by S. Milloy, Oct 27, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch
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. [emphasis, links added]
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, including military technology such as the advanced F-35 fighter jet. Imagine not being able to build warplanes without China’s cooperation. Even if China were neutral toward the U.S., this situation would be unacceptable.
China plans to become the lone global superpower by 2049, if not sooner. Toward that goal, China is quietly but certainly preparing itself for confrontation, if not war.
This is evidenced, in part, by China’s focus on electrifying its economy to reduce its dependency on the global oil and natural gas market, which is dominated by the U.S.
China has also cleverly worked to avoid war against a superior foe by simply checkmating the U.S. and Western nations through economic and energy dependence, and even sabotage.
After being mildly criticized by Australia during COVID, China announced that it would use trade as a weapon and then promptly stopped trading with Australia.
More recently, in response to U.S. and European efforts to build EV batteries domestically, China announced export limits on the rare earths and processed graphite needed to make batteries.
The Trump administration moved to stymie this part of the Chinese plan through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) enacted last July.
Our China-dependent technology includes all the wind turbines, solar panels, grid batteries, and EVs that greens have induced us to buy over the past two decades.
Worse than just the $250 billion in solar subsidies China expected to reap from U.S. taxpayers through the Green New Scam is the fact that electricity prices and equipment availability in the U.S. would be almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of China.
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