OPINION:
The Iran war — with its disruptions to the flow of oil, gas, fertilizer, jet fuel and other petroleum-based products — is a timely reminder that not even the relatively self-sufficient United States can escape the effects of geopolitical disharmonies.
However much Americans may gripe about prices at the pump and the supermarket, the current discomfort is nothing compared with the pain the nation endured in the 1970s in the wake of the Arab oil embargo.
Despite the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has led to greater disruptions to global energy supplies, the effect on American consumers has been far less than in the 1970s. A half-century ago, the U.S. was the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and American households and businesses paid dearly for our energy dependence on the chronically unstable Middle East.
Now, as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas and the global leader in liquefied natural gas exports, America is reaping the benefits of global energy dominance.
This will become even more apparent as energy prices begin to fall, now that a fragile, albeit tense, peace agreement has been reached.
Although being prepared for a global energy shock paid off this year, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels, given self-inflicted wounds in another vital sector of the economy that date back decades.
Though the country is blessed with abundant resources of critical minerals, as the expression goes, “You can’t get there from here.”
According to a recent analysis by the Pacific Legal Foundation, “It takes an average of 29 years [for a mining project] to make it through the permitting process in the United States — the second-longest of any country in the world, followed only by Zambia.”
Facing the gauntlet of endless litigation and paperwork, many developers wind up walking away from promising mining projects.
“As a result, America relies primarily on imports for critical minerals, minerals crucial to national security, energy infrastructure, and technological development — that are vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions,” the foundation points out. “In 2025, China supplied more than 50% of U.S. demand for 21 mineral commodities.”
Being dependent on our greatest geopolitical rival for critical minerals is asking for trouble. China’s control of the global supply chain for critical minerals is one of the steppingstones Beijing uses in its quest to displace the U.S. as the world’s premier power.
“These materials make up the electrical wires that power our homes and businesses and the chips inside smartphones and laptops, and they form the backbones of the entire energy infrastructure of the United States,” the analysis notes.
According to S&P Global, the U.S. is home to some 275 million metric tons of copper reserves and resources, along with generous deposits of lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earths. Yet these riches are largely off-limits to domestic development.
Any serious talk about reshoring manufacturing to the U.S. must include dismantling the barriers that prevent domestic raw materials from reaching our factories. Among other things, this means revisiting four long-standing statutes: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.
These laws, which serve different purposes, create overlapping permitting requirements that can take decades to navigate. They are also an open invitation for environmental groups who use endless litigation to “keep it in the ground.”
Efforts to pass sweeping bipartisan permitting reform in Congress have stalled, notably in the Senate, with Democrats hoping to use the issue to boost the fortunes of wind and solar power. Specifically, Democrats want permitting reform to cover high-voltage, long-distance power lines connecting remote wind and solar facilities to population centers, something opposed by the Trump administration and most Republicans.
Critical minerals, along with the build-out of oil and gas pipelines, are now at the mercy of green energy.
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be a one-off. In what is the energy equivalent of a coronary bypass, Persian Gulf oil and gas producers are already planning the rapid expansion of pipeline networks in the region to escape the strait’s bottleneck once and for all.
The permitting nightmare blocking America’s access to priceless critical minerals is not a one-off. It must be dismantled — the sooner, the better.
• Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph.D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.
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