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Mining companies have asked for federal support — but this isn’t what most of them had in mind.
It took Donald Trump just over two months to potentially tank his own American mineral supply chain renaissance.
At the time Trump entered office, it looked like the stars could align for an American mining boom. Mining jobs had finally recovered to pre-COVID levels, thanks in part to demand for the metals required to engineer the transition away from fossil fuels (and, paradoxically, continued demand for coal). A lot of the gains in mining stocks were thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered a huge tax break to mining and metal processing companies and mandated that the consumer EV credit apply only to cars with a certain percentage of domestically-sourced material.
Trump 2.0 was poised to capitalize on that progress and unleash permits for U.S. mines under pared-back environmental regulations. In March, he issued an executive order to boost production of minerals in the U.S. — a maneuver that, combined with trade actions targeting China specifically, could have been the final step to bring about a mining and mineral processing resurgence in the U.S. and wrest some global market control away from China and other countries under its sphere of influence. In 2024, more than half of the mineral commodities consumed by the U.S. were imported from foreign sources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Trump’s new global tariffs, however, sent the broader stock market into freefall, mining stocks very much included. He exempted many metals from the tariffs in their rawest form, but that was all the relief miners got. There were few exceptions for refined metal products or the inputs used for mining and mineral exploration. At the same time, metals prices — including commodities integral to battery production such as copper and lithium — are falling, with producers warning that now may be the high point for prices this year.
Part of this pricing issue is because the market appears to expect lower demand for new products that require those metals, such as EVs. Another part, as U.S. officials have said previously, is that China has been flooding the globe with minerals sold at a loss to win market influence. For this reason, D.C. policy wonks had been lobbying for legislation to address this pricing issue.
Now Trump has piled onto the industry's problems. This period could be especially painful for American mining companies, as it is exceedingly possible that a combination of lower commodity prices and higher costs for machinery and parts shatters whatever tailwinds were buoying many U.S. mining and metals projects. We may not see projects canceled yet, but a sense of extreme anxiety is sweeping the minds of many in the mining sector.
“If you look at the carrot of the pro-domestic mining policy versus the stick of the recessionary impacts from the demand side and the availability of capital impact from the supply side, the carrot is a raindrop and the stick is an ocean,” Emily Hersh, a veteran of the mining industry, told me.
Al Gore III, head of the D.C.-based electric vehicle and battery mineral supply chain association ZETA, said he agreed with Hersh’s assessment: “She’s right. We’ve been waging war against a raindrop for the last year, and now we’re in the ocean.”
Hersh has worked on mining projects across the world and taught me almost everything I know about the mining business, a sector I covered for years as a beat reporter for S&P Global and E&E News. Over the weekend, she explained to me the basic math behind why these tariffs will be bad for U.S. mining: It’ll be more expensive to buy the things abroad that companies need to build a mine, she said, from the drill rigs used in exploration to the parts required for extraction and ore storage. We don’t make a lot of those devices in the U.S., and building factories to do so will now be more expensive, too, making it more difficult to scale up what would be required to avoid higher project costs. Whatever benefits there are from trade pressure to choose U.S. mines for sourcing is outweighed by, well, everything else.
It’s important to remember how integral longstanding U.S. trade partners are to the global mining industry. Canada is one of the world’s largest producers of hardrock minerals, and at least 40% of the world’s mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Japan — now hit with a 24% tariff — was positioned to be an ally in U.S. efforts to wean off China-linked minerals and signed a minerals trade agreement under Biden. Even the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces most of the world’s cobalt for batteries, was hit with a 10% tariff, leading Trump officials to try and appease the Congolese government by offering billions of dollars in investment.
Mining capacity is not the only constraint. We don’t process the ore we mine here, either. Take copper, a crucial industrial metal that many companies mine in America but then ship to Mexico or Canada to be refined for use in everything from cars to transmission lines and consumer electronics. This is why news of the tariffs has already led to record shipments of processed copper products into the U.S. as companies try to get ahead of the tariffs.
The final, crucial pain point: Recessions, like low metals prices, are usually horrible for mining projects and the companies developing them.
The 2008 recession was infamous for being the moment when the U.S. lost to China on battery metals; mining companies already hurting under sagging metals prices chose to sell assets and stakes in developers in Africa and elsewhere to Chinese companies, paving the way for the global resource power imbalance Trump likes to bemoan. The 2020 Covid-19 market shock also did little to help mining projects — metals prices went up because mines had to shut down, but demand and investment also decreased. That moment translated into a short-term boon for metals trading, with excess material already floating about in commerce. But little more than that.
“You have an administration here who is trying to torpedo international financial order with a misguided idea that some phoenix is going to magically rise from the ashes,” Hersh said. “That’s not how markets work, and that’s not what history has demonstrated happens in any scenario that parallels what the Trump administration is doing now.”
Ben Steinberg, a D.C. lobbyist who helps run an ad hoc advocacy group of mining and battery material companies, put it to me more succinctly: “These projects take a long time to develop. Capital can be somewhat patient, but we know it is generally impatient. The uncertainty is incredibly destabilizing,” said Steinberg, whose coalition of companies includes ones with mining projects that have offtake agreements with Tesla and other EV manufacturers. “The tariffs aren’t what I think about when I think about more mining in the U.S. I’m thinking of permitting.”
Gore, who also represents Tesla through his trade association, told me the tariffs will mean “everything is going to move a bit slower,” including the “momentum towards onshoring a lot of the supply chain.”
“I think that in general, capitalism works when you are using signals very judiciously — using carrots far more than you use sticks,” he told me.
The National Mining Association is also carefully signaling concern about the tariffs. NMA represents more than just the interests of battery metals — it also includes coal companies and gold miners that are rare beneficiaries of the market’s tailspin. But in a statement provided exclusively to Heatmap, NMA spokesperson Conor Bernstein offered a cautious note about interpreting these restrictionist trade actions as potentially good for mining.
“Targeted tariffs can be a part of an effective policy response,” Bernstein said. “At the same time, this is an incredibly complex time for any company to be operating, and we are working closely with our members to gather information on actual and potential impacts, are engaged with the administration to provide that information, and are committed to working with the administration to rebuild American supply chain security from the mine up.”
Ian Lange, an academic at the Colorado School of Mines, offered a blunt assessment of the tariffs: They’re an opportunity for a small group of domestic producers who have successfully argued to “reshape the supply chain away from their competitors.”
For years, individual mining companies have been seeking tariffs and trade protections on specific minerals they claim are unfairly subsidized and cheaply distributed by China and other nations. These efforts, which rose to prominence in Trump 1.0 Washington over uranium and fertilizers, have become more popular and bipartisan in D.C. as part of a tit-for-tat with China over minerals used in batteries, including graphite.
If there’s any silver lining in this moment, Lange said, it is the fact that this “bunch of people who’ve been complaining get their shot.”
“You wanted this!” Lange exclaimed. “So you better take advantage of it.”
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.