by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Energy Secretary Chris Wright went to Wyoming last week to cut the ribbon on the first new rare earth mine in the U.S. since the 1950s. Telling the assembled guests and reporters that the “Brook Mine” is critical to breaking China’s “stranglehold on rare earth processing,” he hinted that it might be the first of several. It should be.
A few years ago, I visited Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and when discussing the need for domestic production of vital minerals, he picked up a dark brown rock from the Mojave Desert, explaining that it was mostly composed of a “rare earth” element. He said millions of such rocks littered the desert in his district, yet the United States imported 100% of the mineral it contains. That situation has not changed since then, but maybe it soon will.
Many leaders have warned for years about America’s reliance on China for rare earth minerals, several of which are critical in the production of renewable energy, and high-tech equipment like cell phones, computers, MRI machines, and satellites. Most Americans don’t spend two seconds wondering where we get these elements with hard-to-pronounce names, like ytterbium, dysprosium, and praseodymium. But with China becoming an ever-increasing threat to U.S. security, a passing concern has become a crisis. Unnecessarily.
There is no good reason for the U.S. or its allies to rely on China in the first place. Western economies are heavily dependent upon energy and telecommunications, but nothing about that requires Chinese mining or manufacturing. America has always had its own plentiful supplies but decided decades ago to lock up some of its own most important natural resources.
