President-elect Donald Trump has a tremendous opportunity — and a lot of work ahead — to dismantle the environmental roadblocks the Biden-Harris administration erected against America’s energy industry.
The current administration painted itself into a corner by touting actions “to strengthen and secure” the supply of critical minerals needed to harness wind and solar energy — while simultaneously enacting mining and permitting policies that made those green goals impossible.
President Biden and VP Kamala Harris never seemed to understand that their own restrictive government put their net-zero ambitions wildly out of reach.
Moreover, our longstanding reliance on mineral imports and a broken permitting process here at home endanger our existing electric grid, national security and the US economy.
Our recent report for the Center of the American Experiment found that demand for minerals used in wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles are soaring, thanks to government mandates pushing consumers to EVs and changing the composition of the grid.
Consider copper, the essential electrification metal: The world will need an estimated 115% more copper by 2050 than has ever been mined in human history — simply to meet current demands.
Global vehicle electrification would require 55% more mining than that, along with similar increases for lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements.
But China dominates mining, processing and manufacturing for all these critical minerals — and routinely demonstrates its willingness to withhold them from the United States.
That’s not due to any lack of mineral riches here at home. The lithium reserves in the massive Smackover Formation in the American Southeast could meet the world’s projected 2030 lithium demand for EV batteries nine times over.
Yet under the status quo, what are the odds these domestic resources can be developed? Effectively zero.
Our report illustrates almost a dozen federal actions that stack the deck against domestic mining — and the Biden administration has repeatedly deployed them, prohibiting the mining of a rich Minnesota copper-nickel deposit in 2022 and halting another copper-mining project by revoking a Clean Water Act permit in 2023, to cite just two examples.
Most damaging is the lengthy, litigious and politicized National Environmental Policy Act permitting process, which applies to all projects that may have an environmental impact.
This dysfunctional system holds hostage new roads, bridges, pipelines, transmission lines for grid expansion, alt-energy projects and mines, depriving the public of their benefits for years and chilling investor confidence.
All of it keeps the US dependent on foreign countries for fuels, minerals, raw materials and manufactured goods.
Some in Congress recognize the need to fix permitting and have moved this year to reform it.
Even Biden has signaled he knows NEPA is broken: In October, he quietly signed into law the Building Chips in America Act, which exempts semiconductor projects from onerous environmental requirements — a bipartisan acknowledgement that they must be bypassed 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, the military and the alt-energy transition.
Meanwhile, the incoming Trump administration should rescind harmful rules that restrict development of public lands, such as the Bureau of Land Management’s new Public Lands Rule, which ignores the agency’s multiple-use mission and prioritizes non-use instead.
For example, BLM this month prohibited wind- and solar-energy development on over 34.5 million acres of sage grouse habitat in 10 western states — another land-use decision that collides with Biden’s own net-zero goals.
The final two months of the Biden-Harris administration will probably be jam-packed with environmental rule-making meant to slow down Trump’s energy agenda.
The Department of Energy is reportedly rushing to complete a study this month to make it harder for Trump to unfreeze permits for new liquefied natural gas export hubs, while BLM is limiting leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and adding new stipulations on development there.
Trump can undo some of this damage through executive orders. In fact, he’s promised to do so, telling rally-goers in St. Cloud, Minn., that he could end Biden’s 20-year mining moratorium in the Superior National Forest “in about, what do you think, 10 minutes? I would say 10 to 15 minutes.”
It may take a bit longer than 15 minutes, but the second Trump administration can make national security and economic strength a clear priority by supporting domestic mineral projects, strengthening the power grid and eliminating the obstacles that put American energy and minerals independence out of reach.
Debra Struhsacker and Sarah Montalbano co-authored the Center of the American Experiment’s report “Mission Impossible: Mineral Shortages and the Broken Permitting Process Put Net Zero Goals Out of Reach.”