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Posted on 05/02/2025 9:00:10 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Rare earth elements are crucial to our modern existence, as well as our advanced defense systems. China, America’s primary supplier of these metals, has restricted exports of rare earths into the U.S. in retaliation for the president’s tariffs on Chinese exports into the country. There’s no reason to panic, though. There’s a way to work around the problem, and it doesn’t require a minerals deal with Ukraine.
Rare earth elements are needed to make our cellphones, computer hard drives, flat-screen monitors and televisions, as well as life-saving medical equipment. They are in fact “indispensable metals in electronics manufacturing.” Without them, modern society simply cannot survive. Even renewable energy sources, so precious to green zealots, need rare earths.
There are also “significant defense applications,” says the U.S. Geological Survey, including “electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.”
Despite their importance to our economy and security, our “leaders” have put us in an awkward position. China provides the U.S. with 70% of the rare earth compounds we buy from abroad.
As their name implies, supplies are scarce. because they can’t be found “in high concentrations in the earth’s crust” and when they are discovered, the process to separate them from other resources is typically arduous.
But the process is not beyond the U.S.
This country could have – and should have – been mining large volumes of its own rare earths. But environmental zealots have blocked mining efforts, including the planned Pebble Mine in Alaska, “home to at least 70 known occurrences of rare earth elements.” It was shut down in 2014 even before the partnership applied for federal approval. The Environmental Protection Agency “decided to kill this project before any science had been done,” Tom Collier, who was the project’s chief executive, told John Stossel.
It was a “pre-emptive veto” from the Obama team that was closely aligned with, and overlapped by, hostile environmentalists.
Six years later, the Trump EPA reversed that 2014 decision. That led to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers taking a look and concluding, according to the New York Times in July 2020, that the mine “would not result in ‘long-term changes in the health of commercial fisheries.’” But a month later, the Corps of Engineers said “the project, as currently proposed, cannot be permitted under section 404 of the Clean Water Act.” In 2023, then-President Joe Biden promised “the mine will not be built.”
While rare earth minerals are rare, as we mentioned earlier, they “aren’t that rare.”
“Eventually,” Wired reports, “the U.S. and other countries will be forced to either ramp up domestic mining or reduce their dependence on rare earths, both of which would make China’s policies sting less.”
In 1990, no other nation produced more minerals than the U.S. Today our country ranks seventh.
“Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported,” says engineer, academic and author Mark Mills, who produced a number of energy papers for the Manhattan Institute.
Mills says “Pebble Mine has become the poster child” that the eco-warriors want to stop, “but it’s not the only one.”
We have enough rare earth elements in this country to meet our needs. But we are also oversupplied with green militants, who are fine with mining in other countries, where labor is forced and/or done by children, rules to protect the environment from damage are ignored if they exist at all, and the mining is done by primitive tools and techniques rather than the modern equipment found in the West. Consequently, it’s become “a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world,” says mining.com.
“Even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine.”
Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently noted that the U.S. “sits on a vast, $12 trillion treasure chest of our own mineral resources at home,” far more valuable, we’d add, than all the gold in Fort Knox. But due to “irrational regulatory and permitting policies,” it is “locked up.”
The Trump administration has had an unusually busy first 100 days, much of it expending massive amounts of time and resources unwinding the messes left by the Biden White House. There’s more to be done, though, and accelerating America’s mining independence needs to be one of the Trump team’s many priorities. It’s past time to mine, baby, mine.
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Yes, mine, baby, mine.
Let’s NOT mine them in the USA - let’s instead get them from Ukraine, where a war is occurring and the mines don’t even exist yet!
The first is harvesting and protection. That would include, mining, logging, fishing, farming and such. Protection includes everything from hired guards to a formal military.
Second level is manufacturing or processing.
Third is retail. Restaurants, stores and other services.
Fourth is investment.
The third and fourth tier produce the highest return but unless you have the first two tiers they will collapse.
The Western Basin, centered mostly in Nevada and Utah, is a basin that does not allow water to leave and it just evaporates on the flat salt pans between the mountains holds vast deposits of rare earth elements and lithium. It is not mined because watermelon marxist globohomos have tried to make America dependent on other nations to limit our freedoms.
Sadly, Americans are ill-informed about rare earth minerals and the fact that there are known sources within the US, but their mining has been blocked by environmentalists and the EPA. To them, it’s better to send billions of US dollars to the Chinese and support their military than it is to disturb an area about the size of the LA Airport parking lot.
The Mountain Pass California mine is still operating and a company in DFW is processing the minerals. Even with all the BS red tape they are making a profit.
Earth First!
We’ll mine the other planets later.
The TDS Marxist Luddites don’t want the U.S. to use its own rare earth resources.
Google NIOCORP
It's actually over ten times that number. Those who invest in domestic extraction today, should see gains of 22,090% in five years. Watch President Trump carefully, as public land restrictions are lifted.
We like Third World countries to mine and process it as it can be very environmentally unfriendly to do it while being relatively cost effective. The US can do it, but at a much higher cost to do it cleanly.
This country could have – and should have – been mining large volumes of its own rare earths.
~~~~~
Is that why Hillary Clinton sanctioned the sale of Uranium One to Russia’s Rosatom in 2010 in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation?
I still have a couple of those bumper stickers.
Thanks for posting....
FINALLY! Someone begins to grasp what I’ve been saying since this all started.
If the environmentalists really cared about Mother Gaia they would promote mining in the USA where we have rules regarding the environment (and worker safety). Heck, even reduce some of the EPA standards (emissions must be less than 50 ppm instead of 1 ppm) would still be better than most foreign countries.
As I have been saying for months:
Once again: What is being discussed in this ‘Ukraine Minerals Deal’ are NOT really “Rare Earth Minerals”.
Some of the ones specifically mentioned in earlier political announcements and media articles are quite common. Others are uncommon in commercial quantities although common in disseminated concentrations worldwide. But NONE of them are actual “Rare Earth Minerals” (check a periodic table of the elements if you don’t believe me.
And even if they were some kind of really incredibly valuable and hard to find minerals, they are still in the ground and mostly only ‘theoretical’ deposits’ Few are actually being mined already. It isn’t like they are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, already mined and refined, and ready to be shipped to the USA.
Since they are still in the ground, (If any even actually exist), any future ruler of Ukraine could easily renege on the deal, and even if all agreements are honored in perpetuity, it will take years, maybe decades, to start any extensive mining and refining of them, and billions of dollars (American Taxpayer supplied Dollars, most likely) . And it would be our luck that after we pay to build the infrastructure (and rebuild the nation in general from the Russian destruction), and get things producing, the future rulers of Ukraine will nationalize them, and we will be screwed by Ukraine once again.
Kudos to President Trump for trying to get something out of our hundreds of billions given to Ukraine, but anyone who really expects us to actually get useful industrial raw materials out of this is dreaming. You’ll be lucky to get even a lump of Ukrainian Coal in your Christmas stocking.
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