I think there's general consensus. It's certainly not an outsider, rogue opinion that China dominates much of the supply chain for many renewables, from critical minerals to the development, the processing and the manufacturing of wind turbines, solar panels, EVs and batteries.
China calls that their new trio. It's been a very strategic endeavour by them to dominate global supply chains in those aspects, and now we are seeing that they have oversupply and they are dumping. The Canadian government has taken efforts to punish those or to deter those through tariffs, and so has the United States. This week the European Union has also done so, so it is very well recognized that this is an issue.
Canada is also rich in critical minerals, but we don't process hardly any of the critical minerals that we do process and, in terms of the ones that are useful for the energy transition like copper, nickel, graphite and cobalt, those are mostly down by double digits. Copper production in Canada since 2012 is down by 9%. Cobalt and nickel are down by almost 40%, so we are not producing the minerals for ourselves. We are not processing them here either, so we are dependent on China. Even where there are tariffs, and even where you might get them from other Asian countries like Vietnam or Indonesia, there's still a supply chain behind that where a lot of the components come from China.
In terms of thinking of North American energy independence, we are very interdependent with the United States with our grids, our pipelines, our refineries—all of our systems. We really should be looking, and we are looking. People are very much concerned in Washington and elsewhere about making sure that we are independent here and that we don't need the shipping. Also, if there was a war in south China, that would obviously impact their ability to ship product from China, not to mention the sanctions that would probably have to be imposed.
Here we have natural gas. We have everything we need for nuclear. We still have that great hydroelectricity as a backbone, so we could use those strengths to build up our energy system and maintain that energy independence. We saw with Europe what happens when you are energy dependent and you're dependent on your adversary.