We do have many of them. We just have chosen not to mine them because that creates environmental and health issues and we can obtain them from elsewhere. When we mine them here, then mostly in remote places.
Cobalt: Top producer is DRC, Europe has a minor local production, mostly in Finnland Lithium: Abundant everywhere but difficult to extract, the EU doesn’t produce any significant quantities right now Nickel: Only 1.5% produced in EU, again mostly in Finnland Maganese: This is the only metal relevant for current batteries where there are no (known) significant deposits in central EU, some are around the black sea, industrial production is nonexistent.
Where the EU is already more present is in the refining of the raw ores. I think the current situation is, while not great, acceptable. As long as many different producers of the rare metals are available and the EU creates reserves of them (it does), it is fine to be dependent on imports for the moment.
This is very relevant. The reasoning to ban hardware from China is two fold in the article: 1. To reduce general dependency on Chinas Manufacturing 2. To increase security. And here is the point. Huawei has offered to provide source code and processes for building the firmware for their devices, thus allowing the German state to check every detail of the the devices. Neither Nokia nor Ericson have agreed to do the same, they should be forced to do so for such important infrastructure.
Even worse is Cisco from the USA. They have been found guilty of multiple times adding hardware and/or software backdoors to their devices. Or in their wording “forgetting to remove a remote root access used for development purposes” Here one of the recent cases: https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/alerts-advisories/vulnerability-impacting-cisco-devices-cve-2023-20198 (This may happen once, but if it happens more than once the company is either guilty of implementing it a backdoor or so incompetent in security no one should dare to buy even a home router from then, much less equipment for critical infrastructure)
In the NSA Leaks Snowden also revealed documents proving that the NSA regularly tampers with Cisco devices to implement backdoors and have standard tools for that. (Also affecting hardware from other US manufacturers)
So asking: “Why these bold claims about increasing security and decreasing dependence with focus on China when these issues are far greater with another supplier” is very much valid. I am actually quite happy that Merz mentioned independence from the USA too.