PerspectiveR&D, not Greenland, Can Solve Our Rare Earth Problem

While President Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland lit up social media feeds and left many scratching their heads, people who work on rare earth elements were not surprised. Greenland has rare earth elements, and currently most are mined in China. Meanwhile, the president’s trade war with China could disrupt access to these metals crucial to green energy, defense systems and consumer technology.

Julie Michelle Klinger and Roger Turner write in The Hill that the “rare earth” label implies scarcity or extreme value, but the label is little more than a stubborn artifact of 18th-century naming conventions. The mineral gadolinite, first dug up in 1788 and from which the first rare earth elements were separated, was “rare” because it had never been found before, and “earth” because it could be dissolved in acid.

The antiquated label persists because it fuels scarcity myths, which in turn have proven useful to justify extreme measures to secure these metals — like repealing mining moratoriums in Greenland or granting U.S. citizens property rights to outer space resources.

“Because the rare earth elements are largely produced in China, Americans of all ideological stripes tend to project their anxieties about China onto the rare earths,” Klinger and Turner write. “People use the rare earths to tell stories of American industrial decline, the power of China’s authoritarian central planning or of American vulnerability. Rarely told is the story of what is shared by China and the U.S.— worries about pollution, desires to reap the benefits of natural resources, histories of imposing the health and environmental costs of production on marginalized people distant from the centers of power.”

As with other commodities produced for global consumption in the last 30 years, China’s hinterlands have absorbed a disproportionate share of the pollution generated by rare earth processing. This also means that scientists in China and their international colleagues have built unparalleled expertise in how to remediate polluted areas and ensure that newer facilities do less harm. The problem is that rare earths have been made into a bargaining chip in the ongoing U.S.-China trade dispute, which overshadows our shared interests and hobbles our progress toward lasting solutions.  

Klinger and Turner conclude:

Instead of periodically reviving rare earth scarcity myths to stoke anti-China sentiment or justify outlandish ideas like buying Greenland or pulverizing the moon, we can invest in several areas where people are already working. 

Opening more mines like it’s 1590, buying territories like it’s 1867, or blasting asteroids like we’re in a 1950s sci-fi flick won’t solve the problem, because the problem is not a shortage of unrefined ores. Instead, smart R&D investments will bring our production, consumption and disposal practices into the 21st century. This means reducing waste, increasing recycling and repair, and cleaning up the dirtiest and most dangerous aspects of the supply chain.