by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
It’s great news that the Trump administration agreed this week with Australia to take steps toward breaking Communist China’s chokehold on rare earth minerals. In addition to a July announcement of a project to extract rare earths from coal mined in Wyoming, President Donald Trump is moving us in a desperately needed direction. But our vulnerabilities to China go much deeper, and much more and faster action is needed.
Rare earth minerals are essential for modern technology. The good news is that they are available virtually everywhere. The bad news is that they generally require strip mining to produce ore, and then the ore must be processed and refined.
Because environmentalists oppose both mining and processing, neither activity has been undertaken on a meaningful scale in the U.S. for decades. And while a few western nations allow rare earth strip mining, about 90 percent of rare earth processing occurs in China, where there is no green activism or bureaucracy to obstruct operations.
This means that virtually all our technology is dependent on China, even military technology like the advanced F-35 fighter jet. Imagine not being able to build war planes without China’s cooperation. Even if China were neutral toward the U.S., this situation would be unacceptable.
