Minerals used for electric car batteries are now primarily held by China. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) acquisition of African minerals such as lithium brine, cobalt, and nickel ores comes as Beijing “doesn’t have problems with using children to mine for these minerals or using slave labor in Xinjiang to mine for these minerals,” said director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation Diana Furchtgott-Roth. “As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s No.1 producer of those minerals. Today, we are in seventh place,” Roth explained.
From The Daily Signal:
Furchtgott-Roth explains how China “can go to Africa and purchase vast tracts of land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, where it can get out the cobalt,” and that Beijing “doesn’t have problems with using children to mine for these minerals or using slave labor in Xinjiang to mine for these minerals.” “So, China has all kinds of business advantages that we in the United States do not have,” she says.
