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April 1, 2023

Don't know much about geology...Biden's interior secretary, Deb Haaland, tells us how little she knows about her job

By Monica Showalter

What happens when a president chooses his Cabinet based on skin color and "historic firsts"?

The result is here:

According to Yahoo! News, the Biden-appointed Interior secretary, Deb Haaland, had her exchange with GOP rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, a former interior secretary himself, who clearly had a command of the critical facts as Haaland came to Congress to argue for expanding her department with billions more in its budget.

Zinke later accused Haaland of not being able to answer his questions. His congressional office posted on its website the following exchange:

ZINKE: Are you aware that China produces more emissions than any other country on the planet?

HAALAND: I probably read that somewhere,

ZINKE: Are you aware that China produces 90% of plastic from four rivers?

HAALAND: I'll take that to be true.

ZINKE: Are you aware that by multiple studies, that in order to satisfy the present requirement of EV and critical minerals, it would take an increase of 2,000% in minerals needed in the next twenty years?

HAALAND: Thank you for that information.

ZINKE: Are you aware that Northern Minnesota is home to those critical minerals?

HAALAND: I am not sure.

ZINKE: Can you pick any place in the United States that you've identified to fast-track so we are not vulnerable to China and Russia both In defense and EV?

HAALAND: We are working on identifying those critical minerals.

ZINKE: You would agree that not having the critical minerals identified and produced in this country is a security problem and prevents us from moving ahead on multiple issues, and makes us vulnerable to China?

HAALAND: Energy independence is a priority to President Biden. 

How wretched can you get?  She wasn't sneering or arrogant, the way Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was to congressional questioners, but she more than made up for it by her ignorance of basic knowledge in order to do her actual job.

Here's what The Economist ran in recent days:

She didn't know that if the U.S. can't produce its own copper for those electric vehicles, it will have to get that copper from someplace else?  Or that the U.S. is going to lose its only nickel-mining plant by 2025?  Or that China is the global leader in pollution?  "I probably read that somewhere"?  She actually shut down a long planned mining project in northern Minnesota, which would have been critical to the production of these metals so critical to electric car production.  When Zinke asked her about it, all she could say was that boilerplate "energy independence is a priority for Biden."

Although the Boston Globe hailed her as the "champion of the land" when she was appointed Interior secretary, owing to her partial Native American heritage, she didn't know even the basics about minerals mined in the U.S., nor the mineral requirements the U.S. would need for Joe Biden's green energy transformation scheme, which among other things involves everyone buying $70,000 electric cars.  At the same time, she's been shutting down the means to achieve that Biden green economy by shutting down mining facilities not favored by the environmental lobby.

Apparently, electric cars are supposed to just appear out of the air, or from the tender mercies of China, which, supposedly, will always be a reliable supplier of rare earth minerals for the U.S. with no strings attached.

We won't hold our breath.

It goes to show that Deb Haaland was just as unprepared as she seemed during her congressional nomination and, in two years as secretary, hasn't bothered to learn anything new, either.  I wrote about how unimpressive she was at the time here.

Now, with two years on the job, she's even more unimpressive, shutting down mining facilities with no regard for how that boosts China or impedes electric vehicle production in the U.S.

Why she was appointed to this post, when she was in so clearly over her head, is a mystery, except for the fact that Joe Biden and the fawning media couldn't stop hailing her as a "historic first."  Biden probably could have picked from a number of knowledgeable Native Americans, if that was whom he wanted from this post, but he instead chose an underachieving identity-politics activist, known for her political loyalty alone.

That's bad for the U.S. interior, and the $12-billion, 70,000-employee agency she "runs."  It's also bad for the U.S. from a national security standpoint, not just in the unproduced minerals, but in countries such as China seeing Haaland in action in Congress, laughing up their sleeves at how little she knows, and adjusting their expectations accordingly.

Incompetence comes in many forms in the Biden administration, and perhaps the most pathetic form is in the sad-sack ignorance of his Interior secretary, hailed as "the champion of the land."

Image: Twitter screen shot.

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