Harvesting from the sea floor is the most environmentally sustainable way to obtain the minerals we need. These nodules can be harvested using specialized, deep-sea vessels. Seabed nodules sit exposed on the ocean floor, allowing collection without significant disruption.
Business leaders talk about moving from strength to strength: going from one thing they do well to another thing they do well. However, the real power move is going from weakness to strength. Figuring out what you are doing poorly and finding a way to do it well.
There’s an interesting paradox in economics known as the “resource curse.” Simply put, areas with abundant natural resources tend to be poorer than those that face scarcity. Competing theories attempt to explain the resource curse, but one generally accepted explanation is that these resource-rich countries usually have authoritarian governments while citizens under democracies fare better.
The Trump administration’s stop-work orders on renewable energy projects add an under-discussed layer of friction in the United States’ bid for energy dominance. While the effects of halting near-finished offshore wind projects are immediately apparent, the downstream political consequences could hobble the administration’s hopes for progress on both bipartisan permitting reform and their “build baby build” energy posture.
Introduced by Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), the legislation offers targeted reforms to how we review and approve infrastructure and, in doing so, advances three vital goals simultaneously: helping to keep energy affordable, improving reliability, and protecting the environment.
“The West does not need to develop a home-grown substitute for the entire Chinese rare-earth industry to reduce the threat China’s monopoly poses,” the Economist article concluded. Indeed, “the West could ‘significantly derisk’ by cutting its reliance on China to 60-70 percent of consumption. That would provide sufficient alternative supply for the most critical uses.”
Just look at the numbers. U.S. data centers used 176 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2023, triple what they consumed less than a decade earlier. By 2030, we’re talking about 400–500 TWh every year, enough to power 20 to 30 million homes. That’s not a blip on the chart. That’s a new industrial revolution.
So what fuels this surge? Natural gas.
Implementing artificial intelligence may help make nuclear permitting faster, even with existing bureaucratic hurdles.
Well-intentioned laws meant to prevent environmental missteps remain the most significant barrier holding America back from meeting the energy moment.
During his 2024 campaign, President Trump frequently talked about the “liquid gold” under our American feet. He meant oil and natural gas reserves. We have fossil fuels in such abundance that we export energy to the rest of the world. It’s quite a change from the 1990s and 2000s when the U.S. was supposedly going...
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