America didn't lose its rare earth industry, it sold it
lawfaremedia.org
lawfaremedia.org
- Rare Earth Technologies. [1] PitchBook says they have about $1 million in investment. LinkedIn says they have 7 employees. Their site says they are going to have a pilot plant running in 2025. Right.
- Northern Minerals (Australia) [2] "Progressing the completion of a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for a commercial-scale mining and processing operation". Australian penny stock, current AU$0.02, way down from peak of 2021. Five years in, and they're still at a feasibility study?
- Ucore Rare Metals [3] They got far enough to make some samples at lab scale. They have a demo plant. More real than the two above. But moving too slowly.
There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.
A big problem with this industry, which the original article should have mentioned, is that there was a rare earth glut in 2015, when China flooded the market. Many of the US players went out of business. Mountain Pass mine shut down. The article's proposed investment vehicle should be stress-tested against the historical data from the last glut to see if it holds up.
[2] https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-proc...
There are a lot of people at bench scale separation. None of the startups seem to be at small, profitable plant. That's when you can get serious investors.
It’s the mining that people don’t want in their backyard because of the inherent environmental devastation. Especially considering the low density at which they occur. And the radioactive pollution!
Also, the same old chemical seperation process used with other minerals also works with the rare earth ones. If you’re talking about that being a challenge, it’s not even rare earth specific. So why market it as such!
Furthermore, in what world is mining a start-up friendly industry? Wouldn’t this naturally be done by the giant mining conglomerates that, in fact, are doing so right now?
Also rare earths (other than promethium) are not themselves radioactive, they just tend to co-occur with uranium and thorium deposits. This is akin to your house having a radon problem though: doesn't mean your house is radioactive, just that you built it on a uranium deposit.
It is under enormous pressure to the point where the Australia Treasury made the unprecedented move to demand some Singapore-based PRC-linked entities to divest ~500m shares. They instead passed them onto other PRC-linked entities. There's been two failed board takeovers, and the annual general meeting postponed while Treasury continues to investigate who owns what and has set them back a year or so. What they have is a potential resource (lots of heavy REE) and an offtake deal with Iluka.
Iluka (Australia) is the one with the processing coming on sooner, and unlike Lynas, on Australian soil and have an existing stockpile ready to go from their mineral sands business.
The other to watch is Arafura (Australia) - fully funded, construction just started and offtake agreements (mostly Europe) in place.
Energy Fuels (UUUU) is one to watch in the US. They purchased Australian miner ASM and plan you use their Uranium processing infrastructure and knowhow to pivot to REE.
Lynas is in the process of purchasing Meteoric Resources (Australia) for the largest ionic clay mine in Brazil.
I hold positions in all the above, and what is really interesting is that despite all the progress their share prices have recently tanked as China wrings concessions from the US, rather than the market viewing the long-term disconnect from PRC reliance as valuable or inevitable. Even Lynas is down having peaked around AUD$21 when they started processing separated Dysprosium and Terbium and renewed their Malaysian licence and Japanese offtake agreements.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-14/federal-politics-reso...
> Northern Minerals is an interesting case. (Disclaimer: I'm a shareholder and keep a close eye what is going one)
For Northern in particular - they have a binding offtake agreement with Iluka for everything they mine, and Iluka are 60-70% towards completing their processing plant (with a huge Government backed loan) by mid next year. The issue the last few years is the intense interest from CCP-linked entities who currently hold ~27% of the shares and have attempted to take over the board multiple times. The Government has so far been willing to intervene, but it's set them back at a time that the funding to push for a FID was much more readily available.
Iluka have also had hiccups as there was a 6 month delay while they requested additional money to meet costs (it's harder and more expensive to source the required plant equipment without China) and their existing business of zircon and titanium products is also struggling as China was a major customer.
Some said that these price signals only make sense if globalisation lasts forever, but their remarks were dismissed as depressing.
The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.
The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.
If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.
Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.
Surely there was someone in the 1980s or 90s that saw the demographic writing on the wall and tried to warn everyone and got laughed at.
I have no idea who will move what way in the future so I can only guess what we will regret in 10 years. However I must act on the world as I know it lest things get worse. (what makes things worse is open for debate)
- What do you mean "the right direction"? Do you mean the "open and free direction" that "Hey you can't have our Nvidia chips but must keep selling us cheap rare earth"? - And who are "we"? I suggest "we"'d better take care of "ourselves" instead of "react".
This is an anger-driven Conversion: someone creates an account to respond out of intense disapproval of a certain opinion, which is extremely common on any forum.
Type of government does have an effect on economic and military policy, but being a liberal democracy does not make automatically make a country less interested in pursuing naked self-interest.
The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.
These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.
In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.
For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.
" The term "rare-earth" is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are found only in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. REEs are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth's crust (cerium being the 25th-most-abundant element at 68 parts per million, more abundant than copper), but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore which is costly and energy intensive. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
What radioactive element is commonly found with rare earths and has to be separated? Thorium, the same stuff that could power future nuclear reactors and is commonly found on beaches in Kerala, India.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-...
For now, China has a huge advantage in the facilities for the chemical processing of the rare-earth minerals, so that much of what is mined elsewhere still goes to China for the extraction and separation of the metals.
Some rare-earth metals are very cheap, like cerium and lanthanum. Even neodymium is not expensive. Unfortunately most applications also need at least small quantities of those rare-earth elements that are really rare, i.e. they form a very small fraction of the rare-earth elements contained in a mineral, and whose separation from the abundant rare-earth elements is also very expensive.
So this phrase that is too often repeated "Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests" is actually false for most of the 14 REEs. Not rare are only lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, which cover only a small part of the applications of REEs, like deoxidizers in metallurgy and glass polishing and lighters. Most magnets with neodymium must also include other much less abundant rare-earth metals, to increase their upper limit for the working temperature.
When someone says "Didnt lose its...", A mine that is shutdown is a loss, because its no longer financially viable to operate. So are we debating what "lose" means?
Open up any old idled steel plants lately?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
It became a bit of a news item a few months ago:
> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
The US do high qualification job like engineering design, state of the art manufacturing and the such and other countries go to manufacture nuts, bolts and magnets that are mainly low qualification jobs for cheap.
But, we don't live in that world and the magnet dudes wanna wield the magnets against us and the high quali jobs dudes somehow wanna go back to making nuts and bolts.
A healthy society finds roles for all it's citizens, not just the ones with the right credentials.
A highe % of the population can work in high qualification jobs, but the society will also always need cleks, bakers, taxi drivers, etc.
The effects that high qualification jobs have, with the higher value added to products and services, permeates all of society with higher wages than in other countries.
It just breaks down when bad actors go against reason for long enough, but the market also corrects for that changing supply chains.
although it seems that the CCP has a problem with this and expects to be the manufacturing hub of the world forever.
It really doesn't feel like that's the case, but media and US politicians seem to have convinced the average Joe that every other country is an adversary trying to start a fight or something.
Reminder heavy REE i.e. the strategic stuff that goes into sensors (what modern US MIC is built around) is geologically rare - economically extracted from limited ionic clay deposits, which is much in fact rarer than... making magnets by smashing rocks for light ree.
That and the entire HREE economic extraction pipeline is Chinese, who build out the foundation tech over last 30+ years aka capability US/west has ever had. The physical reality = agglomerated Chinese mining cities of millions with vertically integrated industrial chains sustained tertiary mining/engineering pipeline larger than RoW combined.
Let's be real this not scale US capable of replicating even if it had ionic clays, and even if US manage to sort out LREE (mountain pass etc)... it still basically built its entire strategic MIC (i.e. sensors) on HREE that only PRC can process at scale. Which is kind of dumb, but here we are. But that's not going away for a long time, i.e. PRC will likely scale EUV to western levels well before US/west can scale HREE to Chinese levels, maybe F35s getting real radars before that.
The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
Addendum: I think this is bad.
By requiring the US to rely on often adversarial countries to supply some of its most crucial military components like rare earth minerals, the US couldn’t really go toe to toe with those countries.
I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.
Or maybe it really is the simplest answer that it was all purely in effort to obtain the greatest profit margins…
Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.
It's much more comforting to think there was a positive intention for the way things turned out, and not just greed and short-sightedness.
Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.
For example, I could say that it's much more comforting to think that current circumstances are artifacts of greedy fools rather than coordination by malevolent and powerful actors.
> that the "top level" had a plan here
You're also being somewhat reductive here. Sure, entry-level conspiracies rely on an all-powerful council with top-down authority, but there are more nuanced understandings where they can arrive out of alliances of convenience between rival factions.
1) more economic engagement would somehow make China democratic
2) an economically integrated China would be more interested in maintaining international stability
3) WTO membership would force China to follow trade rules
Being self-sufficient prevents you from conflict both in preventing external politics from potentially cutting off from critical supplies, and by making the potential fruits of conquest and war fairly limited. Like who is going to go to war over 5% cheaper steel? You will trade for that deal, but likely not kill. But the trading could be part of the source of the problem because it can hollow out your own native industry over enough time, or prevent native industry from being built when it can be bought cheap.
The US built the SR-71 Blackbird in using titanium from the Soviet Union during the cold war; I don't think international cooperation was the seen as needed, just Reaganist margin maximalism taking root.
Who gives a shit about sovereign capability if you can have a real good earnings report?
It's a bit like crowd dynamics. Each individual human is sentient, but if you observe a large enough crowd, there is no sign of sentience in its behavior.
People who are actively involved in politics and advocacy, as well as some terminally online people, often end up adopting the views of their peers. Because they are stuck in their bubbles, they don't consider other viewpoints plausible.
But most people are not like that. In most issues, they are exposed to multiple viewpoints they could plausibly adopt. The choices they make are ultimately their own. Of course, if you know the distribution of people's opinions and situations and the messaging they are exposed to, you can try to predict the distribution of choices. But those are still people's individual choices.
Yes, but most people also come to the same pretty naive conclusions separately and then it looks like they just copy each other. It is pretty hard to tell the difference between low effort thinking and parrots.
Except this time it's neither left-wing or right wing, and sonia harder to harness as a political dynamo.
You cannot afford this in the era of the modern regulatory state. You need projections showing you will be in the black in 5-10 to get financing most of the time. Anything you get after that is just gravy.
There are some exceptions for government intertwined industry (energy, farming, etc) but even then the long term risk is pooled and counter-balanced through financialization so nobody is holding the bag the whole time.
1 - Way more polluting than anybody even considered possible before.
Because when these plants and facilities come up for reinvestment the rules and laws have inevitably made a piecemeal sell out the only financially viable move.
The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.
Worse, there was always some degree of unwritten understanding between government and big business. Like if big business built out a factory they would expect to use it for 50-100yr with refreshes every 30 or so. When the government started crapping on that sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.
Manufacturing jobs are killed by automation. Robots replaced people in plants.
This is happening in Europe and Asia too.
People "dreaming" or cushy well paid union jobs assembling stuff are talking nonsense nostalgia.
What are we making more of than we did 40 years ago? Are there a few high dollar value categories overwhelming everything else?
Do rare earths even count as manufactured goods? I think they are usually considered a raw material, right?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much. This happens to all mature economies, where services and knowledge work become a larger percent of GDP as productivity, education, and living standards increase. It's a sign of progress that we have more people working in offices and fewer people working in hazardous conditions for low pay.
It's because of both.
Mature economies would do well to hold onto some basic manufacturing capacity as a matter of national security. Or at the very least, retain some of that capacity within the sphere of close and trusted allies, assuming allies of that type can even be maintained by the US at this point.
The numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing#List_of_countrie...
While it's true the US is a massive producer, it focuses on automation, which means more productivity per job.
And this is the crux of it all. US factory jobs weren't Los "overseas" as much as they were lost to machines. Each production line needs fewer and fewer workers.
Yes, you can cherry-pick examples (software jobs going to India or coal mines closing etc) but even mines use much less labor today per ton of say coal than they did 50 years ago.
So really, I think, the sense is that good blue-collar union jobs are what's dwindling. It's less about raw output and more about job losses.
- a sheer number of assembly lines,
- number of SKUs,
- automation engineer jobs.
Something more fuzzy: mean/median wait time from a fully specced project to a 10,000 unit batch. Of course only for products where such a batch number makes sense, but probably it could be divided to a few groups of batch magnitudes. For this to be an interesting metric it would require to pick several specific classes of products. For example: per Integrated Circuit number magnitude, per price point, a car, a smartphone, a TV, a home radiator, a bathtub, etc.
Companies in those industries invest millions into automation lines and robotics and pay some maintenance staff and specialists 65-120k/yr because it's cheaper and (more damnedly) more reliable than hiring 1-2k individuals on at 25-40usd/hr.
The outcome is a result of laborers (and capitalism), not the other way around.
1) the added value in final assembly of components made elsewhere (ie. $10 in components being turned into a $100 final product means $90 in "manufacturing") 2) increases in computing power being value-adjusted in the data as increases in output volume, which is defensible but has grown to dominate the numbers to obscure real losses in manufacturing
I think when people talk about manufacturing, there's some expectation that they are talking about real ability to make things with some degree of self-sufficiency. Saying manufacturing jobs are "lost to automation" seems to disguise that it is largely not the same manufacturing which is being automated.
1. https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
I did not intend to imply it's good or bad what happened, it's just the capital exchanges and consequences are obvious
Not really about the political/ finance jargon to me but the change in ground truth for us
Now what?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...
We just do the last mile "human work"? Mow lawns, make zines, hack RPis for fun and teach maintenance of the robots. Cook and socialize but the robots make sure neighborhood grocery and hardware store are full?
Semantics aside giving everyone a direct handle to submit issues also can act like MAD nuke policy: https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
I mean what're the Founders and our living but aging elders going to do? Stick around and make sure we stick to the script? The Founders didn't even either.
Law and code that feeds the fed gov AI could conceivably be built and deployed be blocked like usual by need for sufficient sign offs given a geographic region
So I mean; the language impediments and language that doesn't currently exist can be changed. I mean we don't default to Latin; evolution of social language is not gonna stop with us. We could be intentional about it same as we are with code.
EU Set to Lift Sanction on Chinese Firm to Save ASML Supplier[1]
> In exchange, the EU would remove trade restrictions it put on an unnamed Chinese firm accused of aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine.
> Sindlhauser, which relies on Chinese rare earths and critical minerals supplies, is at risk of going out of business in the coming months if China’s sanctions stay in place, according to the people. Targeting an otherwise obscure firm illustrates the lengths China is going to gain detailed knowledge into Europe’s economic pinch points.
> People familiar with the case say Sindlhauser is almost exclusively reliant on Chinese rare earths, and the listing caused a supply chain shock for the company that had until now done little work to diversify or minimize its dependence on the Chinese inputs.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/eu-set-to...
As an European, they've never done anything to me. In fact, it's our countries that pillaged and conquered and colonized China. I've seen our troops on their borders many times, not even once the opposite.
And it's our own allies consistently creating trouble next to our borders in the middle east or north africa and causing millions of refugees that of course don't cross the atlantic.
Why is China evil exactly? And why are they only evil since they started mathing/outpacing US financial dominance?
It's the US spying our leaders (remember Merkel's phone), it's the US bugging our infrastructure, it's the US consistently creating business and legal issues, it's the US threatening our territories (Greenland), it's US cloud vendors violating our data sovereignity and sharing it with any US court or agency.
Why is China the boogeyman exactly?
You don't know about Tiananmen Square massacre? People thought China was evil even when they were dirt poor after their failed communist experiment.
You probably meant "threat" here instead of evil, and then it is obvious why nobody saw them as a threat when they were poor and weak, but now that they are big and strong people see them as a threat since they haven't exactly left their evil ways behind.
Let’s look at total of deaths the US military caused though, from a scholarly source (https://www.ibon.org/tl/global-victims-of-us-military-aggres...):
“The most severe of the US’ acts of aggression have resulted in some 13-23 million deaths in at least 28 nations. Direct US military actions in at least 16 countries have caused around 7-13 million deaths. US-supported or -instigated armed conflicts in 19 countries have led to some 6-10 million deaths. There are countries where the US has engaged both directly in combat and indirectly through active military support.
These figures still do not include casualties from all the governments the US has supported militarily in their domestic conflicts against supposed insurgents and other political opposition. Many tens of thousands more have been killed by client states with US support and using US-funded and -supplied war materiel, such as in the Philippines.”
[1] sorry that was Gemini, because I lost count at twenty ‘wars’ somewhere on the other Wikipedia for ‘military conflicts’
This isn't a contest, both can be evil.
This is 40 years ago.
Look at what's happening in the most recent years, who's dropping bombs on civilian markets, who killed hundreds of children in the Iranian conflict saying "oops", or who's actively supporting an apartheid in the middle east, who's kidnapping foreign leaders because "reasons", who's supporting repressive a dozen of repressive regimes for its own interest, etc.
I'm not stating that the Chinese dictature is anything we should long for, but I'm tired of this psy ops to treat them as an enemy or threat.
We should pay much more attention at the shit that happens in our countries on a semi regular basis.
Standards for The West: Exactly. We bombed them. They had a case of an evil regime. Why are you apologizing for an evil regime? Would you not want to be liberated by bombs? All of the native expats we know who were part of the upper class agree that bombing the country that they don’t live in is a price worth paying.
But the therapists are struggling. Honestly, serves them right. Who are they do diagnose me with Narcissistic Personality Disorder? It was time that they were taken down a peg. Sometimes I amuse myself a little. They call me, personally. Asking for a session. Please sir. I know that the bots are superior. But I just need a few weekly sessions. I will have to sell my house in Mountain View and move to San Jose if this goes on for another eight years. I smile, the kind of faint smile that you see on Buddha statues. Learn to vibe.
To be clear. I amuse myself with this scenario in my head.