Not long ago, I read an article about an 86-year old man, Jack Lifton, who was coaxed out of retirement to ply his (admittedly unique) trade in the rapidly expanding critical minerals space. It's a striking example of an imbalanced labor market. 

It’s also exemplary of how much of an outlier the critical minerals sector is. 

In this post, I offer my take on the hiring demands of what might be the most important industry of the next fifty years and offer alternatives to coaxing octogenarians out of retirement. Suffice it to say, my advice differs slightly from Mr. Lifton’s, who suggested that companies looking for people like him: "Start with the cemeteries, then check assisted care."

Critical minerals are the materials that make modern energy, defense, and technology possible: lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, antimony, gallium. They go into fighter jets and EV motors and the magnets inside nearly every advanced weapons system the country builds. For decades, the United States allowed key processing and manufacturing stages for these materials to become concentrated in China. Washington is now trying to rebuild domestic supply chains.

It is one of the few priorities of the Biden administration that carried over to the second Trump administration. Under Biden, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed billions toward domestic battery materials processing and manufacturing, while the Inflation Reduction Act created powerful incentives to source and process critical minerals domestically and through U.S. trading partners. 

The second Trump administration has accelerated that push. In February 2026, the State Department announced $30+ billion into critical minerals through letters of interest, investments, loans, and other support in partnership with the private sector. In July 2025, the Pentagon took a roughly 15% equity stake in MP Materials, becoming the rare earth producer's largest shareholder. The Defense Production Act has been invoked repeatedly since -- financing rare earth separation in Texas, antimony refining in Montana, and metallization and magnet capacity for defense systems, including aircraft and missiles. Congress has expanded the National Defense Stockpile by billions. The administration has floated a $12 billion critical minerals reserve open to private industry. Critical minerals are receiving sustained investment and bipartisan cover. They’ve been deemed a national security and supply chain imperative.

Critical minerals is one of the only corners of the climate-adjacent economy currently expanding. Mariana Minerals, for example, has raised $400 million in a span of two years. KoBold Metals raised another $537 million in early 2025, valuing the mineral exploration company at nearly $3 billion. USA Rare Earth, meanwhile, closed a $1.5 billion private placement in 2026 to support its mine-to-magnet expansion. All of this is happening while climate tech more broadly navigates a constrained funding environment.

The capital is there. The mandate is there. What isn't there yet is a workforce plan that matches the scale of what needs to be built. The gap shows up first in how narrowly companies are defining the talent they're looking for.

Take, for example, a small but easily overlooked piece of how critical minerals actually enter the world: permitting, social performance, and community relations.

Finding the deposit and engineering the project are only part of getting a mine or processing facility built. Projects also have to secure permits, understand and mitigate environmental impacts, navigate relationships with Indigenous communities and other local stakeholders, and maintain the social license required to operate over decades.

The consequences of getting that part wrong can be enormous. Research from Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Queensland, and Clark University found that community conflict costs a major mining project roughly $20 million a week in delayed production. One company tracked $6 billion in conflict-related costs over two years. Peru's Minas Conga project is one case study: Newmont and its partners had committed $1.6 billion before protests over water access put the project on indefinite hold, and the companies ultimately put up hundreds of millions in additional social and environmental spending trying to rebuild trust they hadn't invested in from the outset.

A mine or processing facility doesn't get built on geology and engineering alone. It requires permitting specialists who can navigate a federal review process that averages seven to ten years; hydrologists and ecologists who can assess environmental impact before it becomes litigation; Indigenous rights experts and community liaisons who understand what consent requires; social performance and community management professionals who manage the relationship with the people living next to the project, for the life of the project; contracts and procurement specialists who can structure the joint ventures and offtake agreements the capital is chasing. These are the hires which determine whether a project moves forward.

The workforce disruptions of 2025 have created an unusual amount of adjacent expertise, available right now, that critical minerals companies may not be thinking about. There are people who have already solved versions of these problems, they simply solved them elsewhere, such as in offshore wind or academia.

Federal agencies are a starting point. The National Security Council (NSC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and many others have lost many critical minerals experts alongside colleagues with analogous expertise. 

The Army Corps, which runs the wetlands and waterway permitting process critical minerals projects increasingly have to clear, has its own staffing strain. The Interior Department has been cut deeply. The renewable energy sector offers another adjacent talent pool: professionals who have spent years navigating leasing, permitting, siting, government relations, and community engagement for complex infrastructure projects. Additionally, researchers in hydrology, ecology, geology, and resource systems -- in academia, in conservation -- are working on problems that look unrelated from a distance and nearly identical up close.

Most of these people don’t have "critical minerals" on their resume. All of them carry skillsets the sector is short on. Different battle scars, real relevance -- which raises the question: how does a sector moving this fast access such talent ahead of their competition?

In a sector this capital-flush and this talent-short, recognizing unconventional talent before competitors do is the advantage that compounds. We have seen this firsthand with a critical minerals client, where identifying adjacent industries with analogous skill sets allowed us to find highly specialized leaders with the scientific, regulatory, and permitting expertise their projects require. The companies that learn to look beyond the obvious talent pool will be the ones building while the rest are still searching.

The capital is here. The political will is here. The urgency is real, and it isn't going away. What's still unresolved is whether the sector fills its workforce from the same small, thinning pool everyone else is drawing from, or gets strategic about where talent actually is.

A few things in progress that you can expect to see in future issues:

A preview of interconnected climate risk: The El Niño brewing in the Pacific offers a concentrated glimpse of something businesses and organizations everywhere will increasingly have to navigate: climate disruption that begins in one part of the Earth system and travels through economies, supply chains, infrastructure, and communities.

Continued search work: Active searches in environmental permitting, critical minerals, social performance, and commercial development, among others. More on what we're seeing across these roles in a future issue.

BeechTree at New York Climate Week: We’ll be in New York this September for Climate Week, catching up with clients, colleagues, and others working across climate, resilience, and critical minerals. If you’ll be there too, get in touch -- we’d love to find time for a conversation.

As always, if you're navigating a senior climate or environment hire, or you know someone who is, we're easy to reach.

Daniel Abrahams
BeechTree Search
[email protected]

BeechTree is an executive search and advisory firm specializing in senior technical and leadership roles across climate, environment, and critical minerals. Founded by practitioners.