The U.S. should stop compelling and subsidizing the use of so-called “renewable” technology and should allow American companies to “develop critical minerals required for U.S. production.”
So argues the Heritage Foundation. Let energy producers here produce energy, unfettered by statist and environmentalist delusions.
As things stand now, though, “China dominates the critical mineral market” even as the Biden administration “has severely restricted access to critical minerals in the United States with draconian rules and regulations and has blocked at least five significant mines across the United States over the past two years.”
The Biden–Harris Administration has restricted access to critical minerals in the United States, most recently by blocking the Ambler Road Copper Mine in Alaska. The following projects were blocked in 2023:
● The EPA blocked the copper-rich and gold-rich Pebble Mine in Alaska.
● The EPA stalled a copper-rich and nickel-rich Twin Metals Mine in Minnesota with a 20-year moratorium despite the looming closure of the last American nickel mine in 2025.
● The EPA lobbied the Army Corps of Engineers to block another copper and nickel New Range Mine in Minnesota, citing mercury being released into rivers, despite the mining company’s plan to clean up a wastewater pond from a defunct iron mine as well.
● President Biden unilaterally declared that a million acres of public lands in northern Arizona would become a national monument, blocking the extraction of radionuclides such as uranium.
That’s a lot of stalling, blocking, and mining undermining.
Heritage’s report, “How the Forced Energy Transition and Reliance on China Will Harm America” (August 22, 2024), is billed as the third pillar of its “Chinese Handcuffs: China’s Immobilizing Trap on U.S. Energy, Security, and Prosperity” project.
It seems that the way to escape this trap is to tell American socialist-egalitarian-environmentalists to get lost while also telling China’s supply chain to get lost—by unleashing American industry. Let us be more fossil-fuel-independent and mineral-component-independent so we’re not at the mercy of Chinese supply chains. Sounds good. Let’s do that.
A recent Supreme Court decision may help, the authors suggest: “The blocking of copper and nickel mining is likely illegal now that the Supreme Court has rolled back agency actions that depart from written statutes.”
