President-elect Donald Trump has a tremendous opportunity — and a lot of work ahead of him — to dismantle the environmental barriers that the Biden-Harris administration has erected against the American energy industry.
The current administration has put itself in a bind by promoting measures to “enhance and secure” the supply of critical minerals needed to harness wind and solar energy — while simultaneously enacting mining and permitting policies that have made achieving these green goals impossible.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris never seem to understand that their constrained government is putting their net-zero ambitions largely out of reach.
Furthermore, our long-standing dependence on mineral imports and a broken permitting process here at home put our imports at risk. existing The electrical grid, national security, and the American economy.
Our recent Center for the American Experience report found that demand for metals used in wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles is on the rise, thanks to government mandates pushing consumers into electric vehicles and changing grid configuration.
Consider copper, the primary metal for electrification: the world will need an estimated 115% more copper than it did in 2050. never They have been extracted throughout human history – simply to meet current requirements.
Global vehicle electrification will require a 55% increase in mining, along with similar increases in the extraction of lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements.
But China dominates the mining, processing, and manufacturing of all these important minerals — and routinely demonstrates its desire to withhold them from the United States.
This is not due to any lack of mineral resources here at home. Lithium reserves in the massive Smackover Formation in southeastern America could meet the projected 2030 global demand for lithium for electric vehicle batteries nine times.
But in light of the current situation, what are the prospects for developing these local resources? Effective zero.
Our report outlines nearly a dozen federal actions that hinder domestic mining — and they have been repeatedly deployed by the Biden administration, which has banned mining of copper- and nickel-rich deposits in Minnesota in 2022 and halted another copper mining project by repealing the Clean Water Act. Law permit in 2023, to name a few.
Most damaging is the lengthy, controversial and politicized National Environmental Policy Act that authorizes the process, which applies to everyone Projects that may have an environmental impact.
This dysfunctional system holds roads, bridges, pipelines, transmission lines for grid expansion, alternative energy projects and mines hostage, depriving the general public of their benefits for years and weakening investor confidence.
All of this makes the United States dependent on foreign countries for fuel, minerals, raw materials, and manufactured goods.
Some in Congress recognize the need to reform the permitting system, and they moved this year to fix it.
Even Biden has signaled that he knows NEPA is broken: In October, he quietly signed the Build America's Chips Act, which exempts semiconductor projects from onerous environmental requirements — a bipartisan acknowledgment that they need to go beyond when it comes to essential products.
The new Republican Congress should enact similar NEPA exemptions for transmission lines, critical minerals, and everything else needed to support our economy, military, and transition to alternative energy.
At the same time, the incoming Trump administration must repeal harmful rules that restrict development of public lands, like the Bureau of Land Management’s new public lands rule, which ignores the agency’s multi-use mission and prioritizes Non-use instead of.
For example, the BLM this month banned wind and solar development on more than 34.5 million acres of sage grouse habitat in 10 Western states — another land-use decision at odds with Biden's net-zero goals.
The final two months of the Biden-Harris administration will likely be filled with environmental rulemaking aimed at slowing Trump's energy agenda.
The Energy Department is reportedly rushing to complete a study this month to make it harder for Trump to unfreeze permits for new LNG export hubs, while the BLM limits leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and adds new conditions on development there.
Trump can undo some of this damage through executive orders. In fact, he has promised to do so, telling attendees in St. Cloud, Minn., that he could end Biden's 20-year moratorium on mining in the Superior National Forest “in about 10 minutes, what do you think?” I would say 10 to 15 minutes.
It may take more than 15 minutes, but a second Trump administration is able to make national security and economic strength a clear priority by supporting domestic mineral projects, strengthening the power grid, and removing obstacles that make American energy and mineral independence elusive.
Debra Strohsacker and Sarah Montalbano co-authored the Center for the American Experience report, “Mission Impossible: Mineral Shortages and Broken Permitting Process Put Net Zero Goals Elusive.”
