Unleash US mining now to face down China’s deadly trade threats

President Donald Beijing’s rare-earths power-play: Washington needs to reverse the Clinton-era clampdown on US mining, which leaves our country needlessly dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese Communist Party for crucial raw materials.

Beijing is moving to restrict export of rare earths and hi-tech products made from them, including batteries, semiconductors and advanced magnet-based technologies. Trump rightly calls that a threat to throttle the entire global economy.

Yet China only has this power because we allow it.

The United States and its allies have ample supplies of everything China seems to monopolize; it’s simply a matter of restoring a US mining industry that actually led the world as recently as the early 1990s.

This does not require tossing environmental standards overboard, but rather cutting layers of red tape that only serve the green-extremist goal of shutting down new US mining — which ends up doing greater global environmental harm, since nations like China impose far fewer restrictions, and can’t be bothered to use the modern tech that minimizes environmental impacts.

On Monday, the Committee To Unleash Prosperity is releasing a landmark study laying out America’s vast mining potential: roughly $12 trillion in recoverable mineral resources, including hundreds of billions of dollars of critical and rare-earth minerals in in the mountains of Colorado, Montana, the Dakotas and Utah.

Main study author Ned Mamula, a top geoscientist with decades of experience in these issues, just got confirmed last week as head of the US Geological Survey in the Interior Department, where he’ll no doubt spearhead part of Team Trump’s efforts to revive this vital industry.

But Congress needs to get in the act, too, undoing decades of restrictions that, for example, extend mine permitting up to a decade, three times what it takes in Canada. The nation also needs to reform a system that lets frivolous environmental lawsuits delay new projects.

Thanks to such barriers, few companies even try to find, let alone exploit, US mineral resources. But if we’re not to be at Beijing’s (and, to a lesser extent, Moscow’s) mercy, that’s got to change.

Mining this stuff at home will yield prices higher than importing it, but not prohibitively (raw materials costs are a minor part of any modern product’s final price) — and would mean restoring a huge domestic industry full of well-paid working-class jobs.

And it would guarantee reliable access to minerals crucial to manufacturing industries old and new, including key defense needs.

Turning this around won’t be easy: Not just domestic greens, but wealthy foreign interests, are guaranteed to spew out propaganda painting it as environmental rape.

But it’s vital to our economy and national security; anything else is unilateral surrender to the enemies of the West.