This is going to have a mayor impact on Swedish politics. A new government is recently installed and this is the first mayor (public) opportunity for them to make a big impact on Europe from a sustainability, financial and political perspective. Expect A LOT faster result than 10-15 years.

There's some legal hurdles to this.

It would be unconstitutional for a Swedish government to meddle in individual decisions of its agencies (including courts), and they in turn are required to act impartially.

Yes but the parliament can change the law however they see fit, to exempt this mine from environmental law. This has already happened twice in the last few years (cement production and hydro power).

Maybe not super familiar for speed/"velocity" addicted software engineers working on web apps, but things like mining, construction and other huge operations take some time to complete, and safety in modern countries is a huge factor when doing things like this, which adds a lot of time as well.

Ok but why is this news worthy ? Predicting industry demand in 15 years is pointless. I mean I remember 15 years ago everyone was talking about "peak oil imminent collapse". This seems irrelevant for problems of today so framing it as a solution to these is ridiculous. By the time these start producing most of Europe has already proposed ICE bans.

Even though "News" is in the name of "Hacker News" it's not just for "News" or "New Things", it's for everything hackers find interesting. This story, evidently, is interesting enough to gather 133 points in less than 1 hour so it is "Hacker News Worthy" even if it maybe isn't "news worthy".

Quite "surprising" indeed for something critical. It's not just simply coal or so after all ...

I'd be curious to compare with China, how long it took them to exploit their rare earths mines.