WASHINGTON DC – The Biden administration is drafting an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to alleviate shortages of key minerals needed for the technology to store clean energy, according to The Intercept.
Using the DPA in this way would bolster the manufacturing capacity of electric vehicle producers. It also indicates the administration is open to using executive power to achieve progressive policy goals, even as Congress refuses to pass key parts of Biden’s green energy agenda. What is the Defense Production Act? For the answer to that question, we turn to Wikipedia:
The Act contains three major sections. The first authorizes the president to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for materials deemed necessary for national defense, regardless of a loss incurred on business. The law also allows the president to designate materials to be prohibited from hoarding or price gouging.
The executive order is in the “pre-decisional” phase, which is how government officials say, “We haven’t lined up enough support for this yet, so we are rushing around finding out what bribes we have to pay to get key people to agree.” It would declare that “ensuring robust, resilient, and sustainable domestic industrial base to meet the requirements of the clean energy economy is essential to our national security.” In addition, the order would say “domestic mining, beneficiation, and value-added processing of strategic and critical materials from sustainable sources for the production of large capacity batteries for the automotive, e-mobility, and stationary storage sectors is essential to national defense.”
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