Op-Ed: From carbon laundering to strategic resilience — a mining imperative

For years, developed economies have pointed to declining carbon emissions as proof of environmental leadership. But anyone working inside the mining and critical minerals industries knows the story isn’t that simple. The truth is, much of this so-called carbon reduction has been achieved not through cleaner operations — but by quietly offshoring mining, processing, and industrial production to jurisdictions with weaker environmental standards. It’s not decarbonization. It’s carbon laundering — outsourcing the dirty work while importing the benefits under a conscience-appeasing green label.

This global shell game has not only failed to achieve its overall climate objectives — it has hollowed out domestic supply chains, weakened national security, and devastated the kinds of blue-collar industries that ESG frameworks purported to protect. Worse, it has created dangerous new bottlenecks at the very moment the energy transition demands more mining, not less. If we don’t fix the system now — aligning real ecological goals with real industrial capacity — we are headed for a future where crisis, not strategy, dictates how and where mining happens.

The hidden carbon supply chain

At the core of today’s climate accounting crisis is a fundamental omission: both companies and nations heavily focus on emissions generated within their direct operations or borders (Scope 1 and 2), while largely ignoring the emissions embedded across their full supply chains (Scope 3). It’s a convenient blind spot — one that has allowed not just corporations, but entire developed economies to claim environmental victories while their real carbon footprints have simply shifted offshore. What developed nations celebrate as decarbonization is often little more than shifting emissions out of sight — exporting emissions beyond our line of sight while importing the benefits under a conscience-appeasing green label.

Nowhere is this more evident than in mining and mineral processing. As environmental regulations, litigation risks, and political pressures mounted in the West, critical extraction and processing industries were steadily pushed into jurisdictions with far weaker environmental standards and substantially higher emissions profiles. In effect, we did not decarbonize mining. We simply moved it — often to places where each ton of copper, nickel, cobalt, or lithium extracted releases more carbon and leaves deeper environmental scars than equivalent operations would have at home.

This was not without cost. By externalizing our material needs, we empowered ecological abusers, strengthened fragile and often corrupt supply chains, and made real climate progress harder, not easier. Worse, by hollowing out domestic mining and processing capacity, we created ripple effects that struck at the heart of social and economic stability — damaging blue-collar industries, weakening national resilience, and deepening dependence on supply chains we neither control nor can reliably trust.

The illusion is finally cracking. Mechanisms like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) are an implicit admission that ignoring embedded emissions was a fundamental policy error. But while policymakers scramble to patch the consequences, they have yet to confront the underlying reality: we cannot whack-a-mole our way out of a system whose basic structure incentivizes carbon laundering — offloading responsibility rather than solving it.

Fixing the hidden carbon supply chain requires something deeper — a realignment of trade, permitting, and industrial strategy with the ecological and social goals we claim to champion.

Trade policy: the false binary of “protectionism” vs “globalization”

When discussions about critical minerals supply chains emerge, they are often trapped in an outdated binary: either full globalization and open markets, or protectionist nationalism and economic inefficiency. But this framing misses the point — and misdiagnoses the problem.

True free trade is not simply the lowest bid on the global market. True free trade requires true cost accounting: acknowledging the full ecological, social, and strategic impacts embedded in the production and transportation of goods. Without integrating these hidden costs — from carbon emissions to labor abuses to geopolitical instability — what we call “free trade” is often just cost-shifting disguised as economic rationality.

For too long, policymakers and economists have been seduced by an “efficiency über alles” mindset — treating short-term cost savings as the ultimate goal, regardless of long-term strategic risks. In critical sectors like mining and mineral processing, this obsession with theoretical efficiency has proven disastrous. It has rewarded fragile, opaque supply chains over resilient ones, ecological degradation over responsible stewardship, and geopolitical dependency over national resilience.

We are now witnessing the consequences of this distortion. Many developing nations that initially welcomed mining investment are growing more aggressive — nationalizing projects, imposing capital controls, or jailing executives — as they realize they bear the environmental and social burdens while developed economies reap the primary benefits. What was sold as efficiency has bred instability.

Meanwhile, developed economies, having hollowed out their own extraction and processing sectors, now find themselves dangerously exposed. Strategic resilience — not just economic efficiency — must govern the future of mineral supply chains.

Advocating for the reshoring (or “friend-shoring”) of critical minerals is not protectionism. It is strategic realism. It is an acknowledgment that in sectors foundational to the energy transition, national security, and ecological stewardship, efficiency alone is an insufficient guide. Supply chains must be judged not only by their speed and price, but by their resilience, transparency, and environmental integrity.

Permitting dysfunction: how good intentions backfired

In the 1970s, a responsible mining project could clear environmental review in under a year with a document scarcely longer than a college thesis. Today, that same process often stretches over half a decade (or longer), producing a thousand-page behemoth — not to ensure cleaner outcomes, but to defensively navigate a minefield of potential lawsuits. This is not environmental stewardship. It is bureaucratic abdication masquerading as virtue.

Environmental protection laws were created with noble intentions — to safeguard landscapes, ecosystems, and communities from reckless exploitation. But over time, the permitting process

has mutated. Instead of serving as a rational filter to distinguish responsible projects from irresponsible ones, it has become a weaponized tool: “death by legal and administrative challenge” is now a standard tactic, wielded to delay, obstruct, or kill projects regardless of their ecological, social, or economic merits.

The unintended consequence has been devastating. By paralyzing responsible mining and processing development at home, we have even further pushed extraction into jurisdictions with minimal environmental standards and little public accountability. In trying to protect nature domestically, we have exposed it globally to far worse degradation.

Worse still, today’s bloated, litigation-prone permitting system is not a safeguard against environmental harm — it is a powder keg. If we fail to modernize permitting through deliberate, rational reform, we will not preserve rigorous stewardship. We will unwittingly stumble into a geopolitical or economic crisis — a global supply shock, a critical minerals embargo, a military resource scramble — that forces governments to do blanket overrides of procedural barriers by brute force.

When that day comes, there will be no time for four-thousand-page reviews, no patience for endless appeals, no tolerance for obstruction posing as due diligence. Projects will be rammed through under emergency authorities, with vastly greater environmental risks, less public transparency, and a far higher likelihood of ecological damage.

In other words: the choice before us is not between slow permitting and no permitting. It is between smart permitting now — or reckless permitting later. A permitting system that cannot distinguish between responsible stewardship and reckless obstruction will not endure. It will be swept away in the panic of crisis — and what replaces it will make today’s virtue-wielding environmentalists wish they had acted when there was still time for deliberation.

Reclaiming control: how smarter systems can align industry and stewardship

If we are serious about building a sustainable and secure future, we must move beyond the old false choices: globalization or protectionism, environmentalism or industrial growth. We need a smarter framework — one that protects environmental integrity while strengthening industrial resilience.

At the center of that framework is a basic strategic principle: nations must be accountable for the full impacts of their consumption — not just the activities that happen inside their borders. Outsourcing the burdens of resource extraction while claiming the benefits is not a viable path forward. Building critical mineral supply chains at home isn’t about isolationism; it’s about strategic security, environmental stewardship, and economic common sense.

Mining and processing under transparent, enforceable domestic standards can — and should — outcompete opaque, unaccountable supply chains operating offshore. Reshoring responsibly is the fastest way to regain control over the material foundations of the energy transition — and to restore public trust in the industries that make it possible.

But reshoring requires more than good intentions. It demands Smart Permitting:

· Fast, data-driven, transparent environmental reviews that separate real stewardship from endless procedural obstruction.

· Dynamic compliance monitoring, using modern technologies like AI and satellite imagery to track and safeguard environmental performance in real time.

· Firm timelines and structured appeal systems that allow responsible projects to move forward without becoming trapped in endless litigation.

Smart permitting is not deregulation — it’s better regulation. It clears the way for responsible mining at the speed the future demands, without sacrificing the environmental values we aim to protect.

The choice ahead is clear: build systems that align environmental stewardship with industrial strength — or watch crisis dictate the terms of the next resource scramble.

From illusion to strategy

We stand at a crossroads. We can continue clinging to the comforting illusions of offshored responsibility, procedural paralysis, and short-term efficiency — and stumble blindly into a future shaped by crisis and coercion. Or we can act now to rebuild systems that align environmental stewardship with industrial strength, economic resilience, and strategic autonomy.

Mining is not the enemy of a sustainable future. It is the foundation of one. But if our policy leaders refuse to modernize how we permit, produce, and govern, we will leave that foundation cracked and unstable — vulnerable to the very forces they claim to oppose.

The path forward is neither denial nor surrender. It is disciplined realism: securing the materials, capabilities, and governance structures that the energy transition — and civilization itself — will demand at scale.

The future will not be imported. It must be mined, refined, and built — by those willing to lead, not just criticize.

* Erik Groves is Corporate Strategy and In-House Counsel at Morgan Companies