From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

Then-national climate adviser Gina McCarthy appears to have met directly with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2021 to urge him to ease up on a Chinese solar company linked to slave labor, according to documents obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog group.

A pre-meeting primer prepared for Mayorkas by staff to get him ready to meet with McCarthy in June 2021 states that McCarthy would “likely discuss the concerns the solar industry has regarding the Department’s enforcement posture on solar products, particularly with regard to Hoshine Silicon Products Company.” The meeting, which McCarthy requested, was scheduled to take place several days after DHS issued a “Withhold Release Order” (WRO) to customs officials to begin seizing shipments of Hoshine solar products because of its connections to slave labor in China’s Xinjiang region, an area known as ground zero for the Chinese government’s genocidal repression of Uyghur Muslims.

DHS still lists Hoshine Silicon Industry and its subsidiaries as entities manufacturing products that use slave labor in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

“The impacts of the Hoshine Withold (sic) Release Order (WRO) include the detention of goods and their effect on consumer and investor confidence in solar products, projects, and the industry; concern is growing that this will affect the industry’s ability to meet the nation’s clean energy goals,” the primer for Mayorkas reads.

PPT Documents – Hoshine + DHS by Nick Pope

“Industry indicates that the Hoshine WRO limits their ability to meet demand for solar panels without liability,” the memo continues. “Industry expressed that the WRO’s impact on consumer and investor confidence has resulted in cancelled orders and investments and has put jobs at risk.”

Chinese companies dominate the global supply chains for green energy products including solar panels, and a large share of the world’s polysilicon — a key ingredient for the production of solar panels — comes from the Xinjiang region specifically, The New York Times reported in June 2021 following the announcement of the Hoshine WRO. The Hoshine WRO illustrates a wider problem for the Biden administration whereby it works to cut China and Chinese slave labor-tied companies out of the U.S. solar supply chain without going too far and suffocating American solar companies that rely on Chinese component parts at the expense of the government’s lofty long-term green energy goals.

For example, about one year after the scheduled Mayorkas-McCarthy meeting, the Biden administration opted to waive tariffs on Chinese solar products in June 2022 amid concerns that the levies could crush the American solar industry before reinstating the duties in June 2024. Some American solar firms and executives said that Chinese companies managed to undercut U.S. solar production during the period of time when the tariffs were not being enforced.

Mayorkas stated publicly that “the United States will not tolerate modern-day slavery in our supply chains” on the day DHS announced the WRO against Hoshine.

The memo briefed Mayorkas on several options that McCarthy was likely to bring up at the meeting, including possible proposals to phase in enforcement to reassure the spooked market, increase transparency for the public with respect to DHS’ Hoshine restrictions or to create a “de minimis” threshold for the amount of slave labor-linked polysilicon in a given imported product. Mayorkas’ staff also laid out detailed “pros” and “cons” for each of the suggestions they expected McCarthy to make in the meeting.

“DHS made a rational and moral judgement about products from a company and a nation that uses the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic and political prisoners,” Michael Chamberlain, executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But it seems human rights are a secondary consideration for the people charged with implementing the Biden administration’s green agenda and their counterparts in the clean energy industry. It’s hard to see what’s ‘clean’ about solar panels made with slave labor.”

McCarthy, who was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the Obama administration, served as the Biden administration’s national climate adviser before leaving the government in 2022. In between her stints in the Obama and Biden administrations, McCarthy worked as the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmental activist group that has a presence in China and is registered with or supervised by Chinese government institutions like the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and the State Forestry and Grassland Administration, according to NRDC’s Chinese language website.

Notably, the documents obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust also include a similar briefing memo meant to prepare him for an October 2021 meeting with the American Clean Power Association about DHS’ enforcement actions against slave labor-linked solar products. That particular document spells out how representatives for the green energy trade group were likely to push for answers about the administration’s conflicting goals of rooting out slave labor from solar supply chains and quickly standing up a robust domestic solar industry.

DHS and McCarthy’s spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

The Biden administration issued its long-awaited assessment on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports on Tuesday, with its findings potentially complicating President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to unleash America’s energy industry.

The Department of Energy (DOE) published the study nearly a year after the administration  announced in January it would pause approvals for new export capacity to non-free trade agreement countries to conduct a fresh assessment of whether additional exports are in the public interest. While the report stopped short of calling for a complete ban on new export approvals, it suggests that increasing exports will drive up domestic prices, jack up emissions and possibly help China, conclusions that will potentially open up projects approved by the incoming Trump team to legal vulnerability, according to Bloomberg News.

“The main takeaway is that a business-as-usual approach is neither sustainable nor advisable,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Tuesday. “American consumers and communities and our climate would pay the price.”

Trump has pledged to end the freeze on export approvals immediately upon assuming office in January 2025 as part of a wider “energy dominance” agenda, a plan to unshackle U.S. energy producers to drive down domestic prices and reinforce American economic might on the global stage. It could take the Trump administration up to a year to issue its own analysis, and Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that “findings showing additional exports cause more harm than good could make new approvals issued by Trump’s administration vulnerable to legal challenges.”

Republican Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers slammed the study as “a clear attempt to cement Joe Biden’s rush-to-green agenda” in a Tuesday statement and asserted that the entire LNG pause was a political choice meant to appease hardline environmentalist interests.

Notably, S&P Global released its own analysis of the LNG market on Tuesday and found that increasing U.S. LNG exports is unlikely to have any “major impact” on domestic natural gas prices, contradicting a key assertion of the DOE’s brand new study. Members of the Biden administration were reportedly influenced by a Cornell University professor’s questionable 2023 study claiming that natural gas exports are worse for the environment than domestically-mined coal, and officials also reportedly met with a 25-year old TikTok influencer leading an online campaign against LNG exports before announcing the pause in January 2024.

“It’s time to lift the pause on new LNG export permits and restore American energy leadership around the world,” Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said of the new DOE report. “After nearly a year of a politically motivated pause that has only weakened global energy security, it’s never been clearer that U.S. LNG is critical for meeting growing demand for affordable, reliable energy while supporting our allies overseas.”

Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, also addressed the DOE’s report in a statement, advising the public to be skeptical of Biden administration efforts to play politics with natural gas exports.

“There is strong bipartisan support for U.S. LNG exports because study after study shows that they strengthen the American economy, shore up global security, and advance collective emissions reductions goals – all while US natural gas prices remain affordable and stable from an abundant domestic supply of natural gas,” said Bradbury. “U.S. LNG exports have been a cornerstone of global energy security, providing reliable supplies to allies and reducing emissions by replacing higher-carbon fuels abroad, and it is critical that any study or policy impacting this vital sector should reflect thorough analysis and active collaboration with all stakeholders. Further attempts by this administration to politicize or distort the impact of U.S. LNG exports should be met with skepticism.”