Rare earths are a colossal scam. Yes, you heard me—a scam. The outsourcing of their extraction and refinement isn’t born of geological scarcity or technical impossibility. The planet is riddled with them; they can be found and mined in almost any wealthy nation. The real reason we ship this filth overseas is far simpler: the process is vile.
It’s toxic, corrosive, and ruinously destructive—everything our enlightened societies claim to abhor. We could, of course, do it ourselves, but doing it responsibly, without turning the landscape into a chemical graveyard, is catastrophically expensive. So we don’t. Instead, we export the moral and ecological carnage to nations desperate enough to poison their own land and people for a handful of foreign currency.
Wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles are gluttons for these same compounds—voracious consumers in the so-called clean economy. Their value chain depends utterly on the cheap supply of these “rare” materials. Conventional energy sources, by contrast, require far less of this toxic abundance.So we tell ourselves a story about “green energy,” while others wade waist-deep through radioactive sludge to keep the fantasy alive. The current rare-earth extraction regime isn’t sustainable, renewable, or even rational. It is, quite simply, a destroyer of worlds—one strip mine at a time.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/03/rare-earth-minerals-etc-from-china-or-the-usa/