{C} alifornia’s Salton Sea is beginning to look like a miracle. Just a few months ago, enough lithium was found there to meet America’s need for the mineral for decades, potentially resolving a trade-off that has so far stumped environmentalists and geopolitical strategists.
These newfound domestic supplies of lithium — which is essential to electric-vehicle batteries and solar- and wind-power storage — could solve a large portion of America’s green-innovation supply-chain issues practically overnight and relieve the U.S. from having to choose between clean-energy storage and a tough policy on China. However, a new lawsuit threatens to snuff out this potential, ironically enough on environmental grounds. If we are unable to take advantage of an environmental miracle gift wrapped for us, we need to admit that our green-energy problems never started — and won’t end — with China.
China has long been considered America’s prime competitor in the race for green energy, and for good reason. The country’s direct and indirect control over global critical-mineral supplies — the raw materials for renewable-energy technologies — has put it at a significant competitive advantage. This includes 80 percent of the rare-earth-minerals production and refining necessary for the direct drives in wind turbines, half of the world’s supply of polysilicon, which is an essential ingredient in most solar panels, and nearly 100 percent of global refining pipelines for the graphite in battery anodes. At least until recently, China was also on track to control a third of the global lithium supply by next year. For years, China’s global dominance in raw materials has forced a trade-off between America’s ability to encourage environmental innovation and remain tough on China, a difficult choice amidst growing climate concerns and China’s ongoing human-rights abuses.
Otto von Bismarck supposedly once quipped, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America,” a joke that feels ever more real given the recent developments in California. The environmental miracle lying beneath the Salton Sea could not have come at a more fitting time. A new extraction plant currently under construction just outside of Joshua Tree National Park is projected to produce 25,000 metric tons of commercial-grade lithium hydroxide, enough for nearly half a million electric vehicles, annually. It’s also in an area of California that could really use an economic boost, as the region has yet to recover from the impacts of pandemic lockdowns.
No green deed goes unpunished, however, and Salton Sea is proof of America’s nasty habit of getting in its own way. Just days after the construction of the lithium-extraction plant broke ground, one local environmentalist group delivered a notice of intent to sue, taking advantage of a tangled mess of permitting regulations to do so. The lawsuit mostly calls attention to inadequate environmental reviews rather than concrete risks. Potential risks such as the lack of project-specific studies on the impact of earthquakes, long-term monitoring of dust, and even the pollution generated from commercial vehicles driving to and from the construction site, the lawsuit alleges, are all reasons to pause or cancel the project entirely. Many tangible risks, however, have already been addressed, and the project has won expedited approvals for things such as establishing new wetlands and paving nearby roads to control dust, efforts with which the plaintiffs are presumably not be satisfied.
None of this is news to those who have been raising concerns about America’s broken permitting process for years. In fact, it’s incredible that the construction of the Salton Sea lithium-extraction plant was able to get rolling as quickly as it did. While we’ve been focused on geopolitical competitors, the immediate enemy has always been our own red tape. Contrary to popular belief, the permitting process — not public buy-in, developer interest, or even political gridlock — is the most common holdup for clean-energy projects. It takes an average of 4.5 years and an additional $4.2 million just for clean-energy projects to get government approval, with obvious downstream effects on the feasibility and value proposition of such projects for developers. While we should be cautious about environmental complications, this lengthy permitting process doesn’t help us mitigate every risk — it just dulls the benefits of much-needed environmental innovation.
China remains a serious competitor to the United States in and out of the environmental-innovation sphere. The country’s control over other mineral supplies is not something we should ignore. Nonetheless, getting our act together domestically should be a higher priority for American environmentalists. If anything can secure us a head start in the race for green energy, it’s our fixing the broken permitting process.