“Why is the United States reliant on China and Russia for strategic minerals when we have more of these valuable resources than both these nations combined?”

Stephen Moore, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with Freedom Works, and ARPN expert panel member Ned Mamula, a geoscientist and adjunct scholar at the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, argue it has nothing to do with “geological impediments.” In a new op-ed for The Washington Times, they say: “[i]t is all politics.”

Citing the latest USGS numbers, Moore and Mamula zero in on our nation’s mineral resource dependencies and retrace the root causes for our over-reliance on foreign metals and minerals.  Acknowledging some of the positive developments that have taken place in recent weeks, including the presidential Executive Order to calling for a federal strategy to ensure secure and reliable supplies of critical minerals, Moore and Mamula call for a change in strategy and philosophy in mineral resource policy:

“We need a change in strategy and philosophy when it comes to mining. For federal land development, the 20th-century philosophy of ‘lock up and preserve’ needs to be replaced with an ethic of ‘use and explore.’ We have hundreds of years of these resources with existing technology. 

China’s leaders have been known to boast that the Middle East has the oil and China has the rare earth minerals. But that’s false. We do. With a pro-mining policy, we can make America a mineral-exporting superpower, not an importer reliant on our adversaries. This strategy has worked like a charm when it comes to energy; it should be employed to yield the same America First results for strategic minerals.”

Click here for the full piece.

To read more from ARPN expert panel member Ned Mamula on current mineral resource policy issues, click here.