Is anyone else concerned why none of our politicians seem to care about going after rare earth metals? They are THE FUTURE!!! They will be used for building EVERYTHING IN THE FUTURE!!! Everything from cell phones to car batteries (which wont contain ANY OIL) ALLLLLLL the way to fusion rocket engines to travel THROUGH SPACE! So WHY isn’t the strongest nation on the planet securing them and allowing China to go after them and surpass us so vastly while we fumble around worrying about oil??? Oh yeah, because of the fucking boomers and their propaganda machine , the corruption, and the worst parts of capitialism like lobby’s and big oil! I sometimes feel like our system is just so broken we are all fucked sometimes…
Rare earths are not actually that rare, they’re just… messy to extract. They require a ton of processing, infrastructure and create a lot of byproducts that cannot just be dumped, the byproducts need to be neutralized and disposed of properly. Very expensive, not very large margins.
Rare earths are important to making certain things, but, oil’s products are key for running things. You can go a few years without replacing a phone, you don’t get oil for a week and your transportation infrastructure ceases running.