China Refines the Minerals Behind Every Battery, and America Let It Happen

We are a country that can put a rover on Mars and cannot get a copper mine permitted before the rover wears out. That is not a joke at our expense so much as an indictment, and I am going to make the case for it carefully, because the people who will tell you it is not so bad have a few good arguments, and I want to answer them.

The charge is this. America has real deposits of rare earths, lithium, copper and other minerals that modern life runs on. China does not have a monopoly on the ground. China has a near-monopoly on something else: the processing, the refining and the manufacturing know-how that turns raw ore into the material a magnet or a battery needs. And the reason it has that near-monopoly is not that Beijing outsmarted us. It is that we decided, over a generation, that it was better to let someone else do the dirty work. That is a strategic weakness, and it is a self-inflicted one.

Why these minerals matter

Define the terms. Rare earths are a group of seventeen elements, not especially rare in the crust but seldom found in concentrations that are cheap to mine and separate. They go into the strong permanent magnets used in electric motors, wind turbines, hard drives, and a long list of military systems: guided weapons, aircraft, radar and sonar. Lithium is the light metal at the center of rechargeable batteries. Copper is the metal of wires, motors and every electric grid ever built. Processing, or refining, is the step that takes the ore out of rock and makes it a usable product, and it is often the hardest and dirtiest part of the chain.

Three points follow from that.

1. Mining is not the bottleneck. Processing is. A country can dig up ore and ship it abroad, and still have no ability to make the finished material. Whoever holds the processing holds the supply chain.
2. Defense depends on it. The magnets in a fighter aircraft and in a precision weapon use rare earths. A country that cannot make them at home depends on a supplier who may be an adversary.
3. The civilian economy depends on it too. The batteries and motors that policymakers in both parties say they want in everything from cars to the grid use these materials. You cannot have an energy strategy that ignores where the materials come from.

Mountain Pass, and what we gave away

Here is the part of the story that should make us angry. America used to be the leader. The Mountain Pass mine in San Bernardino County, California, was for decades the leading source of rare earths in the world, from the 1960s through the 1980s and into the 1990s. At that time, the United States had the ore, the mine and much of the processing.

Then the economics shifted. China began producing rare earths at lower cost, helped by cheaper labor, looser environmental standards and state support. Prices dropped. Mountain Pass struggled, its separation plant stopped producing refined rare-earth compounds in 1998, and after a toxic waste spill the mine itself closed in 2002. The mine went dormant. A company called Molycorp restarted it around 2012, ran into financial trouble and filed for bankruptcy in 2015. In 2017 the mine was acquired by a new owner, MP Materials, which resumed mining and refining in 2018 and has worked since to restore the mine and to bring the separation and processing back to the site.

Let me put that in a line. The country that led the world in rare earths gave up the lead because it was cheaper to buy from China, and nobody in charge did the math on what a cheap supply was worth when the seller was a strategic competitor. We priced the mineral and ignored the risk.

The 2010 cutoff

The risk became visible in 2010. After a dispute between China and Japan over a collision near disputed islands in the East China Sea, reports emerged that China had halted rare-earth shipments to Japan. Beijing denied that it had imposed an official embargo, but Japanese manufacturers and traders reported that shipments had been held up, and prices of rare earths spiked around the world. The episode put the dependence in plain view. A country with an industrial base and a long list of high-tech exports was suddenly aware that its supply of a key input could be tightened by a government in a political quarrel.

China had also been limiting exports through quotas. The United States, the European Union and Japan took the matter to the World Trade Organization, and in 2014 a WTO panel and then the Appellate Body ruled against China's export restrictions on rare earths, tungsten and molybdenum. The legal victory was real, and China said it would bring its export restrictions into line with the ruling. But the legal victory did not rebuild a single refinery in the United States. A ruling that a supplier must sell to you is not the same as a capacity to supply yourself.

The permit problem

If we know all that, why have we not fixed it? The honest answer is permitting. A mine in the United States has to pass through a thicket of federal and state approvals. For a project on federal land or one that needs a federal permit, the National Environmental Policy Act requires an environmental review. Then there are permits under the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, state laws and local ones, and each approval is open to a lawsuit. A project can spend many years in review before a single shovel goes in, and then more years in court.

Two cases show the problem from different angles, and I want to treat both fairly.

Resolution Copper is a proposed copper mine in Arizona, a joint project of two large mining companies, near Superior, in the Tonto National Forest. The copper deposit is large. The site includes a place called Oak Flat, which is federal land that Congress authorized to be exchanged to the company in a provision attached to a 2014 defense bill. Oak Flat is also a site of religious significance to some Apache people, who have challenged the exchange in court, arguing that the mine would destroy a sacred place. That is a serious objection, and it deserves respect, not a shrug. The project has been through more than a decade of process, with lawsuits that raise questions of religious freedom and tribal consultation. You do not have to take a side on that dispute to notice that a copper project has been in the system for years, and the country that needs the copper has watched.

Pebble is a proposed gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, which also contains one of the world's great salmon fisheries. The Army Corps of Engineers denied a key permit in 2020, and in 2023 the Environmental Protection Agency used its authority under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act to block the project's disposal of mine waste in the area. Supporters of that decision say it protected a fishery worth far more than the mine. The deposit's owners and others said that the veto came before the project's full review was complete. I do not claim to settle that question here. I raise it because the Pebble case shows the opposite risk: a project that may or may not have met the standards was stopped, and the process made it hard for anyone to say.

The common thread is time and uncertainty. A company deciding whether to invest hundreds of millions of dollars wants to know that a permit decision will come on a schedule, based on the law and the facts. When it cannot know that, it invests elsewhere, and elsewhere is often a country with fewer safeguards than ours.

The environmental objection, answered

Here is the other side's strongest case, in words its defenders would accept. One: mining is destructive. It can pollute rivers with acid drainage, leave scars on the land and generate waste that remains hazardous for generations. Two: the places where the best deposits lie are sometimes places of great ecological or cultural value. Three: companies have a long history of abandoning sites and leaving the public with the bill. Four: a faster permit means a less careful review.

I accept the first three as true, and I want to take them seriously. The legacy of old mines, many of them from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a real burden. That is a reason to insist on strong safeguards. It is not a reason to export the activity to places that have none.

Here is the answer, in numbered form.

1. The mine does not disappear if we refuse to dig it. It moves. The copper in our wires and the lithium in our batteries must come from somewhere. If the United States says no, the supply comes from a country that is likely to have weaker environmental and labor standards. A rule that makes the global footprint of mining larger, so that we can feel clean at home, is not environmentalism. It is outsourcing the harm.
2. Modern standards are far better than the old ones. Today's mines operate under laws that require environmental review, financial assurance for reclamation, treatment of water and monitoring, which were not the norm a century ago. A modern mine in the United States is held to a standard the older mines were never asked to meet.
3. The objection is an argument for better rules, not for no mines. Reclamation bonds, strong water protections and real consultation with the people whose land is affected are all compatible with building. What is not compatible is a process in which a decision takes a decade and the outcome is uncertain until the last day.
4. Speed and care are not opposites. A review can be thorough and quick if it has firm deadlines, one lead agency, a page limit and a clear standard. The delay in many cases comes from duplication and litigation, not from careful science.

The case for permitting reform that keeps real safeguards

So what do we do? Here is a program, and I will say plainly that it is an argument and not a settled policy.

• One lead agency and a firm clock. For a major project, designate one federal agency to coordinate the review, and set a deadline for decisions, with a presumption that an agency that misses it has to explain why.
• Page and time limits on environmental reviews. The purpose of a review is to inform a decision, not to produce a library. A reasonable limit forces focus.
• A narrow window for lawsuits. Let challengers raise their claims promptly and expect a prompt ruling, so that a project is not held hostage indefinitely. Real harms can still be litigated, but without an endless sequence of new filings.
• Keep the substantive safeguards. The Clean Water Act and the rest of the statutory standards should stay. The reform is about the process, not about the pollution limits. A mine should still have to treat its water, post its bond and clean up its site.
• Support processing, not just mining. Because the bottleneck is refining, permit and finance the processing plants too. A mine with nowhere to send its ore is half a strategy.
• Look at federal land law. The 1872 General Mining Law still governs much of hardrock mining on federal land, and a process written in the nineteenth century should be reviewed by the twenty-first.

Each of these is a question for Congress, not for a bureaucrat. See Why Washington Owns Most of Nevada and What the Property Clause Allows for why Washington controls so much western land and what the Constitution says about it, and The Antiquities Act Says Smallest Area Compatible, So Read the Text Again for another case where a statute's text and the way it has been used have drifted apart.

The Founding and the strategic question

Alexander Hamilton, in his Report on Manufactures of 1791, argued that a country dependent on foreign suppliers for the essentials of defense and industry was not truly independent. You can read the report, and you should check my characterization against it, but that is the thrust of it. The Founders did not imagine that national security was only a matter of armies. They knew that a nation needs to be able to feed, clothe and arm itself.

That is not an argument for central planning, and it is not a call for subsidy for its own sake. It is an argument for removing the obstacles that stop free people from building what the country needs. A permit that takes a decade is a tax, imposed by no legislature, on the very activity that would make us more secure.

I say this as a believer in free markets and in the rule of law. The two go together. A market cannot work if it is impossible to know whether a project will be allowed, and the law cannot be respected if it is used to run out the clock. For the broader argument that human ingenuity and price signals can overcome scarcity, see The 1980 Bet on Five Metals That Settled the Great Scarcity Debate. For the moral dimension of reliable energy for people who lack it, see Hundreds of Millions Still Cook Over Wood, and That Is a Moral Question. For what a country can do when it decides to build, see We Raised the Empire State Building in About a Year, So Why Not a Power Line. And for the consumer-facing side of the same energy policy, see The Electric Car Mandate Is a Choice Washington Makes for Your Driveway, where the question is what happens when the government mandates a product before it has secured the supply.

There is an irony here that deserves to be said out loud. The policy goals that many people in Washington say they want, more electric vehicles, more batteries, more grid, all rest on minerals that the same policymakers make hard to produce at home. You cannot mandate the car and block the mine. A policy that wants the output and forbids the input is not a policy. It is a wish.

The case in brief

1. The United States has deposits of rare earths, lithium and copper, but China dominates the processing that turns ore into usable material, and that dependence is a strategic weakness.
2. Mountain Pass in California led the world in rare earths for decades, and the country gave up the lead when cheaper Chinese supply made it seem unnecessary.
3. China's 2010 rare-earth cutoff to Japan, and the WTO ruling against its export restrictions in 2014, showed that a supplier can use dependence as a lever.
4. Cases like Resolution Copper and Pebble show how permits drag for years, and the environmental objections deserve answers: modern standards are stronger, and refusing to mine at home moves the harm abroad.
5. The remedy is permitting reform that sets a lead agency, firm clocks and limits on delay while keeping the substantive safeguards, with support for processing as well as mining.

What you can do: Find the status of one pending mine permit in your state on the lead agency's website, read the schedule and write your member of Congress about the review timeline.