North American mining firms tend to be private sector, but in Asian countries like China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam the mining conglomerates and processors are state-owned enterprises, or in the case of Japan and South Korea, private sector firms with a controlling stake owned by a sovereign development fund.
This is why we need a Temasek or Mubadala for America.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.
Turns out (to no surprise) that it's to the US's advantage to outsource very polluting mining and processing of critical minerals. (Nobody likes open-pit mines, see people thoughts about the Permanente quarry south of Cupertino)
Of course it's a trade-off, as the US becomes dependent on an external source, and the cost of bringing up internal production increases as internal mining sources are shut down and potentially skill is lost.
Related link: https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/department-interio...
And here's the 2025 draft report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2025/1047/ofr20251047.pdf
Edit: here's the USGS talk, from 2017: https://youtu.be/N53Rm-aDCu8
Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that
Tangentially, attending the USGS talks gave me a huge appreciation for the excellent, useful work that (some?) of our federal agencies do, which just made me that much more livid at the senseless cuts that DOGE & Republicans have done.
What do you mean? Trump spent more than the US government has ever spent before just this year. He did so in his last term too.
He just doesn't want to spend it on necessary things. After all, they're necessary. If he doesn't do it, someone will, right? There's a slight issue with this reasoning: it usually ends in the state having to do it anyway, at greatly increased cost, further increasing the already eye-watering spend Trump did.
Most metals commonly occur together with specific other metals in nature. For example, it is rare to find silver and zinc without a lot of associated lead. You can't make that lead disappear and we still need silver and zinc.
You want carcinogens in you water supply, and a whole NYT expose about it? That's why. Mining and processing is VERY VERY VERY dirty.
Countries like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India are choosing the accept the externalities and/or make deals with shady partners if needed.
Add to that spamoflauge campaigns lead by nation state competitors trying to stoke opposition to these projects [0], and it becomes hard.
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
Edit: can't reply, so replying here.
> mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths
Optics mostly, along with a healthy dose of social media disinfo [0]. Processing is also a pain in the butt and causes severe externalities.
> while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
Pretty much, but private sector firms are also worried/hemmed by the implications of litigation.
The recognition that the status quo is unstable arose after China weaponized exports to Japan during the Senkaku Diaoyu crisis (it was one of the first things I worked on in my short stint in policy), but "industrial policy" was a dark word you could never utter on the hill until the last 3-4 years.
Also, 13-15 years ago, China wasn't really viewed as a threat the same way it is today. Russia was viewed as the primary peer state competitor to the US back then. I yelled hoarse warning the people I reported to that we needed to deep dive into Chinese institutions back then, but no one listened.
These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.
Mining and processing is very dirty.
Is there evidence that China’s rare earth mining creates more environmental damage than US coal, gold, or other domestic mining operations?
The real issue seems to be strategic: China made rare earth supply security a policy priority, while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
The Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, owned by MP Materials, is an open-pit mine of rare-earth elements on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range in California, 53 miles (85 km) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2020 the mine supplied 15.8% of the world's rare-earth production. It is the only rare-earth mining and processing facility in the United States. It is the largest single known deposit of such minerals.
Look at the history section to see how this mine initially dominated rare earth element production, then shut down due to low price competition, then reopened, then shut down due to low prices, then reopened.
The total addressable market for rare earth elements is small in dollar and tonnage terms, but opening mines and processing plants is expensive. One big new mine could tank the global market price.
The US used to maintain large stockpiles of many mineral resources for defense purposes, but mostly stopped in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The pendulum may be swinging the other way now. The Mountain Pass mine received DoD grants in 2022 and 2023 to support continued operation, regardless of open market prices.
The only way to mine rare earths is to just process massive quantities of earth. Typically this is done as part of another mining operation, like mining nickel. It's labor intensive and requires nasty chemicals. Places with cheap labor, weak environemental regulations, and extremely large scale mining operations that they are going to be operating anyways are always going to be able to produce the cheapest rare earths. It's very easy to see why China naturally dominates the market.
This creates a perverse incentive where it is often cheaper to reprocess low-grade ore from an existing mine than to jump through the regulatory hoops and decades of lawsuits to develop a new mine with high-grade ore. Refining a low-grade ore in the US often is not cost competitive on the global market, so there isn't much incentive to do so even though you've already mined the material.
The US needs to make it fast and efficient to develop new high-grade ore deposits. America has extraordinary mineral wealth as a matter of geology but we barely even explore in the US anymore because even if you find it you can't develop it. This has been the case since circa the 1980s or 1990s.
Price controls on gold up until the late 1970s didn't help either, since it discouraged gold exploration. Many high-value mineral deposits in the US have been discovered as a side-effect of gold exploration. The price controls disappeared but were almost immediately replaced with regulatory regimes that made it unprofitable to develop new mines.
Many rare earth deposits in the US were discovered as a side-effect of uranium prospecting. The US government stopped subsidizing uranium mining ~1970, which was the main reason it was being done at all, and so people stopped discovering associated minerals around the same time.
Simplistic thought, but, they're the only ones willing to ignore and cover up the insane pollution it causes. Rare earth is somewhat synonymous with "exceptionally toxic."
For the same reason that only China can produce t-shirts, or a quality sedan EV with a 5-star EU crash test rating and 350 miles of range for $15,000.
(And, you know, environmental regulations, so mining and refining sites don't turn into what's described in a sibling comment.)
The Chinese government even attempted to lead a spamoflauge campaign against North American REE projects initiated by the Biden admin [0]
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...
DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.
It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.
The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!
The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.
Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.
They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.
Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.
Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.
The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.
In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing than to build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.
The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
MisterTea•1h ago
Though it doesn't address the issue of waste from the refining process which currently looks like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
alephnerd•1h ago
Either you eat the cost of the externality or you accept that countries that can will end up dominating the industry, and hold entire sectors like automotive or semiconductors hostage. This is what China did and what Vietnam [0] and India [1] are attempting to do as well.
It's like packaging for grid batteries - someone has to do the dirty work because manufacturing is inherently dirty.
The only rule that matters even in a "rules based order" is might makes right.
If we don't want to do it, then we need to cultivate partners who can - but the only countries who are not China and open to eating the externalities are Vietnam and India, which is why South Korea and Japan depend on them after China weaponized REE imports to both in 2016 (THAAD) and 2012 (Senkaku) respectively.
[0] - https://en.mae.gov.vn/Pages/chi-tiet-tin-Eng.aspx?ItemID=811...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093322
xnx•1h ago
Let China process the materials under normal circumstances, but keep 6 months of processed output on hand in case trade is disrupted (trade disagreement, pandemic, war, etc.).
alephnerd•1h ago
That's not enough of a leeway when dealing with a country who has active land disputes with 2 countries we have a defense treaty with (Japan, Phillipines) and 1 with whom we have an ambiguous defense commitment (Taiwan).
And even the Chinese government knows that countries like the the US will try to stockpile. Almost all processing, mining, and exporting in China for REEs is managed by SoEs and under close monitoring from state regulators.
This is why the Biden admin initiated the Minerals Security Partnership with Japan, India, and Australia.
kelnos•1h ago
I think there are two ways to effectively mitigate this risk: 1) have mining and manufacturing of your own that covers most of your needs, or 2) balanced trade where you get something critical from another country, but they also get something critical from you (and can't easily get it somewhere else).
(Of course when you have very solid allies, you can relax a bit more and rely on them, but you still have to be prepared for a situation where that ally has a shortage and prioritizes their own use.)
XorNot•39m ago
Waiting out 6 months of production would be easy. And even the threat of interruption would drastically mess with prices.
_DeadFred_•1h ago
bdamm•1h ago
I don't think it is good, but let's be reasonable in comparing environmental harm.
MisterTea•1h ago
This isn't about China or the size of the lake, but the fact that there is a lake because the effluent is difficult to dispose of and currently has no use.
Edit: to further clarify, I am not against refining them in the USA. Just that we have to also address the consequences of doing so.
soperj•1h ago
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mildred+Lake,+AB+T9K+2Z1/@...
Check the previous dates. 2018 yes, 2022, no.
sandworm101•1h ago
https://www.ctvnews.ca/northern-ontario/article/company-work...
https://www.jxscmineral.com/blogs/gold-tailings-impacts-and-...