https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/02/mining-our-own-business/
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.
