Imagine discovering a treasure chest beneath your home, only to lock it away because someone said the wood might bother the squirrels.
That, in effect, is what the United States has done with rare earth metals, critical ingredients for smartphones, military hardware, wind turbines, and more.
While we’ve squabbled over red tape and risk-averse environmental policies, China quietly built a monopoly.
Now, we’re left with a familiar American crisis: we need what we refused to mine.
The 90 Percent Problem
Today, China controls about 90 percent of the global rare earth market.
This isn’t a fluke or a stroke of natural luck.
It’s the result of aggressive planning, state subsidies, strategic acquisitions, and a relentless willingness to do the dirty work.
These 17 elements, names like neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium, are essential for modern technology. From electric vehicle motors to guided missiles, they’re as crucial to this century as oil was to the last.
Yet, while China expanded, the U.S. retreated.
Not because of a lack of supply (we’re sitting on some of the world’s richest deposits), but because policymakers, green absolutists, and bureaucratic inertia refused to get their hands dirty.
It’s as if, having won the resource lottery, we tore up the ticket.
Minnesota’s Minerals, Washington’s Red Tape
Consider Minnesota’s Duluth Complex, one of the largest undeveloped mineral deposits on Earth, containing not just rare earths but also copper, nickel, and cobalt.
It’s precisely the type of site the U.S. needs to secure energy independence and industrial resilience.
But in 2023, the Biden administration’s Department of the Interior imposed a 20-year mining ban on 225,000 acres of the Superior National Forest.
This wasn’t an area already being mined.
It was a proactive handcuffing of American potential, courtesy of the loudest voices in the environmental lobby.
The Twin Metals project was shut down before it had a chance, all in the name of protecting wilderness near the Boundary Waters.
Not pollution.
Not disaster.
Potential.
Other States, Same Story
Wyoming has the Halleck Creek deposit, a massive, high-quality site potentially among the richest in the world.
However, mining companies like American Rare Earths are still bogged down in paperwork, navigating environmental impact reviews, litigation threats, and federal uncertainty.
Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, Alaska’s Bokan Mountain, and even parts of Texas have rare earth veins that could help diversify supply. Still, all share the same obstacles: federal delay and activist outrage.
In every case, the problem isn’t geology.
It’s bureaucracy.
How Did We Get Here? Follow the Ideology
For decades, the American Left championed a policy of “not in our backyard.”
Rather than innovate clean mining, they outsourced the problem. Better to let China dig up the Earth, they argued, than risk an endangered insect or disturb sacred lands back home.
Environmental groups, backed by deep-pocketed donors and media amplification, lobbied to make rare earth mining in the U.S. practically illegal through endless layers of permitting, litigation, and political interference.
The Bureau of Land Management, the EPA, and a patchwork of overlapping federal and state agencies turned each proposed site into a multi-decade legal nightmare.
Meanwhile, the very industries that depended on these materials, green energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, continued to grow. The hypocrisy was staggering.
You can’t build a wind turbine or an EV battery without rare earths, but you also can’t mine for them here. Instead, we lecture the world on clean energy while buying minerals from a country known for child labor, toxic waste, and authoritarian rule.
Duke Lacrosse Meets Mining: Guilty Without Trial
America’s treatment of its own mining industry is eerily reminiscent of the Duke lacrosse scandal: accused, vilified, and shut down before facts were in.
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Just as those athletes were declared guilty by public sentiment rather than evidence, mining companies are often painted as environmental criminals simply for filing a permit application.
We’ve created a political culture where asking to responsibly mine for rare earths is seen as heresy.
The naturalists scream, the bureaucrats stall, and China laughs all the way to the bank.
Trump’s Push and What Comes Next
President Donald J. Trump, in his previous term and again in his current administration, has made critical minerals a national priority.
In 2020, he signed an executive order declaring the nation’s dependency on China a national emergency. His administration launched funding initiatives, streamlined permitting for strategic mining, and began stockpiling rare earths.
But the damage done during decades of neglect doesn’t reverse overnight. It takes bold leadership and public resolve to rewire an industry long choked by activist-driven policy.
Trump has made clear he supports American mining for American needs, not because he wants to bulldoze nature, but because he recognizes what is truly at stake: independence.
A Wake-Up Call That Can’t Wait
The next war, economic or military, may hinge on who controls the resources that power missiles, drones, lasers, and sensors.
America cannot afford to rely on a hostile communist regime to keep our defense contractors supplied. Nor should we allow California-based environmental lobbyists to dictate whether Minnesota can responsibly mine minerals crucial for U.S. security.
The road ahead requires a new pact: one where environmental responsibility meets national interest. Technology has advanced. Modern mining can be cleaner and safer than ever before.
What we lack is not capability.
We lack courage.
Dig or Surrender
It is no longer a question of whether we can mine rare earths here. It is a question of whether we’re willing to.
Every policy that delays or denies development helps China tighten its grip. Every bureaucratic pause emboldens a regime that uses our dependence as a form of leverage.
The choice is ours.
We can continue to bow to the altar of imagined environmental purity while outsourcing the dirty work.
Or we can face the ground, the facts, and the future with clarity.
America once lit the world with innovation, grit, and the willingness to do the hard work ourselves.
It’s time to remember that.
The treasure is still beneath our feet.
All we need now is a shovel.
Tech companies silence dissent. Academia shames truth-tellers. The media ignores it all.
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