I could imagine that what US has done has caused fear and a feeling of needing to hoard enough to get your country through a war. It’s making me, a lowly in Australia feel like we should be able to survive on our own, and have more available resources. I’m going to guess they’re more aware of threats than I am, more aware of where the next steps of this whole “mastermind” plan of Elon and Trumps enacting. This is not the only consequences of what they’ve done, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, yet.
hoarding
The main issue with rare earths is extracting them. It’s very polluting and labor intensive.
China sells them so cheap it doesn’t make economic sense for most countries to extract them, but there are locations with high concentrations all over the world.
Yup, very few rare earth metals are actually rare in absolute terms. Most deposits simply aren’t worth the trouble.
