Both Germany and Japan have reported the first shutdowns. These shutdowns will become worse over time. While China is providing some licenses for Rare Earths, they’re slow walking them and customs approval, and I’ve been told (though cannot confirm) that so far they have given none to Indian companies. (Maybe that little Pakistan kerfuffle wasn’t cost free?)
This is all very amusing and instructive on a number of levels. America banned something that China could handle the bans on: semiconductors. China, after much provocation, banned something that there is simply no way of replacing in the next few years:
“There is no solution for the next three years except to come to an agreement with China,” said Andreas Kroll, managing director of Noble Elements, rare earths importer for medium-sized companies and startups without their own inventories.“China controls practically 99.8 percent of global production of heavy rare earths. Other countries can only produce these in minimal quantities, virtually on a laboratory scale.”
This is why Trump was begging for a call with Xi, and why he’s going hat in hand to China, rather than the other way around.
It’s not that there aren’t reserves elsewhere, though China does have the most:
Now what I find funny about this is that we’ve known about this vulnerability for ages. I remember writing about it back in the 00s. We did nothing. Nothing.
And it isn’t just about automobiles, a vast amount of weapons need rare earths, and the Chinese controls are ostensibly about “dual use” — aimed explicitly at military production.
The West has no foresight. No one did anything because China’s production is cheap, cheaper than any alternative would be. But anyone with sense would see that not having an alternative was allowing China to hold a gun to our heads, and would have subsidized production to make it cost competitive.
This summarizes so many of our problems: we know they exist, there’s a solution, but no one important can get rich off it, so nothing is done until it turns into a crisis, at which point much of the damage cannot be mitigated.
We have few real problems we can’t (or couldn’t, sometimes the deadline has passed) fix, and almost no real problems we’re willing to fix.
Dagnarus
” no one important can get rich off it”. I don’t buy this. Of course important people could have got rich off this.
I’m pretty certain important people get rich from rare earth’s in China. Important people certainly get rich producing artillery shells in Russia. Our societies are just senile.
Jan Wiklund
The stupid Westerners – “donkeys”, they are called in Asian media according to a friend of mine who listen to them – concocted the market dictatorship for their earlier colonies, but believed so much in it that they now are the only ones that obey it. It’s even written into the EU constitution.
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Not to worry. Trump has us covered. Right?
https://www.reuters.com/world/kyiv-is-ready-sign-resources-deal-with-us-ukraine-government-source-says-2025-04-30/
Poul
Just as you have pointed out that China will stop it’s dependence on US chips. So will the West stop their dependence on Chinese rare earths.
The prices will be higher and environmental pollution will rise too (the two reasons China has gained it’s key position), but rare earths are not that rare. It is just a question of costs. With national security involved China will be replaced, so any deal is just a short term solution then the US and EU will break the deals.
So another step towards no trade or strongly regulated trade between the US, EU and China. China’s mercantilist policies have reached their end.
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Obviously, or at least it should have been to any and all, my previous post about Trump’s Big Beautiful Rare Earths Deal with Ukraine was dripping, nay sizzling, with satirical sarcasm.
I’m amazed, really I’m not because these days nothing amazes me any longer, more establishmentarians don’t debunk this Ukrainian rare earths nonsense. As I said before in that post, Ian, Ukraine are liars but they’re not alone. Russia lies its ass off and so too does America and China is not immune either. It’s just a matter of degree and should be evaluated on a case by case basis and this Ukrainian rare earths deal is a whopper of a lie.
I thought it only fitting considering Trump’s Big Beautiful Boondoggle he calls a bill is so favorable to AI that we let AI answer whether or not Ukraine truly has rare earths. Hey DJT, since you’re such a fan of AI and support it whole-heartedly, for now at least, why not consult with it about rare earths in Ukraine versus taking Stephen Miller’s word for it or is Stephen Miller an AI too like Biden?
Here’s AI on Trump’s Big Beautiful Rare Earths Deal with Ukraine. As we all knew already without AI having to tell us, or we/you should have, it’s a crock. Ukraine knows it was a crock but did/does DJT or whether he does or doesn’t, does it matter either way?
Ian Welsh
Plenty of places can mine them, including the US and Canada. The issue is refining.
Mark Level
“The U.S. cannot do diplomacy”, and the Trump admin. cannot do diplomacy even more than the previous clowns– says Max Blumenthal on the most recent Grayzone report, “I think I’m a drone now.”
That’s a clever pun variation of an old Tommy James and the Shondells song. The episode is centered on his having visited a big AI Conference in the DC area after his recent trip to Iran. It had Palantir and a lot of the usual villains and Dr. Evils in attendance. He was expelled after asking a panelist about the current starvation in Gaza, using the “genocide” word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-xOO1lUv9g
But his specific comment was about the fact that Trump seems to now be bumbling into a full-on war against Iran, due to Zionist pressure from both parties, he has demanded that they have “0% nuclear enrichment” (a non-starter of course) and that the US be allowed to do “controlled demolition” of Nuclear facilities inside Iran!! Wackadoodle stuff.
Meantime he hasn’t yet let go of US collusion in trying to gin up WW III over Ukraine . . . How does this relate to the topic here? Well, if the entire NatSec blob is 99% clear that Ghina is the actual US peer-competitor that has to be destroyed ASAP (every few months they make major gains, the window of opportunity to attach China with any prospect of success is closing “soon”), and they still can’t remove supporting the genocide in Gaza (& the West Bank), “destroying Russia” (Brazil’s Lula recently shared that the senile Biden told him while still VP that this was his major ambition in life, other than jailing more black people, I guess) . . .
From my readings in history most Empires collapse via overreach against one peer opponent– the US has 2 peers, China economically stronger, and Russia militarily stronger, Iran a regional power that cannot be destroyed without destroying the US economy with $20 per gallon oil. Well, the writing is on the wall.
Trump is currently taking credit for the stand-down between Pakistan and India, which India has openly rebutted . . . the overgrown boy’s endless need to claim “Winning Bigly” means clinical insanity is probably a bigger concern than the malignant narcissism that the Libs for the most part correctly beat the drum about.
Watching the shit-show that is “International Relations” from the US it is difficult to predict the specifics of degeneration by the Empire, but at this point the trajectory is only downward, so the specifics may not matter. I’ve never been afraid to admit when I’ve gotten it wrong. I used to troll all my Lib friends by noting how stupid I was to have voted for Obama the first time thinking he would do anything different than a 3rd and 4th Bush term (but with nicer speeches, stylish empty words.)
So when people called me out some months back for sharing Keaton Weiss’s pre-election take: “You shouldn’t vote for either Kamala or Trump but if you think you must vote for one, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette and Trump is a gun with one empty chamber, Harris has bullets in all 6 chambers.”
Well, it’s true as far as it goes, but now I see it doesn’t go far enough. Yes, Kamala would’ve continued the genocide without a little pause to make the incoming President look non-genocidal before back to the status quo. She also likely would’ve fully committed to Regime Change in Russia and we could all be dead from large-scale Nuclear exchange by now.
However Trump’s complete bipolar incontinence and deep ignorance and arrogance do mean spectacular failure– will it be in Iran? In China? It’ll be somewhere, and likely before the mid-terms. The Empire is a train speeding off the cliff and there ain’t no PotOP (President of the One Percent) who will ever stop it.
Character is destiny, and the Empire’s character can’t be changed by anyone since the Dulles brothers et al publicly executed JFK in 1963. Chris Hedges has pitilessly noted the futility of “Hope”, and the Greeks had it right in the Pandora’s box story. Hope is the final poison pearl in the box of poison that “Western Civilization” brings. It should be abandoned fully and without reservation.
They’ll burn down their own empire based entirely on hubris and arrogance. It never could’ve ended otherwise.
Disaster Girl was only 4 years old, and she called it right– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_Girl
bruce wilder
well, now the immediate issue is time.
to build the whole supply chain capability to source and refine rare earths (many quite different supply chains for the various rare earths really) and to become reasonably efficient — that begins to look like deep time when you think about building, say, university geology and chemical engineering programs.
the U.S. did not just “transfer” its industry to China. China set up the global dollar economy to incentivize U.S. disinvestment that mirrored the financial incentives to support China’s positive investment in manufacturing industry and also global supply chains. It cost China to do that — they had to make a lot of American business corporations very profitable as long as those companies were engaged in disinvestment: dismantling the cycles of reinvestment and renewal that keeps business and industry moving forward. that hollowing out of enterprise went right along with creating the oligarchy of the super-rich — it was the same process.
I had a conversation with a lady on the train yesterday — a French-Canadian business executive based in New York and she was lecturing me about how great Mark Carney was and how terrible Trump is. I, of course, could only agree that Trump is terrible. But, I raised an eyebrow about Carney, the Goldman-Sachs alum who parachuted in to save the Liberals — a Mario Draghi of the North. Carney was so well-qualified, so capable, knowledgeable . . . blah.
I said, yeah, but the U.S. had Barack Obama, who was greatly admired. And, yes, she said — Obama was great.
I said that I thought that Obama was evil and the U.S. would never recover from the consequences of his policies and I began a litany that would be familiar to readers of Ian’s blog: immunity for banksters, persecution of surveillance state whistleblowers, fracking to make the U.S. a major oil producer. I didn’t get very far in my long list before I was shouted down and she did not want to speak with me.
My point is that this is the mentality of a whole class of globalist apparatchiks — middle-level business executives and professionals, who simply no longer register history or consequences when it comes to the policies behind politics.
This is why it is Trump, in his semi-deranged way, who has been left to confront reality. Rare earths are simply a stark instance of the crisis of competence that has been building in the U.S. and the West for more than 25 years.
NR
This is just one of countless examples of how dependent the United States (and really, the entire world) is on China, and why this whole trade war with China is idiotic. The simple fact is that if China simply stopped all trade with the U.S., that would be the end of 90% of U.S. manufacturing for a decade. You’d be very hard pressed to find anything “made in the U.S.A.” that doesn’t use Chinese parts somewhere in its manufacturing process.
I don’t think most of our nation’s elite, including Trump, understand that fact.
GrimJim
The rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful, and the mid-level apparatchiks whose livelihoods depend on that are, of course, going to cheer on the policies that do this. Good, evil, right, wrong, sustainable or not, they will cheer on with every fiber of their being, because that is how they remain a mid-level apparatchik and do not fall into the “useless eaters” category.
Regarding rare earth minerals, you can find them just about anywhere, but to effectively mine them in an affordable manner will take the development of an entirely new industrial system, which requires technical know-how and massive industrial capital investment. The US does not have the former anymore, and the oligarchs are unwilling to do the latter, so it just won’t happen. The environmental impact won’t even come into it, as even the cost of strip mining and throwing the rubble into the nearest river West Virginia style will be prohibitive.
Every stupid thing Trump does with and to China brings us one step closer to a war that the US is not ready or capable of winning. And nuking China into submission is not a “win” by any definition, though that is what they will end of trying to do, as it will be the only thing left in their quiver when the battles are all otherwise done…
Mark Level
A little addendum to my comment above– listened to a bit of Larry Johnson and also John Mearsheimer before errands today, & both were hedging their bets as to whether Trump would bumble into a war with Iran, could go either way in their eyes. Johnson dropped a bombshell though regarding the unreleased files, stating that a source he couldn’t name had told him the JFK files will NEVER be released as they directly implicate Israel. The Izzys don’t have much support left during the mass starvation act (they’ve lost Piers Morgan, for god’s sake!) and maybe Kennedy was so long ago that modern ‘Muricans wouldn’t care (I concur with Gore Vidal’s opinion that JFK wasn’t much different than his peers). Anyway that is a far more consequential withheld file than the Epstein files in some respects, since those came up yesterday during the epic Elon-Donald Girl Fight.
And having referenced Kamala, I want to briefly restate I don’t think Musk can take the “credit” alone for Trump winning. She was a horrible, cackling sociopathic loon with only negative accomplishments and no charisma, and in the end something (even something mostly bad) will always beat nothing as regards the voting sheeple. Can any of us imagine a timeline on which Kamala became president? I certainly can’t, you’d have to be using the amount of ketamine (or a similar drug) that Elon does to imagine that outcome. In the past the plutocrats could put an utter non-entity like Warrren Harding in there, but with modern media people need to have magnetism. Kamala had only anti-magnetism.
Any political future she has is unimaginable. With the likes of Karine Jean-Pierre fleeing the Dimmies’ sinking ship, what is the point? Funny that Elon would think a 3rd party could be viable. But his instinct that the 2 major parties are dying seems pretty correct. They are the heart and lungs of the Empire, so it does make sense, however.
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One could argue and should argue that if environmental remediation costs associated with the mining and refining of rare earths is factored into the price, rare earths would remain rare in manufacturing. Instead, all the smart people decided to pretend the environmental costs don’t exist and proceeded to make rare earths increasingly ubiquitous in manufacturing. Here we are.
China should tell Trump if he wants a deal, he must pay the historical, present and future environmental costs. Just like he told Ukraine they need to pay the West back for all the military aid. I wonder how Trump would respond to such a demand?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic-aftermath-of-rare-earth-mining
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The dirty little secret that isn’t so secret is green is not so green unless you mean green backs.
One of the comments to the video ignores the environmental impact and instead points the finger back at Big Oil and claims that environmental degradation from oil lasts forever whereas with rare earths it’s one time because rare earths are recycled. Too funny. Rare earths could be recycled but my guess is they largely are not being recycled and will never be recycled to any extent or degree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLFYChw5c0Y
Purple Library Guy
It’s funny. The US spends a ton of money and organizational energy doing international stuff for “national security”. The CIA along with USAID and the NED and the International Republican Institute and even some help from the freakin’ AFLCIO mess around overthrowing governments, blackmailing politicians and so on. The State Department team up with the military to put bases all over the damn place.
And yet, in a country that sees the economy as king, not only was nobody willing to put any thought into making sure that economy and its supply chains were not unduly dependent on the economies and actions of potential opponents, but any time someone else DID put thought into that, the reaction was “La la la, we’re not LISTENING!”
All because the likes of Lockheed Martin saw next quarter’s line go up faster if they outsourced.
@Dagnarus: You have a point to some extent, but the idea holds. I’d modify Mr. Welsh’s “no one important can get rich off it” to “no one important can get rich ENOUGH off it.” One feature of the modern financialized economy is that a ton of stuff that would be useful to do, and WOULD MAKE MONEY, doesn’t get done because the return isn’t high enough. If the investors can make 2% building the economy, but 5% stripping it by investing in private equity firms that cannibalize, or in firms that are mortgaging their own future borrowing money to do share buybacks, or in flat out fraud like crypto and other pure speculative plays, then the investment goes to stripping the economy rather than building it. Building up rare earth mines and refining would make some money slowly rather than lots of money right now, so the Western economy wasn’t doing it.
One key feature of the Chinese economy, I suppose, is that the people in charge of it see the economy as a means to an end that needs to be managed if it’s going to create that end. So they’re not shy about arranging things so that money and returns go to actual production of valuable things rather than to destructive speculation and looting. If the Communist Party of China saw some guy in China doing what private equity routinely does in the US, they’d find a way to outlaw it and put him in jail to make sure nobody else got any ideas.
Feral Finster
I am hardly a geologist, the only digging i do is when I bury turds, but I understand that “rare earths” are not actually all that rare.
Rather, the problem lies in processing, and, of course, such facilities cannot be built and switched on or off to synch with Trump’s whims.
different clue
Larry Johnson says lots of things. I remember when he said that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to run for US President. He said it on his No Quarter blog before Trump ever said it and he said it several times that I remember.
Dagnarus
@Purple Library Guy according to statista peak chinese exports of rare earths was about 1 billion usd in 2022. The USG currently spend 7000 billion usd per year. Elon Musk got enough money out of gov subsidies to become a billionaire, are you telling me that it is/was impossible for USG to create a subsidy system such that the US had at least enough rare earth to supply there defense industry and provide insiders with 10% (why not 20%) ROI? I suspect that, back in the days before the US went senile it would have set that up.
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China has as of late been farming out its rare earths mining and refining to countries like Malaysia where the regulatory environment is entirely non-existent. The result is, you guessed it, massive environmental degradation.
So, sure, China may not be engaging in destructive speculation similar to financiers in the West, but it is most certainly engaging in destruction and looting as the following article reveals.
These environmental costs exist regardless of whether or not the current system recognize them and/or accounts for them. If the price tag associated with this environmental degradation is included in the total cost of mining and refining rare earths, the ROI would be substantially less than zero and this a no go.
https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/transition-minerals/fuelling-the-future-poisoning-the-present-myanmars-rare-earth-boom/
I have a question. What role if any did China play in the 2021 militry coup?
miss jennings
“Since those [technology] companies have benefited from using our rare earth resources, they should bear a part of the responsibility and join the process of cleaning up the environment … We have made huge sacrifices to extract the resources they need.”
the cost born by the locals has been high
Oh, so there are problems in China.
And this is solely the fault of ‘western’ multinationals? They put a gun to China’s head?
Did the vaunted Chinese Communist Party not know at the time that they were hurting/sacrificing their own poor and ‘common’ people? They are just waking up to this fact now?
China’s ‘lifting’ everyone out of poverty!!!!!!!!!! We heard this ad nauseum for years until quite recently. Maybe it’ll stop now. It would be nice
Poor, poor China. Huge sacrifices (for their own slightly-less-rich-(maybe)-than-western-elites at the expense of their own rural poor and downtrodden.
China’s own enclosure. But don’t say it too loudly around here.
Oh yeah: Good article over at NC the other day about all the business China does with the Jewish Supremacist genociders.
It looks like China is playing the US card of ‘balancing’ their support for ‘Israel’ and its enemies such as Iran but keeping ‘Israel’ slightly in the lead. Same game, different team.
I wonder how much blackmail and the like exists to this day inside China as a result of China being ‘communized’ all those years ago:
“Until I saw the documentary “The Revolutionary” at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, I mistakenly thought that China during the revolutionary period was one country that had not felt the Jewish embrace. In fact, 85 to 90% of the foreigners helping the Chinese at the time of the Communist takeover were Jewish. This included the daughter of the founder of the brokerage firm Goldman Sachs, who left the comfort of her Park Avenue home to assist the Chinese.
“The Revolutionary” tells the story of Southern-born Sidney Rittenberg, the only American that has ever been admitted to the Chinese Communist Party. The Mandarin-speaking Rittenberg, who was initially sent to China by the U.S. Army at the time of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, became an influential advisor to Mao Zedong and to the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, Zhou Enlai. His pivotal role at the Broadcast Authority, explaining the Communist Chinese point of view to America, earned him a higher salary than Chairman Mao.”
https://forward.com/schmooze/159051/a-jew-in-maos-china/
Caution: The following piece was written by a Jewish man masquerading as a part of ‘the resistance while at the same time no doubt collecting information on followers and fomenting the necessary anti-Jewish sentiment that is talked about by Jewish Supremacists as being vital to their sick project for the world.
Talk about ‘killing a few birds’ with a single stone!
https://mouqawamahmusic.net/red-china-is-jew-china-the-disturbing-origins-of-chinese-communism-and-the-deepening-chinese-israeli-ties-of-today/
Mark Level
Hey Diff Clue– for the record I was not aware of Larry C. Johnson as a commentator c. 2008 or earlier— I may have known about his colleague Ray McGovern, don’t think I even knew about Col. Wilkerson or many other critics of failed American militarism from the Left at that time.
I don’t want to call you a liar without proof (& I won’t) but I went on his Substack (after Goggling “Larry C. Johnson says Obama born in Kenya” and getting nothing) and it was time-consuming to get as far back to just post-Oct. 7 2023, I do not have the time to research back well over 16 years to see if Johnson made an ignorant comment as you claim. If you actually have evidence please share it.
Whatever Johnson’s past political views he is clearly, now, a very strong ally of the Left and critic of US Empire. His entire body of work demonstrates that. His sense of humor may sometimes be rather earthy and un-p.c., as one might expect in someone of his age (an older Boomer) but I have no problem with that either.
If you prove that he said something ignorant and even racist 17 years ago, it is regrettable (notice I don’t say “I’m sorry”) but I am not going to shun or ostracize him as a source, since he is very trustworthy and informed, on the whole.
Earlier in the thread I shared my own ignorance in 2008 when I stupidly voted for Obama. I could add to that (& have) that early in her grifting career I thought AOC was actually “progressive” and not an Op, as I now know her to be. We’ve all been stupid or mistaken sometime.
You have at least twice on this blog written screeds saying you want “Leopards” to “eat the faces off of” people who have minor political differences with you– myself clearly included. I followed Kamala’s career from the beginning when I lived in Oakland, CA, I did a long post on her record which was always incredibly right-wing and mercenary and never in the least “Left” or “Progressive” (if the latter term means anything– and yes she did say in the 2020 campaign that she was for M4A, and retracted that “crazy” idea in under 24 hours when her aides or whomever explained to her what M4A actually was.)
Let’s suppose you are correct– based on my own moral compass, if I put that ignorant and racist claim you attribute to Johnson from 17 years ago or more next to, say Kamala’s promise (before Trump said the exact same thing) that under her reign, in the middle of a genocide, that America “will have the most lethal military ever in human history”, or her statement that she would have done NOTHING different than Joe Biden did to help Netanyahu’s genocide, and if I throw in your 2 posts about Leopards eating faces, and decide which is the most repellent– Well, it isn’t Johnson’s, not by a long shot. (For God’s sake, Matt Miller just came out and said openly he knows that Israel committed War crimes, and that as a Spokesman for the admin his job required him lying, he was “just following orders”.)
Prove your case and I’ll acknowledge (as I already have) that it’s a stain on Johnson. But it won’t make me stop respecting or listening to him at this moment in history. I’m in my mid-60s and I have yet to meet any person that is perfect. Nor do I frankly expect to do so before I die.
“The little dog barks, and the caravan moves on”, as the Arabic saying goes.
KT Chong
Ducks and Rare Earths: China’s Byproduct Economy
In the West, ducks might be a special-occasion dish, perhaps featured in a fancy French restaurant. In China, however, ducks are a cornerstone of cuisine, culture, and commerce. From street food to global trade, China’s duck industry offers a surprising lens for understanding its dominance in another critical area: rare earths.
Ducks Are a Big Deal in China
In China, duck is as ubiquitous as chicken or beef in the United States. It appears in every region and form—roasted, stewed, smoked, dried, or even vacuum-sealed as a gas station snack. Peking Duck, with its crispy golden skin, is the most famous, but it’s just the start. Duck blood soup, tongues, gizzards, and spicy duck necks (a popular snack akin to beef jerky) showcase the culinary range, leaving no part of the bird unused.
Duck eggs are equally versatile. Century eggs—fermented, black-green, jelly-like delicacies—are savored with congee or as appetizers. Salted duck eggs, with their rich, briny yolks, star in mooncakes, rice dishes, or standalone snacks. China’s appetite for duck is vast, and it fuels a thriving byproduct economy.
The Duck Down Economy
China’s massive duck consumption creates a robust byproduct industry, most notably duck down—the soft feathers used in jackets, bedding, and sleeping bags. China dominates the global duck down market, not because it breeds special ducks, but because its domestic demand for duck meat is enormous. Feathers, like bones or fat, are a cost-effective byproduct. Raising ducks solely for their feathers would be as impractical as raising cows just for leather and discarding the meat. The duck meat market makes the feather industry viable.
Rare Earths: The Duck Feathers of Industry
Rare earths—17 chemical elements critical for magnets, batteries, and high-tech electronics—are the duck feathers of the industrial world. They are rarely mined on their own because they occur in low concentrations. Instead, they’re extracted as byproducts during the mining of primary metals like iron, aluminum, or phosphates. China’s dominance in rare earths stems from its vast industrial ecosystem, which includes mining, refining, and manufacturing for steel, aluminum, batteries, and electronics. This integrated system allows China to extract rare earths efficiently as a byproduct of industries it already leads.
America’s Challenge: No Duck, No Feathers
The United States aims to secure its own rare earth supply, but it faces a hurdle: it lacks the industrial “duck” to produce the “feathers.” Decades of offshoring have diminished America’s steel, aluminum, and manufacturing sectors, reducing the domestic demand and infrastructure needed for cost-effective rare earth extraction. While the U.S. does mine rare earths at sites like Mountain Pass, California, doing so without a robust industrial base is costly and inefficient—like raising ducks solely for their feathers.
The Big Picture: Ecosystems Matter
China’s duck industry supports not just Peking Duck but also century eggs, snacks, and down jackets. Similarly, its industrial ecosystem enables rare earth production as a natural byproduct of manufacturing essentials like steel and electronics. To achieve self-sufficiency in rare earths, the U.S. must rebuild its industrial foundation—from mining and refining to manufacturing and tech assembly. Without this ecosystem, rare earth production remains expensive and unsustainable.
Conclusion: Feathers Need Ducks
Whether it’s down jackets or electric vehicle motors, byproducts like duck feathers or rare earths depend on a robust primary market. China’s success in both illustrates the power of integrated systems. For the U.S. to compete, it must revive its industrial roots, creating a supply chain where rare earths flow naturally. The next time you use a smartphone or wear a parka, consider the ducks—and the ecosystems—making it all possible.
Notes: I wrote the original essay, and then I let ChatGPT and Grok 3 to rewrite it for me.
EGrise
Here’s a Twitter thread via NC that claims our problem with magnets is because it’s a lost industrial art in the West:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1930711616494215302.html
“This is what strategic capture looks like. One country kept the entire value chain. The rest outsourced and forgot. It was never a trade. It was a surrender.”
shagggz
miss jennings, it doesn’t mean that China is engaged in the “same game, different team” just because it has win-win exchanges even with entities as unsavory and ideologically antipodal as Isnotreal. This is the opposite of the win-lose game of hegemonism the Collective West plays. And just because China still has poors doesn’t mean we should dismiss its historic accomplishment of having lifted as many out of poverty as it has, and continues to.
Mark Level, I admire how constructively you’ve engaged with different clue’s kneejerk dismissal of Johnson’s very positive recent contributions on the allegation of some historically distant indiscretion. You demonstrate how the toxic pull of cancel culture can only be overcome with openness and humility. I hope different clue can rise to the occasion.
Let’s not be crabs in the bucket, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, guys.
Purple Library Guy
On the question of rare earths–sure, mining rare earths seems to be quite environmentally destructive. Mining everything is quite environmentally destructive. And in general it would be good for money to be spent on research into how to make it less so, and for regulations to be enforced to make sure it was done the best way. And it would be good to change our economic system to not be capitalism but instead something that does not require constant growth.
But just to be clear, mining FUELS is also quite environmentally destructive. But the big difference is, fuels you BURN and then you have to mine some more so you can burn that, over and over and over. So if I make two things, 1. A coal plant for generating electricity, and 2. A solar panel array for generating electricity, there will be environmental destruction involved in building either thing. But the solar panel array will last for decades, while the coal plant will burn a bunch of coal EVERY DAY. You will be mining a thousand times as much stuff to run the coal plant for those decades. And that’s not even hyperbole, we’re talking literally a thousand times, in the old fashioned actual meaning of the word “literally”.
So I find it hard to take seriously people who get upset about mining rare earths, to the extent that they talk like it’s JUST THE SAME as using fossil fuels. That’s a fossil fuel company talking point meant to deceive the gullible. I also can never get a straight answer from them about what they want. Because I can see three available courses of action:
1. Continue to use fossil fuels. Mine a thousand times as much stuff (coal, oil, weird gases), and also cause global warming. Global warming causes civilization to fall, mass deaths, and incredible disruption of the ecosphere far worsening the destruction we’re already doing.
2. Switch to using electricity for everything and get that electricity from renewable sources. Mine 1/1000th as much stuff and do not cause global warming. But, all else being equal, continue ruining the planet in other ways.
3. Stop mining anything. Technology collapses. 90% of the population dies and the rest of us get to be peasants, and probably not the enlightened-independent-commune kind but more the ruled-by-a-Mad-Max-crazy-dictator kind. Whoever is left starts mining again.
Out of the three, to me option number 2 is clearly the least bad. There are a lot of reasons our society requires transformation, but “we’re mining rare earths” is not one of them. If we could achieve a green democratic socialist world order that was doing careful de-growth down to a size of economy and population that did not overshoot the earth’s carrying capacity, that world order would STILL MINE RARE EARTHS because that is actually the LOWEST-IMPACT known way to maintain a technological society.
Really, what does Like & Subscribe actually want? What is your alternative?
miss jennings
it doesn’t mean that China is engaged in the “same game, different team” just because it has win-win exchanges even with entities as unsavory and ideologically antipodal as Isnotreal.
It’s not apples to apples but it ain’t apples to oranges either.
shagzz, your statement reminds me of the recently mentioned Henry Ford.
Hmm, let’s try this:
‘It doesn’t mean the US is unsavory just because it has win-win exchanges even with entitites as unsavory and ideologically antipodal as Germany under the Nazis.’
Let’s go further:
It doesn’t mean that that part of the US establishment – a huge swath ranging from Henry Ford and other industrialists and ideologically/financially aligned pols on the right to the left side of the US industrial-political nexus including antiwar unionists and workers and their aligned pols, and also including ideologically-religiously motivated antiwar citizens such as quakers and pacifists etc etc etc [not to mention non-citizens such as indigneous groups]- it doesn’t mean that all these human beings should be seen as unsavory , ‘antisemitic’ or whatever other degrading, demeaning term one wants to use simply because they didn’t think the US should enter WWII to ‘save the Jews’
This is the opposite of the win-lose game of hegemonism the Collective West plays.
The ‘Collective West’ [tm] at minimum includes ‘Israel’ as a seemingly vital partner.
If one believes it is largely a ‘tail wagging the dog’ scenario then the US-led NATO enerprise is also largely ‘Israel’ – which includes not just the entity occupying Palestine but also all its professional operatives as well as regular old sayanim around the world. We can use James Petras’ ‘Zionist Power Configuration’ here for lack of a better term, or simply because people are afraid to use the word Jewish or Jewish Supremacist (even though there is to this day no issue talking about an underlying innate German mindset or something similar that brought about and then allowed the Nazi project to flourish – just read many of the comments at NC for starters).
This would mean that ‘Israel’ is, more than any other entity, wagging the entire ‘Collective West.’
For its part, ‘Israel’ brags about this openly. It’s right in front of you.
Either way – whether it’s a ‘tail-wag’ or not – ‘Israel’ is firmly entrenched within the ‘Collective West’ and I can’t imagine anyone attempting to dispute this.
So, returning to your words: ‘it doesn’t mean that China is engaged in the “same game, different team” just because it has win-win exchanges even with entities as unsavory and ideologically antipodal as Isnotreal.’
China has strong economic, industrial and political ties with an ‘entity’ that is committing a genocide. Or, to use your (intentionally?) tame words: an ‘unsavory and ideologically antipodal’ entity.
No shaggz. This is a megalomaniacal collective entity. Period, end of story. And since you had no problem recently giving me advice I’ll simply say you need to come to terms with this. Your pathetically weak description of this monstrous holocaust is insulting. It is also downright stupid given the knowledge we have.
This genocidal entity calls itself ‘The Jewish State of Israel’ and is populated by a majority of people calling themselves Jews and the overwhelming majority of them (9 out of ten) support the genocide while 8 out of 10 diaspora Jews support the genocide.
‘unsavory and ideologically antipodal’
https://x.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1845740101705367924
https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1866087123629023507
https://x.com/hippyygoat/status/1930662489458372855
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/1/20/aerial-photos-show-scale-of-israeli-destruction-in-gaza
https://www.mintpressnews.com/gaza-hospitals-nurse-testimony-shooting-boys-genocide/289919/
Shooting penis’ and raping hostages and watching from a hillside as the babies burn and celebrating and raping and raping and raping and you’ll have to amputate without anesthesia from the last hospital we left standing ha ha no wait here’s some flour for you BOMB and let’s rape the corpses!!! and let’s bomb Beirut and the West Bank and rape them too!!! BOMBS sent by Jews wearing uniforms with Jewish religious symbols and remember the SAMSON OPTION and remember we’ve got recordings cause that’s how we roll and bomb and rape and bomb and rape and bomb bomb bomb etc etc etc
Pure unadulterated annhilation that is openly celebrated in real time.
All in the name of and with the support of the majority of Jews the world over.
Poor Jews.
1) I torture UN workers
2) I bomb embassies
3) I refuse to declare my official borders as I want more and more of other countries’ (plural) land
4) I openly interfere in the affairs of other countries.
5) All criticism by any member of the World Community just reinforces my sense of privileged Victimhood
6) I never tell a lie as I have no concept. I only know what serves me.
7) I invented the Samson Option and will take the rest of you with me.
8) I commit collective punishment
9) I kidnap thousands, including children, with no judicial oversight
10) I will commit torture if I see fit and even if I don’t
11) I oppress occupied inhabitants and enjoy doing so
12) I commit rape with impunity against mine enemies
13) I steal land with impunity
14) I murder with impunity
15) I commit premeditated Genocide
16) I look forward to war and prod my neighbors for more
17) I need money, send a check
18) I commit false flags and if friends or even my own people are sacrificed so be it.
19) I implement the Hannibal Doctrine
20) Treachery and betrayal of my own people are a means to an end
21) I support and conduct terrorism.
22) I openly interfere in the affairs of other countries, seeking support for all of the above
23) I know that I can count on other amoral nations to support my wars, oppression and theft.
24) I know that the World Community will not stop me as I commit future Genocides
25) I target aid trucks and kill their workers;
26) I especially target hospitals;
27) I kill civilians prisoners, women and children and old people.
28) I use my lobbyists to attack, intimidate and silence freedom of speech
29) I torture and kill UN workers and their dependents
30) I protected Zionist perpetrators of the Holocaust and lie about their role.
31) I cannibalize living Palestinian captives for their internal organs
32) I use human shields
33) I kill and kill and kill as many journalists as I can find
34) I take delight in being a hyper-sadist and proudly boast of it; “1 shot 2 kills”
35) I use starvation as both a tactic and for my strategic goal of Genocide.
36) Most of my people support mass murder, racism and theft, and thus make known the true nature and meaning of Israel.
Those that would make it illegal to protest against Genocide support the Psychopathic Genocidal Entity that has given voice to the urge to kill us all (Samson Option). When madness speaks people had darn well take notice.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/06/palestine-open-thread-2025-124.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef02e860ebe312200b#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef02e860ebe312200b
I’ll finish with Caitlin Johnstone’s recent article. Caitlin isn’t afraid to call this collective insanity what it is but she then steps into the good old ‘western world’ trap – intentionally or not I do not know as I don’t know Caitlin but I can glean some things based on her writing. Let’s go immediately to her final paragraph:
‘In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from uncomfortable truths. And one of our favorite hiding places for uncomfortable truths at this point in history is the modern state of Israel, and the western empire’s support for it.’
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/this-is-israel
Hmmm.
China, Israel announce innovative comprehensive partnership:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-03/21/c_136146441.htm
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-03/21/136146441_14901377796881n.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GZ1i1y0WQAAL175?format=jpg&name=medium
Um, can someone let Caitlin know that China wholeheartedly supports – to use her own words – the “modern state” of ‘Israel.’
Last time I checked China wasn’t in the west. But then it all depends on where you’re situated.
So Caitlin supports ‘Israel’ though perhaps she’d want to clarify at what borders exactly?
And the ‘state of Israel’ is a Jewish-dominated society no matter where it ends up or retreats to. This is its primary raison d’etre.
It has always been known that if there were to be one democratic state in all of historic Palestine that that state would not only not be a Jewish majority but that it would lose its core Jewish identity which is, again, largely the raison d’etre of the entire enterprise.
This means that Caitlin et al support an exclusive ethno-religious supremacist state.
I thought Caitlin was a leftist?
Perhaps she just plays one on TV, err, the internet.
‘In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from uncomfortable truths.’
Indeed.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GZ1i1y0WQAAL175?format=jpg&name=medium
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-03/21/136146441_14901377796881n.jpg
miss jennings
And just because China still has poors doesn’t mean we should dismiss its historic accomplishment of having lifted as many out of poverty as it has, and continues to.
‘still has poors’
‘historic accomplishment’
The original statement made by a Chinese bureaucrat was alluding to the harm done to the people and their land because of the mining. It is not that they are ‘still poors.’ That seems to be your focus.
These were probably sustenance farmers and other largely self-supporting groups who didn’t live modern exquisite crammed and ultimately debt-burdened urban lives and didn’t care to. There are ‘cancer valleys’ and all manner of devastation because of these careless inhumane Chinese state policies which took over the land and gave it to both state and private mining interests. Many of the formerly self-supporting ‘poors’ were forced to work in the mines.
This isn’t western propaganda. This is a fact.
Incidentally, the particular statement by Xu Cheng of the Longnan Rare Earths Bureau was given to the Yale publication back in 2019 and has been repeated verbatim a number of times by various outlets since then without the qualifier that it was made back in 2019.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic-aftermath-of-rare-earth-mining
https://www.realclimaterecords.com.au/?p=5223
https://www.google.com/search?q=Xu+Cheng+Longnan+Rare+Earths+Bureau&uact=5&oq=Xu+Cheng+Longnan+Rare+Earths+Bureau
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Xu+Cheng+Longnan+Rare+Earths+Bureau&t=lm&ia=web
Like & Subscribe
What I want is irrelevant. What was, is and will be is the discussion. I’m just purveying information. I am a concerned messenger and no, I am not peddling the fossil fuels industry’s clap trap. In fact, the fossil fuels industry supports this green push to include electric vehicles because so-called renewables like solar and wind cannot meet persistent, constant energy demands without the aid of fossil fuels, namely natural gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbxpieEQ7bc
https://steadystate.org/planet-of-the-humans-puts-sacred-cows-out-to-pasture/
I’ve stated already what is needed, and it was needed yesterday in fact, is an economy based on contraction ultimately plateauing at a steady state. This will never happen. For it to be successful, it would require the most brilliant minds and all countries would have to behave as one in this regard. All things considered, that’s impossible. You simply cannot solve this equation without contraction to an ultimate steady state.
No one is interested in contraction but ultimately we’ll get it one way or another and that another is nature providing the contraction. Remember, at current rates of pre-AI growth, we cook ourselves in 400 years. That’s per the laws of physics. With the exponential rise of AI and its tremendous energy demands and the energy demands of the productivity for productivity’ sake it will provide, that 400 years becomes 20 at most.
There are so many ways AI can put a fork in humanity and this is but one of them and it’s the most convincing.
The controls have been set. Sun, here we come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RbXIMZmVv8
Purple Library Guy
Like & Subscribe: “so-called renewables like solar and wind cannot meet persistent, constant energy demands without the aid of fossil fuels, namely natural gas.”
What?! That’s bullshit. Where did you get . . .
“Planet of the Humans”
Ohhh. No. I watched Planet of the Humans. It is an incredibly stupid movie. I can’t even say its heart is in the right place because to make its point it has to do some ridiculous cherry-picking and claim that’s how everything works, so the filmmakers HAD to be aware that they were essentially falsifying. Like really, some rock band some time in the past wasn’t able to successfully use some portable solar panels to power its gig, therefore all the solar power in the grid doesn’t exist or something. WhatEVer.
Planet of the Humans makes one major good point: Burning wood as a “renewable” source of power is an absolutely horrible idea, and there is too damn much of it going on and being greenwashed. And it makes one strong emotional appeal to a point I agree with: We shouldn’t be destroying orangutan habitat (specifically in this case, by cutting down trees for wood chips for the aforementioned burning, although a lot of that habitat destruction is actually about palm oil plantations). But its stuff about solar and wind is just downright bizarre and shouldn’t even be part of the conversation.
different clue
@Mark Level,
Yes, I can understand the limits on time and patience. I too would not have the time to sacrifice to go all the way back to the Clinton v. Obama primary time to find those referrences by Larry Johnson in his No Quarter blog which would not be on his substack anyway. So I found something much more recent, therefor more easily findable, an article by Larry Johnson on Colonel Lang’s blog Sic Semper Tyrannis ( now renamed Turcopolier). It is titled: ” Yes, George Floyd Killed Himself by Larry C Johnson “. Here is the link.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/08/looks-like-george-floyd-not-derek-chauvin-killed-george-floyd-by-larry-c-johnson.html
So I do not automatically accept anything Johnson has to say about anything just because it would make me feel good or validated. You are free to do otherwise.
As to the rest of it, I notice that you specialize in writing very nasty very not-nice comments in which you often delight in lying about people and what they said and covering your lying by pre-emptively accusing your target of lying. The last time you did that, I answered you in your own tone and at your own level and my comment was not printed because our host felt the hostility level was getting too high. So he stepped in as circuit breaker to break the circuit. When he said that there was a comment he regretted having let through, I suspect it to have been yours. ( If any other readers overtly ask for me to find and recopy-paste that comment as evidence of my suspicion in that regard, I would be happy to honor any serious request to do so).
So I merely invited the readership to read back over all my comments and your replies to decide for themselves who was lying. Its something our fellow readers can always do if they feel it is worth the time. ( I notice that you did not quite overtly accuse me of lying this time. This time you used the clever Nixonian method of the non-accusation accusation. Yes . . . I saw what you did there.)
Since I have learned that when I adopt the approach of ” when you go low, I stoop to the challenge” gets me not-published, I am keeping my reply within the bounds of courtesy and politeness. Since I don’t want to risk getting not published by adopting your level of personal nastiness, I will only say in dispassionate general that I wish to see the leopards eat every face which deserves to be eaten. And I again invite our fellow readers to read all of my comments going back years and read your comments to me and see who is lying about whom. I make no specific accusations. I only invite the readers to decide for themselves.
And about leopards eating faces, here is a video on that subject:
It is titled : ” The Ultimate “Leopards Ate My Face” Rendition! ”
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QGy9D_c1pY
eg
Everything in the West is “because markets” — right up until it isn’t … 🙄