With another spring graduation season here and new job-seekers flooding the market, one industry is desperate for new talent...but unlikely to find it in this year's crop of grads. U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told a Breitbart event this week that the mining industry is coming back and hotter than ever. The only problem is since the left spent decades demonizing and trying to destroy the industry, there is a massive shortage of qualified candidates. "We'll graduate 36,000 lawyers in America this year, we'll graduate about 300 mining and metallurgical candidates," said Burgum. "So if you know anybody that wants to have a sure-fire, long-term career, in a place where everybody is retiring because they're all Baby Boomers...go into that."
The mining Burgum is talking about is not the old-school coal mines and rock quarries. Modern mining is extracting things like lithium and precious metals that are used in most new technology, and often imported from other countries. Burgum said we have to not just "drill, baby, drill" but also "map, baby, map" to find the treasure that lies below us. That could also include geothermal energy, a growing sector in Texas. And because of the growing demand for electricity and precious metals, this modern mining is likely here to stay even if Democrats return to power.
Burgum believes the only issue facing the industry is a shortage of labor, but he hopes we can start to change that. "I recently visited a handful of the remaining mining schools in America, and they've got some fabulous programs going on, amazing technology," he told Breitbart. "It's not what you think of in some old movie of hard rock mining, I mean this is high, high, high-tech capability."
Photo: AFP