the extent to which the US/the west is behind on this stuff can’t be overstated. rare earth extraction/refining is not something that can just have money thrown at it to build capacity. one can make the case that chip technology is an area where the US/western proxies did the cutting edge research and china is catching up. even in this scenario, it’s hard to imagine the US rebuilding high tech capacity, but the knowledge at least does exist in places like taiwan/korea.
rare earth refining is different. the west has benefited from and coasted off of chinese R&D for 2 generations now. for decades, these commodities have been just that, commodities, meaning bulk products that are sold with low margins. the west has been happy to coast because capital would rather make money making huge margin on high tech/financial products and advertising apps. most high tech rare earth applications require very high purity or very specialized rare earth precursor ingredients to go into manufacturing processes. however, rare earth refining is finicky, hard, and all R&D and worker/industrial capacity for it has been in china for decades. to start rebuilding this would require focused effort to generate appropriate material scientists/PhD/researchers that have the fundamental understanding necessary, followed by focused effort and state policy to support the industrial engineering to implement RE extraction at full scale in the west. how many non-chinese people can read chinese language academic publications? it’s a paltry amount, especially as chinese academics in the west are chased out and move back to China.
if the US was run by a functional state that can do industrial policy (read: the CPC), then starting today it would take 20 years to build/rebuild rare earth extraction capacity. as it is, the US is run by a state that can’t do industrial policy and relies on market fundamentalism - that is a 50 year recipe at best.
Good news is that there’s absolutely no path towards enacting a sustained decades long industrial policy under financial capitalism. The US is completely and utterly incapable of doing any meaningful reindustrialization as a result.
I prefer my earths medium rare or medium
we are going towards well done earth real quick
Just the way my mom used to make steak… tough as leather and as consistent as sawdust once you chew it up. I don’t want my earth like this.
how do you usually cook them? sous vide?
just burn a bunch of oil until it heats up.
Sous terre
Mud cakes ftw
It’s worth mentioning that this article is from 2023
I’m guessing nothing much changed substantially in the past two years though.
China controls even more now
104%
The problem is of course the more you throw your weight around against big countries the less weight you have. The US as global hegemon could afford to sanction all kinds of small countries and just extort the world with their power for a long time. But once they extended this to Russia the whole thing began to crack and break because they went too far with too large of a country.
As a short term trade hard-ball tactic this is fine but if they keep it up it will encourage the west to create alternative production capacity. All they really need to do is mine the stuff, then process it in some place like post-war Ukraine that’s totally corrupt and under their thumb with horrible job safety standards and cheap wages and no pesky environmental regulations. Make no mistake, this stuff has alarm bells ringing not just in Washington but in Berlin, in Paris, in London, in the EU because they deeply fear the rise of China and seeing power exercised in just the way their China whisperers always fear-mongered it would be by China is enough to further harden the already conventional wisdom that China cannot be allowed to replace the US or to rise to the level of a great power because it will threaten liberalism, “European values”, and “liberal democracy” because they’ll swing their power around against anyone who stands against them and the west very much intends to create more atrocity propaganda (and is often run by those who uncritically believe it and don’t understand it’s propaganda).
What I’m saying is basically this kind of thing helps the decoupling accelerationists.
Are the capitalists greedy enough and foolish enough with not enough forward planning or class consciousness about what a rising communist state means to prevent the rise of alternative processors or will they marshal and discipline themselves and each other for war? That is the defining question of our age. We know that in the past the US prevented large US corporations like IBM from making in modern terms billions of dollars in profit by disallowing them contracts with the USSR during the first cold war. That was contrary to pure simplistic capitalist interests but in line with more thoughtful capitalist interests of destroying communism for the greater good and longevity of capitalism. The amount of trade between the USSR and US was never anywhere near the levels of trade we see between the US and modern China. Clearly many planners of empire know this is a problem and want to put a stop to it. So it’s really down to which faction of the bourgeoisie wins out and how much discipline they can inflict on the rest of their class.
One more thing, tangentially related but consider that Trump and co know they don’t have the political capital to actually keep tariffs of 100% on China and especially on things like chips and computers and smartphones. How then to coerce decoupling? By playing these uncertainty games. Businesses hate and cannot tolerate uncertainty. Whereas it’s easy to rally a bunch of corporations to go to Republicans and force them to repeal tariffs that have been left in place for months, it’s harder to rally everyone around stopping the constant dance of tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs of x amount, tariffs of shrug who knows. This kind of thing is a nudge to businesses to strongly encourage them to move production out of China, even to India, to any other country that has bent the knee and not retaliated against the US which isn’t a strategic communist rival like China. It’s less forceful but it creates an atmosphere of coercion where they can play the game of mass imports in bursts and holding inventory short term to prevent profit interruption but the looming threat encourages them to begin plans to move out of China. Consider that for a war or isolation of China scenario getting even a third of production out of China and to India would be enough to prevent the economy from totally imploding, it would lead to shortages and price shocks for consumers and a market crash but it would be something that could be tolerated and endured so total decoupling is not necessary in the eyes of these people, just prying a bit out.
Don’t worry, thanks to the tariffs I’m sure billions are ready to be poured into mining them in the USA. Lmao
Is it better or worse that Trump is incompetent?
