President Trump’s Executive Orders have ended U.S. participation in the Green New Deal and Paris climate treaty. He’s also terminated mandates, programs and subsidies that would have changed our reliable, affordable energy systems to wind, solar and battery power for all-electric homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, factories, farms, transportation and shipping.
His actions will benefit wild, scenic and agricultural lands in America and worldwide.
* Wind, solar and transmission line installations would have sprawled across tens of millions of acres, impacting habitats, farmlands and scenic vistas, onshore and offshore; interfered with water flow, aviation, shipping and other activities; and killed whales, birds and other wildlife.
* These “clean, green” technologies require far more raw materials than the equipment they replace: electric cars need 4-6 times more metals and minerals than gasoline counterparts; onshore wind turbines require 9 times more raw materials than equivalent megawatts from combined-cycle natural gas turbines; offshore wind requires 14 times more materials than gas turbines; solar panels are just as resource-intensive. And we’d still need gas power plants or grid-scale batteries for windless/sunless periods.
* Those raw material needs would require mining at levels unprecedented in human history. Just meeting “green energy” plus “normal” needs for copper would require more than twice as much copper mining as occurred throughout human history up to now. That would mean mine shafts and open-pit mines; ore removal, crushing and processing; and land, air and water pollution – on unprecedented scales.
* Converting those raw materials into finished technologies, and transporting, installing, maintaining and ultimately removing the turbines, panels, transformers, power lines, batteries and other equipment would require unfathomable quantities of materials, equipment and energy.
* All this mining and processing, equipment damaged and destroyed under normal operations and from extreme weather, leaching from non-recyclable components in landfills, and huge infernos when batteries ignite would send massive quantities of toxic chemicals into air, soils and water worldwide.
* U.S. mining, processing, manufacturing and waste disposal would be done under tough environmental, workplace safety and human rights standards. Not so in despotic regimes in the rest of the world.
* A large portion of the cobalt, lithium, rare earth, graphite and other exotic and strategic materials still come from China, which has monopoly control over mining and processing them. That puts U.S. and Western energy, transportation, communication, AI, defense systems and national security at great risk.
Simply put, humanity would have had to destroy the planet with green energy mining and systems, to save it from GIGO computer-modeled climate cataclysms.
President Trump’s actions have dramatically reduced all these mining needs, ecological impacts and dependence on adversarial nations. However, modern industrialized civilization still requires metals, minerals and energy in enormous quantities. We must still find and produce these materials, to meet today’s needs and tomorrow’s emerging and still unknown needs.
Thankfully, the United States is blessed with mineral wealth. Plate tectonics and other geologic processes have created enormous deposits of metals and minerals throughout Alaska and the Lower 48 States. Most have yet to be found, much less mapped or developed, to serve strategic U.S. needs.
By 1994, when I helped prepare what was likely the last land withdrawal summary, mineral exploration and development had been restricted or banned on federal lands equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. That’s 420 million acres – 19 percent of the USA; 66 percent of all federal/public lands. The situation has gotten “progressively” worse since then.
Today, mineral exploration is prohibited (or severely restricted) on almost 80 percent of all federally managed lands. And those 500,000,000+ acres of no-access lands likely contain many of the best metal and mineral prospects in the USA – again because of their unique geologic history.
Those lands were closed to mineral exploration to protect scenic and ecological values, but with little or no regard for their potential subsurface treasures, without which modern civilization cannot function. Many were deliberately placed off-limits by anti-mining activists, land managers and judges – to prevent access to prospects and even curtail America’s industries and economy.
Indeed, they were closed to exploration despite clear statutory language stating that gathering information about mineral resources via “planned, recurring” mineral exploration is required by law in designated wilderness areas, if the exploration is conducted in a way that preserves “the wilderness environment.” If that work is required in wilderness areas, there is no reason to prohibit it elsewhere – especially since today’s technologies ensure it can be done with minimal impacts.
National parks should be off-limits. In most cases, these other citizen-owned lands should not.
These lands and mineral treasures belong to all Americans, not just to hikers and anti-mining activists. And basic morality demands that we begin meeting U.S. needs right here in the USA – not in foreign countries, where impoverished, powerless people have no say in the matter, and where the impacts are out of sight and mind for virtue-signaling activists, bureaucrats and politicians.
We must remove the roadblocks and start exploring for American mineral deposits immediately.
The process will begin with remote sensing technologies on satellites, airplanes and drones, to collect data on magnetic and other anomalies and trends over large areas, enabling geologists to identify potentially mineralized areas. Artificial intelligence will help evaluate results more quickly and in greater detail than was ever before possible, leading to better decisions about which areas merit closer examination.
Aerial and ground-based work will augment these initial gravitational, magnetic, electromagnetic and other surveys by mapping outcrops and showings of indicator minerals, to identify potential mineralized areas more precisely. This stage also includes rock and soil sampling, plus analyzing data from mining and exploration during previous decades and centuries, to pinpoint locations where core drilling may be warranted, using relatively small equipment brought in by truck or helicopter.
Three-inch-diameter cores extracted from hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface will be examined and assayed in labs to measure mineral content in multiple locations throughout a prospect. If results are positive, additional cores will be drilled and instruments may be sent down boreholes to gather more data. This will enable geologists and geophysicists to create 3-D computerized profiles of possible ore bodies deep beneath the surface – all with minimal ecological disturbance.
At some point, we will know enough about the subsurface resource potential – for metals and minerals for existing or brand-new technologies – that mining engineers, government specialists, financiers and voters can determine whether companies should spend billions of dollars to extract the ores … under stringent U.S. land, air, water, wildlife habitat, endangered species, reclamation and other requirements.
Relatively few Americans today have worked on farms or in mines, oilfields, refineries or factories. Few understand where their food, clothing, cell phones, cosmetics and other essential products actually come from. Most would be astonished to learn that nearly everything we touch or use ultimately comes from holes in the ground. Always has; always will.
That’s why we must “Mine, baby, mine” right here in the United States, to survive and prosper.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate change and human rights issues.