In his second administration, President Donald Trump is countering this decades-long slide the old-fashioned American way: making mining and refining profitable again.
“In the last few years, it’s been this gradual build but in the last seven, eight months, President Trump has taken on critical minerals and made it a priority,” said Steve Christensen, executive director of the Responsible Battery Coalition.
The Washington-based coalition, whose members include Honda, FedEx, battery makers such as Clarios and Entek, and auto parts retailers, has been raising the alarm about reliance on China for minerals since it was founded in 2017.
“The president understands this issue, I think, probably better than any president in recent history,” Christensen told The Epoch Times.
However, it will take years, maybe decades, to revive the nation’s mining industry and reshore metal processing capacities for U.S. industries to access resources resilient to CCP market-meddling.
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For that to happen, Lemke said, it will require a “whole-of-industry” approach in investing, and government commitment in, if not subsidizing, at least supporting markets that can weather CCP manipulation.
Christensen said, “We’re exploring how that might work.”
“Something has to be done,” he said, specifically citing the need for antimony, a key battery mineral not mined in the United States since 1982. Processors in China control half the global market for it.
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Many question if these initiatives can overcome China’s market domination without direct subsidization. Christensen wonders, too.
“Those are things I think need to be explored because we’re playing against an opponent that is not confined to market forces. [China] will manipulate the price of their own product just to get it out there, just to keep others out of the marketplace,” he said.
“If you play by market rules—the rules we all learned in economics 101, in our first-ever business class in high school—if we play by those rules, China isn’t ... and we'll lose every time.”
