Bruce Westerman: “Again, we are talking about copper. So let's talk about copper a little bit. This chart shows that in 1995, we produced…”

“Again, we are talking about copper. So let's talk about copper a little bit. This chart shows that in 1995, we produced 2.3 million tons of copper, and China produced 0.7 million tons. That is about three times more copper that we produced in the United States in 1995. In 2020, China was up to 9.8 million tons a year, and we were at 0.9 million tons. You can see our overall production actually went down; China's skyrocketed. In 2020, they were producing 11 times more copper than we produced here in the United States. It is not because we don't have copper deposits in the United States, it is because people don't want copper mining and production in their backyard. However, if you are building a copper mine, you don't get to choose where the copper is located. It has long ago been determined that the copper in these places, sometimes it is on Federal lands, sometimes it is on private land. The reason our production has gone down is because we can't permit new copper mines. We also can't permit copper refineries. The other side of this story is we have 2 copper refineries in the United States today and China has over 50.…”