Rare-earth metals are essential to 21st Century technologies, including smartphones, lasers, night vision systems, weapons guidance systems – and GND technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.
... China ... has only a third of global reserves of rare earths, but in 2017 produced over 80% of the global supply of rare-earth metals and compounds, and its exports that year to the US accounted for 78% of the 17,000 tons of US rare-earth imports.
Even rare-earth metals mined in the USA are processed in the People’s Republic – because China now owns the US deposit and we’d prefer to pay the cheaper prices associated with processing under China’s abominable pollution, wage and workplace safety rules.
Christopher Barnard, national policy director at the American Conservation Coalition, is but one of many who agree that a reliable, affordable domestic supply of rare-earth metals is critical to building a “green” economy.
... There are plenty of rare-earth deposits in the USA, but extracting them is not photogenic.
Barnard laments the “regulatory minefield of labyrinthine local, state and federal rules” that has turned permitting into a two- to three-decades adventure in frustration.
Over the past decades, lawmakers have all but banned mineral exploration and development on minerals-rich federal lands.
... Mountain Pass, the sole US operating rare-earth mine, lost two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy and still sends its mined ore to China for processing.
... during Trump’s final days, the Bureau of Land Management (the other BLM) announced new decisions that took effect January 15 expanding potential mining operations on federal lands,
adding mining to the list of industries that can receive fast-tracked permitting (critical to getting any new rare-earth mines operational),
approving a new mine in Nevada for lithium (a critical element in electric vehicle batteries), and
approving a land swap to ease final approval of an Arizona copper mine.
Will Biden and Congress undermine all this?
... The Biden campaign privately told US miners it would support boosting domestic production of metals required to make electric vehicles, solar panels and other products critical to his climate plans.
But this would represent a shift from Obama policies that included “rigorous environmental regulations that slowed US mining sector growth.”
Green groups in Minnesota, Nevada and Arizona – along with some Native American tribes – have begun pounding the drums of dissent.
... will Biden-Harris put America’s clean energy future in Chinese hands?"