national climate insecurity
January 2023 Briefing: The fatal flaw in green energy security policy
Rare earth minerals mine at Baotou, China
In mid-2021, the Director of National Intelligence issued a National Intelligence Estimate stating that climate change represents a clear and present danger.
President Biden used the NIE to draft his official National Security Strategy in October ‘22. It called fossil-fuel dependence and climate change the second most significant security threat after Sino-Russo imperialism. The President cites green energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act as a national security bulwark more than ten times in the twenty-nine-page document.
But there’s a fatal flaw in the administration’s green security logic. A rapid conversion to green tech will make us even more dependent on other fossilized remnants in the soil: rare earth metals. And just about all of them come from China.
Silicon, magnets, and batteries form the building blocks of the conversion of electrical to mechanical energy and vice versa. They’re in wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, laptops, servers, and smartphones. Improving battery performance, miniaturizing magnets, and supercharging conductivity depend on an ever-expanding pool of mined rare earth metals. Your iPhone contains seven of them. Extra credit if you’ve ever even heard of your phone’s yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, or dysprosium.
We’ve become flat-out addicted to metals like these. The continued proliferation of digital devices and a new green energy model will require doubling rare metal production approximately every fifteen years. The next three decades alone will require mining more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the previous 70,000 years. Should we have sustainability concerns?
Yes—but not because these minerals are hard to find. The term “rare earth” is something of a misnomer as the metals are geologically abundant in the earth’s crust. Refining them to usable purities is the rare part, the dirty underbelly of clean tech that no one wants to talk about. Akin to enriching uranium, it’s a toxic, polluting regimen that’s both carbon and water intensive. The process spews tons of waste, often with high levels of radioactivity. For these reasons, we don’t like doing it in the US.
We’ve outsourced clean tech’s dirty business to China, which does 85% of global rare earth refining. The largest site is in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, operated by China’s state-owned mining concern Baogang. By offering refined rare earths at cut-rate prices, Beijing has cornered the global market.
But in the name of ecology, we’ve also outsourced an environmental and human rights disaster. Just ask the citizens of Baotou. It was once a pleasant place with grassy hills, a lake, and a fishing village. Then, as Baogang dumped ever more acid into the ground to help extract rare earth metals, the runoff turned the lake white, sometimes red. The ethnic Mongolians who lived in the fishing village developed unusually high rates of cancer.
By 2015, the villagers had had enough. Led by Chinese human rights lawyer Qin Yongpei, they began to protest. “Mountains of gold and silver are not better than mountains of blue and green,” went the chants before riot police. The protests spurred Beijing into action. They arrested Qin Yongpei on a subversion charge, razed the town locals called the “cancer village,” and barricaded access to the poisoned lake.
Eight years later, the mining at Baotou goes on and Qin Yongpei is still behind bars. The Chinese government is building a Ghengis Khan theme park nearby to distract the populace—anything to keep Beijing’s pipeline of rare metals flowing to the hungry west.
Qin Yongpei
Does East Asia have a resource advantage when it comes to rare earths? Was North America dealt a weak geological hand?
No. In the 1980s, most rare earth metals came from the US. Believe it or not, the world’s largest rare earth mine is Mountain Pass, only 54 miles south of Las Vegas. Though it’s the only rare earth mine in the western hemisphere, it went bankrupt in 2016 because the environmental clean-up costs wouldn’t pencil out. A new firm is operating it today with a better business model: it ships its rare metals to China for processing.
But China’s rare earth processing dominance is more than just a narrative-defying ecological and human rights disaster. By moving up the value chain to rare earth magnet production, it’s also become a major vulnerability for the US military.
As an example of just how dependent the Defense Department is on Chinese magnets, note that the Lockheed Martin F-35—the new jet standard across all our services—comes equipped with them in its radars. After several congressional reviews, the Pentagon had little choice but to accept this irony since China manufactures 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets.
F-35s
There is, at least, a single bullet point in the National Security Strategy about the rare earth metals Achilles Heel. And it should be noted that congress has appropriated $253M for a stockpile of rare earths maintained by the US Defense Logistics Agency. This investment will bring the total stockpile value to approximately $1B. While this is 98% less than the $42B stockpile (today’s dollars) held by the DOD at the height of the last cold war, it’s a start.
But that stockpile is for the military. No reserve could sustain us when our entire green-tech economy depends on rare earth metals. As the Chinese Communist Party increases defense spending by 7% year over year and sends fleets of fifth-gen fighters over the Taiwan Strait, Beijing could weaponize its rare earth monopoly as another form of diplomatic bullying.
Far-fetched? “…the Chinese government has blocked exports of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines, and guided missiles,” wrote the New York Times in 2010 when the Japanese detained a Chinese trawler captain who’d illegally fished the Senkaku Islands. Note that this was Beijing’s tactic for an insular sovereignty dispute when we were less dependent on Chinese rare metals. You don’t suppose they would try this when it comes to Taiwan?
History repeats, or rhymes, or—as the case here—smacks you right in the head. In 1939, the Japanese cut the US off from antimony, a rare earth metal used in the manufacture of ammunition. To head off the shortfall, FDR opened an antimony mine in Idaho. We still use antimony to make ammo today. But the FDR mine closed in 1997 and no other domestic source exists. China now sells 85% of the world’s antimony. Fear not though. Russia is the second-largest supplier.
Another President, JFK, famously wrote a 1940 Harvard thesis turned book that advocated unsentimental realism in world affairs. It was titled Why England Slept. Perhaps the refined mineral our national security team needs most right now is smelling salts.
For further reading on our growing rare earth metals dependence, consider reading “The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Tech,” by Guillaume Pitroi.
