For a while now, the vast majority of Western countries (especially) have not been interested in mining. It's largely because when mining is done irresponsibly, it is incredibly destructive to the environment. On the flip side, developing countries have been willing to do irresponsible mining, which is cheaper but it's not sustainable.
This environmental destruction isn't just clearing trees. It's literally poisoning your soil and water. And it can take decades to reverse this kind of damage. So it's only really profitable in the short term. Developing countries are starting to wake up to this and are making reforms for a more sustainable long-term future. This will increase the price of goods, but it also coincides with the time that Western countries are realizing how concentrated their supply lines are, and they're looking to diversify as well.
For a long time, Western countries were basically just buying their materials from developing countries. However, we're seeing multiple changes that I believe will play out over the next few years here:
1. The United States the Trump administration has been incredibly clear about their interest in progressing mining forward. The thing that changes the most is easier permitting. This is bipartisan though. The Biden administration started making reforms to ensure that we can mine critical minerals here in the country
2. This is a big difference because it also makes the other very difficult part of mining, financing, much easier. Products are easier to get built, and the timeline is faster, and the process is clearer. It means you have a more certain and better return on investment. Financing has been notoriously difficult for decades now. But I believe that pain will start to ease.
3. We're at the beginning of a major infrastructure build-out that we haven't seen in developing countries for probably the better part of a century, a combination of modernizing the grid to handle data centers as well as the push to reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which is basically just another way of saying more electrification.
So mining has this very rare combination of being extremely depressed with pretty significant tailwinds. As a result, there's just degenerate levels of alpha in mining right now. Even gold a number of gold miners with this massive run-up are still cheap here, for instance. I'm going to do an article on my sub stack soon where I go more into this in depth, but I just wanted to share a quick synopsis.