Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
House China hawks are building legislation to shore up U.S. supplies of the minerals needed for wind, solar and batteries.
Why it matters: The next big energy and climate legislation could take a national security frame, born of the Hill's growing bipartisan anti-China sentiment.
- The House Select Committee on China's new "critical minerals" working group, led by Reps. Rob Wittman and Kathy Castor, is an important launching point.
Driving the news: Both lawmakers told Axios that it's an opportunity to build bipartisan ideas — like Defense Production Act investments — into a broader suite of policies to secure supply chains for batteries, energy and defense applications.
- Top of mind for Wittman is an environmental permitting overhaul to help expand domestic mining and rare earth production.
- He also wants the Pentagon, using the DPA, to strategically stockpile key minerals, pointing to Chinese export controls on gallium, germanium and graphite — a crucial battery material.
- "You have to look at things in reforming the regulatory structures so we can actually get back in the mining business," he said. "And then when you get back to mining, how much of that mining volume needs to go towards a national stockpile for strategic purposes?"
Zoom in: Wittman also has his eyes on seabed mining and expanding agreements with friendly minerals giants like Australia to "fill the gap" in U.S. supply chains.
- The working group could flesh out some of the ideas that the committee detailed in its report in December. They include creating a "resilient resource reserve" and boosting overseas mining development investments.
- Broadly, Wittman acknowledges that the U.S. probably won't be able to cut off China entirely.
- "We want to decouple strategically as much as we can in areas where we know it's going to be critical to our manufacturing capability and our national security," Wittman said. "We're not going to be able to completely decouple."
Between the lines: Expect the NDAA to be a venue for some of these ideas in lieu of a larger legislative package.
- Already, this year's House bill has provisions aimed at bolstering U.S. domestic production of batteries and their component minerals.
The other side: Castor, like other Democrats, isn't willing to give a full-throated endorsement to new domestic mining.
- "In the right places with the right environmental protocols? Maybe," she said. "Recycling will be a very important part of that."
- Still, she said the working group is an opportunity to "develop some durable bipartisan policies to boost our economic security or national security, clean energy and counter China at the same time."
Our thought bubble: This kind of legislation has been stymied for years by disputes about environmental permitting and the 1872 mining law.
- This is just a working group, so count us skeptical that it'll be able to break that logjam any time soon.
- But it could lead to a real legislative push on funding, tax incentives and overseas mining investments.
