Donald Trump wants to bring back mining and mineral processing to the US – and he needs to do this if he’s to continue fighting wars. “You cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains,” says economic journalist Wolfgang Münchau. “The specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals – it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled.”

Trump has exhorted America’s traditional allies to take responsibility for their own mineral supplies as well as their own defense, and to ditch economically ruinous energy policies. But will it work?

Two Canadian scientists, Marta Rivera and Eduardo Zamanillo, have written a book called Mining is Dead. Long Live Geopolitical Mining, whichprovides an analysis of the capabilities of various countries. It makes for bleak reading if you’re American or European.

In the United States, the average time from mineral discovery to production is 29 years

In the United States, the average time from mineral discovery to production is 29 years

The organized, practical, dogged Chinese have built integrated supply chains from mine to finished product. China wins on every front. It mines at home and abroad and it has become the world’s washer of dirty dishes, dominating global processing of key minerals. China is largely powered by coal and gas so electricity prices are low and it has been able to invest for decades in people and mining technology. These all make for a winning combination. Now that it controls mining, processing and manufacturing across a vast array of commodities and products, China holds all the cards. Like it or not, it can choose to sell vital, crucial metals to the West – or it can choose not to. 

Meanwhile, the feckless West has fallen behind. And, oh boy, how it has fallen behind. In the US, the average time from mineral discovery to production is 29 years. This represents a dramatic increase from the average of just six years for mines entering production between 1990 and 1999.

Rivera and Zamanillo realize that there is an embedded inertia at a societal level. They write that there is “a profound institutional insecurity, reflecting western society’s increasingly ambivalent or even distrustful perception regarding mining’s strategic role in future development.” When it comes to mining, the “industry has lost control of its narrative, appearing in public perception as outdated, environmentally destructive, or politically exploitative.” Worse, “resistance is neither anecdotal nor marginal – it is systemic and rising.”

I blame the erosion of mining’s status on misguided cultural leadership from naive artists that condemn miners and metallurgists for the supposed destruction of a fictitious pastoral idyll. We have been fed a diet of ecofantasy by dreamers, from William Blake’s “dark satanic........

© The Spectator