Is anyone else concerned why none of our politicians seem to care about going after rare earth metals? They are THE FUTURE!!! They will be used for building EVERYTHING IN THE FUTURE!!! Everything from cell phones to car batteries (which wont contain ANY OIL) ALLLLLLL the way to fusion rocket engines to travel THROUGH SPACE! So WHY isn’t the strongest nation on the planet securing them and allowing China to go after them and surpass us so vastly while we fumble around worrying about oil??? Oh yeah, because of the fucking boomers and their propaganda machine , the corruption, and the worst parts of capitialism like lobby’s and big oil! I sometimes feel like our system is just so broken we are all fucked sometimes…
Iirc they go after both. Didnt they already pressure Ukraine by holding off support until they agreed to provide them with rights to rare earth metals?
Take the information with grain of salt, its just vague memory
Rare earth metals aren’t actually rare, the problem is extracting them from soils cost effectively. I understand it can be a messy process as well.
Oil and other minerals usually occur in one location as singular deposits. Rare earths need to be extracted from large amounts of soil. The US has always had viable reserves of oil, coal and gold.
China has dominated this market because they are prepared to spend non profitable time processing soil for these minerals whereas Americans aren’t.
I think there’s some US rare earth extraction in the mid west.
Yes I live in the mid west and I was thinking about possibly meeting with my state representative about the matter. I live in a capital city and it would be convenient for me to go and just talk to them about it all downtown possibly. Know anything about that?
No, I’m an Aussie, my information on this comes from reading a couple of articles on rare earth domination by the Chinese and that affecting US military supply. The two key points were the Chinese moving strategically on it (as someone else pointed out they don’t care, they also mention a US labour law) and American miners not being interested in something with little returns.
At the time other things that were mentioned was us filling a gap. We do have concentrated deposits of certain rare earths in Australia but it’s environmentally contentious here. There were rutile, zircon and ilmenite plants on the sand islands in Queensland but they’re now closed.
Rare earths are not actually that rare, they’re just… messy to extract. They require a ton of processing, infrastructure and create a lot of byproducts that cannot just be dumped, the byproducts need to be neutralized and disposed of properly. Very expensive, not very large margins.
Rare earths are important to making certain things, but, oil’s products are key for running things. You can go a few years without replacing a phone, you don’t get oil for a week and your transportation infrastructure ceases running.
I mean if we have fusion we don’t need REE mines…
You said we’re the strongest nation on Earth, what makes you say that? I’d say it’s one of America’s greatest propaganda feats, we have proven we’re incompetent at security / defense to a degree that is impossible to deny. Any country could easily win a war by simply socially engineering our uneducated masses who would be administrating our tools.
If worst comes to worst, I would bet that we’re going to see a collapse of federal systems which is magically saved by companies opting for privatization of public systems so we can start paying to be in these national databases that we’ve been evidently freeloading off of for decades…
