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.
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.