The White House's Material Genome Initiative says

The White House's Material Genome Initiative says its goal is to "support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast at a fraction of the cost".

The need for speed is accurate, but it's going to prove difficult for American innovators to be twice as fast when America's mine permitting process is easily twice as slow as in other mining nations.

The .S. has domestic resources for 18 of the 19 metals and minerals we now exclusively import from abroad. But a maze of government regulations has made mining them here too difficult. That's the consistent finding of the annual Behre Dolber Country Rankings for Mining Investment, known in the mining world as the "Where-Not-to-Mine Report."

The U.S. is currently tied for LAST PLACE (with Papua New Guinea) in the time it takes to permit a new mine - seven to 10 years on average.

In a world where the technology industry regards a year as an eternity, waiting a decade for new supplies of critical technology metals will severely hamper America's ability to innovate. Without significant reform of the country's mining-permit process, the U.S. may be starved of the resources to build everything from smartphones to weapons systems, impairing both the economy and national security.

Reform could begin with streamlining the permitting process to get rid of redundancies at the local, state and federal levels, so the process can run concurrently. Among other benefits, this would mean that environmental challenges and litigation-bitter ironies given the fact that mined metals and minerals are needed for many forms of green energy - do not set the permit process back repeatedly.

All that will depend on whether the White House initiative is the first step toward a strategic-resource policy that assets the importance of domestic metals and minerals exploration.

Or will the initiative bring only a federally funded study group writing what might prove to be the definitive white paper on the industrial decline of the U.S.?

This article was originally printed Jan. 30th in the Wall Street Journal.

NOTE: Behr Dolber is the company that produced two feasibility studies on the then Emerald Isle mine for previous owners.