NIMBY and NOPE buried U.S. minerals mining
By
Duggan Flanakin
|
September 12th, 2025
As America wakes up from the dystopian dream that everything we need will always be readily available at affordable prices, even official Washington has recognized that we have a problem.
And it’s not China.
According to S&P Global, the U.S. has a sizable resource base, including ample reserves of copper, lithium, and several other critical minerals. But it takes an average of twenty-nine years (that’s 29 years!) to develop a new critical minerals mine in the United States, longer than any nation except Zambia. Without radical changes in the permitting process, minerals independence – even interdependence – is just another dystopian dream.
The sad result of this combination of negligence and intransigence has left the U.S. with just two domestic rare-earth mines – but not a single processing operation. Other mining operations are equally hampered by a combination of decades of well-organized, well-funded environmental opposition coupled with the naïve belief that Communist China would always provide cheap labor for America’s benefit.
The Chinese took full advantage of this gross negligence to build a virtual monopoly on production of lithium and other critical minerals – and to push a “clean energy” agenda that only their mines and factories, buoyed by slave labor, could supply. Lest anyone not realize China has the U.S. and much of the world over a barrel, consider that last December, China banned exports of germanium, gallium, antimony, and most graphite to the U.S.
https://www.cfact.org/2025/09/12/nimby-and-nope-buried-u-s-minerals-mining/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nimby-and-nope-buried-u-s-minerals-mining&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nimby-and-nope-buried-u-s-minerals-mining
