In June 2024, then-President Joe Biden or his autopen posted a tweet announcing that his administration had “stopped a 211-mile road from carving up a pristine area that Alaska Native communities rely on, in addition to steps we’re taking to maintain protections on 28 million acres in Alaska from mining and drilling. These natural wonders demand our protection.”
The Biden administration thus reported this stoppage as if it were good thing to submit to the demands of natural wonders and in consequence deprive us, including “Alaska native communities,” of the critical minerals that would have been made accessible by the project. Industrial civilization does not run automatically, and natives of Alaska use or benefit from all the same things that rely directly and indirectly on critical minerals that everybody else does. It is a bad idea for all Americans, including natives of Alaska, to be as dependent as we are on the People’s Republic of China for critical minerals that the CCP may at any time decide to withhold.
Ambler Road
President Trump had approved the so-called Ambler Road Project during his first term, and he has now re-approved it by way of granting the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s appeal of Bureau of Land Management’s decision under Biden to prohibit the mining.
A White House fact sheet defines the Project as “a proposed 211-mile industrial road from the Dalton Highway to Alaska’s remote Ambler Mining District that would enable access to large deposits of copper, cobalt, gallium, germanium, and more.”
Unfortunately, one aspect of the decision to let the work proceed involves making the government a shareholder in yet another company, Trilogy Metals. The federal government is “investing $35.6 million to support mining exploration in Alaska’s Ambler Mining District. This investment makes the U.S. government a 10% shareholder in Trilogy Metals and includes warrants to purchase an additional 7.5% of the company.”
The federal part-ownership isn’t necessary to persuade companies to dig, may well prove counterproductive, and won’t prevent any subsequent administration that happens to be anti-mining from again calling a halt to the mining it possibly can.
Trump says: “I signed this years ago, and Biden unsigned it for me. This is something that should’ve been long operating and making billions of dollars for our country and supplying a lot of energy and minerals.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says that the minerals to be produced will help the United States “win the AI arms race against China” and that “we’ve got to get back in the mining business. China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of the top 20 critical minerals.”
Also see:
The White House: “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Approves Ambler Road Project to Unlock Alaska’s Mineral Potential”
