The headline refers to this action by DJT:
President Donald Trump will launch a strategic critical minerals stockpile with $12 billion in funding as part of an effort to protect American manufacturers from supply shocks as the Trump administration seeks to cut reliance on Chinese rare earths.
Formally known as Project Vault, the project would take $1.67 billion in private capital and $10 billion as part of a loan from the Export-Import Bank to obtain and store minerals for automakers, tech firms, and other companies that need access to rare earths.
Reports have compared the idea to the country’s emergency oil stockpile. Project Vault would obtain rare earth elements such as gallium and cobalt, which is used in iPhones, batteries, and jet engines.
So… anyone have any ideas why this hasn’t existed since, say, the appearance of the PC and digital phones in the market?
Given that our defense systems — aircraft to tanks to ships — have relied on computer chips since, oh, the 1980s, it astonishes me that no Administration since the 1980s had established this already. Then again: Clinton, Obama, Biden — that’s seventeen twenty years of Presidency that essentially hated the whole concept of a Defense Department because they’re all either overt or quasi-Marxists.
Explicable, but still inexcusable.
“Clinton, Obama, Biden — that’s seventeen years of Presidency”
It’s 20 years: a presidential term is 4 years. Clinton and Obama served 2 terms each and Biden served 1, for a total of 5. 5 * 4 = 20.
Serves me right for not using a calculator.
I think that Kim got it closer than you might expect – did Biden even have most of his mental faculties for that first year?
Back in the 60’s when we were building the SR-71 we discovered we needed a whole bunch of Titanium because it was light weight and highly heat resistant. The only known source at time was in the Soviet Union, but we couldn’t exactly tell them why we needed it so the CIA whet to some questionable practices to get enough. Turns out Titanium is the 9th Most abundant mineral found in lots of places.
Same story with Lithium. When the demand skyrocketed by the electric car industry, people thought the only place we could get it was China. Once people started looking for it and finding less dirty ways to refine it, it’s in lots of places. The Ozzie’s have a bunch and there is a big pile of the stuff under all those pristine forests in Maine. Long before any of that it was uranium, the Germans didn’t have a source, we did but you still needed to find a way to mess with it molecularly to make the isotope that goes bang.
Now it’s Samarium, Rhodium, and Niobium. They are “Rare Earths” because there was little demand for the stuff before this and they are currently difficult and very messy to mine and refine. And some people get all upset when we dismantle a whole Mountain to get to stuff we need as anyone who has ever driven through Leadville Colorado can attest. It would all be fine if the missing Mountain top and spoilage pond wasn’t so visible from the public road.
So, the real reason for the stockpile is to create the demand ( and bypass a whole bunch of enviro weenies. )
The short answer is that “it wasn’t perceived as necessary”. Probably still isn’t going to be all that useful, and will likely be a source of graft in the future (if it isn’t now).
There were two commodities MUCH in demand by the “military industrial complex” during the cold war, titanium and platinum. Both, at the time, had one major source–the Soviet Union.
The Soviets *literally* sold us the raw materials that we were turning into weapons pointed at them.
Because they needed hard currency. And there was probably some corruption in there.
So much for the capitalist selling the communist the rope he’ll be hanged with.
It’s the same with these materials. It’s only been the last few years (IIRC) that China has developed a near-monopoly on some of them, and it’s likely that most of that is due to environmental regulations and government subsidy rather than true rarity, and we really only ran into supply chain problems when the governments around the world followed our lead and shut everything down (Well, China sorta lead the way with that, being the ones that really were hardest hit).
The materials needed for making computer chips (at least the “rare earth” elements of them) have changed over the years, as has the location of their manufacture. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to stockpile stuff in the US when the chip fabs are in Taiwan, Ireland, Israel etc.
The ironic thing about “rare earth” minerals is that they’re all over the place, just in low(ish) concentrations and more difficult to extract. You don’t find a big vein of Cerium, for example, even though it’s more common than Copper (Cerium: 60 ppm, Copper 50 ppm). Back when they were discovered we didn’t have a use for ’em, so they remained rare because they weren’t worth the trouble of extracting. Now that we’ve decided they’re crucial for all of our new gizmos we’ve discovered more efficient ways to refine them and thus commercially viable deposits are being found all over the place.
Team Jackass & Richard Nixon.
Nixon signed the EPA into existence. It was his greatest crime.
wasn’t gasoline seen as a useless byproduct of oil refining back before the automobile was developed?
The environmental restrictions are killing the West’s strength and prosperity. You have Democrats supporting excessive environmental regulation and you have Republicans standing by doing nothing to stop it or reverse it.
Given the overtly political uses of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves by previous presidents, I’m not sure it’s actually necessary for the original intended purpose. And I’ll say the same thing about this critical mineral stockpile. Instead, why don’t we ease up on the fucking environmental fuckery and drill baby drill along with mine baby mine. Biden’s use of the SPR was obviously political and he squandered billions of dollars to make Wall Street a little happier. Let’s not give the next democratic president the same option with rare earth minerals.