The United States has been sitting on enough lithium to power 130 million electric vehicles and enough copper to rival Canada and Australia combined — and for decades, Washington's answer was to let China dig up the planet while we filed environmental impact statements. That era is over.

You read that right. We've been importing 54 critical minerals from foreign adversaries like a country that forgot it owns a pickaxe.

Rich Nolan, President and CEO of the National Mining Association, laid it all out in a DC Journal op-ed this week, and the numbers are staggering. A U.S. Geological Survey report released in April found 2.3 million metric tons of undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium buried in the Appalachian region alone — stretching from North Carolina to Maine. That's enough to cover 328 years of current U.S. lithium imports. Three hundred and twenty-eight years. We could have been mining this stuff since before the Declaration of Independence and still had leftovers.

But we didn't. Because for the better part of two generations, the environmentalist lobby and their allies in Washington treated American mining like a war crime while happily buying the same minerals from Chinese-controlled operations with labor standards that would make a Victorian coal baron blush.

Now the adults are back in the room. Over 50 mining projects are currently advancing on the federal permitting dashboard under President Trump's streamlined approach to domestic resource extraction. The Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada already has more than 1,000 workers on site and is projected to produce enough lithium for 800,000 EV batteries per year. And that's just one mine.

Then there's the McDermitt Caldera — potentially the world's largest lithium deposit — also sitting right here in the United States, waiting for someone with the political spine to say "yes, we should dig that up."

Here's what the retirement crowd needs to understand, because this isn't just a geology story. This is an economic security story. When China weaponizes global mineral supply chains — and they have, and they will again — every American who depends on a stable economy, a strong dollar, and a manufacturing sector that actually manufactures things has skin in the game. That includes everyone with a 401(k), a pension, or a prayer of retiring before they're 90.

For years, the "green energy" crowd told us we needed to transition to electric vehicles and renewable power — then fought tooth and nail against mining the very minerals that make those technologies possible. The hypocrisy was always the point. The goal was never energy independence. The goal was energy dependence on the right countries, meaning not ours.

As Nolan put it, the U.S. possesses mineral wealth that rivals or exceeds the combined endowments of Canada and Australia in copper alone. We're not a resource-poor nation begging for scraps. We're a sleeping giant that finally rolled over and checked under the mattress.

The federal permitting reforms now in play are the difference between these resources staying in the ground for another 50 years and actually building supply chains that don't run through Beijing. Every mine that opens is jobs for American workers, revenue for American communities, and one less leverage point for the Chinese Communist Party.

We spent decades outsourcing our mineral security to countries that don't like us very much. Now we've got a president willing to let Americans dig on American soil for American prosperity. For retirees watching their portfolios and wondering whether this economy has a future — this is what a future looks like. Rocks in the ground, shovels in the dirt, and Washington finally getting out of the way.