Rare earth elements are crucial to our modern existence, as well as our advanced defense systems. China, America’s primary supplier of these metals, has restricted exports of rare earths into the U.S. in retaliation for the president’s tariffs on Chinese exports into the country. There’s no reason to panic, though. There’s a way to work around the problem, and it doesn’t require a minerals deal with Ukraine.

Rare earth elements are needed to make our cellphones, computer hard drives, flat-screen monitors and televisions, as well as life-saving medical equipment. They are in fact “indispensable metals in electronics manufacturing.” Without them, modern society simply cannot survive. Even renewable energy sources, so precious to green zealots, need rare earths.  

There are also “significant defense applications,” says the U.S. Geological Survey, including “electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.”

Despite their importance to our economy and security, our “leaders” have put us in an awkward position. China provides the U.S. with 70% of the rare earth compounds we buy from abroad.

As their name implies, supplies are scarce. because they can’t be found “in high concentrations in the earth’s crust” and when they are discovered, the process to separate them from other resources is typically arduous. 

But the process is not beyond the U.S.

This country could have – and should have – been mining large volumes of its own rare earths. But environmental zealots have blocked mining efforts, including the planned Pebble Mine in Alaska, “home to at least 70 known occurrences of rare earth elements.” It was shut down in 2014 even before the partnership applied for federal approval. The Environmental Protection Agency “decided to kill this project before any science had been done,” Tom Collier, who was the project’s chief executive, told John Stossel. 

It was a “pre-emptive veto” from the Obama team that was closely aligned with, and overlapped by, hostile environmentalists.

Six years later, the Trump EPA reversed that 2014 decision. That led to the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers taking a look and concluding, according to the New York Times in July 2020, that the mine “would not result in ‘long-term changes in the health of commercial fisheries.’” But a month later, the Corps of Engineers said “the project, as currently proposed, cannot be permitted under section 404 of the Clean Water Act.” In 2023, then-President Joe Biden promised “the mine will not be built.” 

While rare earth minerals are rare, as we mentioned earlier, they “aren’t that rare.”

“Eventually,” Wired reports, “the U.S. and other countries will be forced to either ramp up domestic mining or reduce their dependence on rare earths, both of which would make China’s policies sting less.”

In 1990, no other nation produced more minerals than the U.S. Today our country ranks seventh.

“Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported,” says engineer, academic and author Mark Mills, who produced a number of energy papers for the Manhattan Institute.

Mills says “Pebble Mine has become the poster child” that the eco-warriors want to stop, “but it’s not the only one.”

We have enough rare earth elements in this country to meet our needs. But we are also oversupplied with green militants, who are fine with mining in other countries, where labor is forced and/or done by children, rules to protect the environment from damage are ignored if they exist at all, and the mining is done by primitive tools and techniques rather than the modern equipment found in the West. Consequently, it’s become “a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world,” says mining.com.

“Even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine.”

Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently noted that the U.S. “sits on a vast, $12 trillion treasure chest of our own mineral resources at home,” far more valuable, we’d add, than all the gold in Fort Knox. But due to “irrational regulatory and permitting policies,” it is “locked up.”

The Trump administration has had an unusually busy first 100 days, much of it expending massive amounts of time and resources unwinding the messes left by the Biden White House. There’s more to be done, though, and accelerating America’s mining independence needs to be one of the Trump team’s many priorities. It’s past time to mine, baby, mine.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board