profitability 20 years out
Lmao the idea that the west could industrialise in 20 years under neoliberalism is fucking hilarious
There are ROADS in my city that have been worked on that long
We have a 10 mile stretch of highway in my town that was approved to be expanded in 1998. They got a $2B funding allocation. It’s now 2025 and they’re only 60% complete and $5B over budget.
a road should be like the easiest thing to build ever, too
We are in the mountains, so I can give them a bit of slack. But like 3 years slack, not 27 years slack
What’s so difficult about grilling some earths just enough so that they are left a little pink inside? We could do that in Texas.
we’re doing that right now
I don’t have access to that full article but in general the sentiment is correct. the rare earth industry is extremely technically sophisticated and there simply isn’t the expertise needed to build a separate supply chain for all these things. each rare earth is unique and requires unique feedstock and processing systems. the resultant product has to be quite pure for it to be used in high end applications (i.e. military gear), meaning things need to be designed and operated correctly on a consistent basis to make appropriate product. literally no aspect of the west is set up to build multiple pieces of large scale infrastructure in an integrated fashion without promise of near term profitability.
arnaud’s article notes something like ‘maybe 20 years for profitability’ but I think that is optimistic. looking back at china’s rise in rare earth land, they made it a national priority in the early 80s and by the early 2000s were dominant in the sector for the world. call it 20 years to build that sector under central planning. western governments are not set up to do central planning and will just get eaten by grift (see also any high speed rail project, any nuclear project, any bridge building, all of which are something like 0.1-1% of the complexity of building an independent rare earths supply chain). But even setting the greater efficiency enabled by central planning vs market forces aside, china has clearly stated that they intend to continue supplying rare earths to non-military sectors. that means that any western RE industry would still be competing with china’s products for consumer goods (i.e. they will not be able to compete and will thus derive no profit from this end of the sector, unlike the situation during china’s RE rise).
the lack of expertise also shouldn’t be discounted. I work in a related sector and it’s truly astounding to me how even extremely well known, completely public technologies can be implemented badly. I’m talking about fairly simple, 1 to 2 step chemical processes that require minimal specialty equipment, and I still see things royally fucked up on a regular basis. the complexity of rare earth extraction and more critically, refining, requires use of much more sophisticated technology, chemistry and reagents. this is expertise that the west doesn’t have, because it’s been outsourced to China for the last 50 years. meanwhile, during the period where the US is trying to create a rare earth’s industry, china will not sleep and will continue pushing fundamental research from theory into practice.
I really hope that china sticks to its guns on this one and doesn’t roll back these export restrictions to military applications. the longer they stand and are enforced, the more western military materiel will moulder away and the less capacity the empire will have for waging war.
china has clearly stated that they intend to continue supplying rare earths to non-military sectors. that means that any western RE industry would still be competing with china’s products for consumer goods (i.e. they will not be able to compete and will thus derive no profit from this end of the sector, unlike the situation during china’s RE rise).
We both know the US would sanction Chinese exports, prevent western companies (US+EU plus assorted Pacific vassals) from buying Chinese ones and force them to buy the western ones or at least slap a tariff on the Chines ones to make the western ones competitive. Heck they’d probably threaten the biggest private western consumers to throw their money and weight behind getting this running ASAP regardless of how dirty and dangerous it is. So while the rest stands, this isn’t a real objection. Western government and military will be a captive customer and as their capacity will likely take a while to get large enough to even service western weapons makers plus tech companies I don’t think they need to worry about competing on the open market with China.
More realistically I think the west will set up an elaborate scheme of shell companies and buyers to route rare earths to their war industry. They’ll have their tech companies and tech companies in pliable countries like India, Europe, and whoever else wants to suck up to the US invent production capacity, purchase the rare earths for purported civilian uses then divert them from the manufacturer. For example say Nvidia (more realistically it would be some private company in India, Europe, Africa that they cut a deal with). They just ship them to the plant, then ship out only 10% of the wafers they claim they’re making, shipping the rest onwards mixed in with their actual product through a series of intermediaries. The US is very good at this. It will raise costs quite a bit but China has very limited visibility into US/western supply chains due to among other things not being an empire of hackers like the US, not controlling SWIFT and monetary flows, and so on. The west will use this to build up a stock-pile. It will impede their abilities if China is willing to stop supplies to the west entirely to carry on a sustained 10 year war against China for example but give them enough ability to stockpile a reserve to launch an initial attack and sustain some fighting for a while at a moderate cadence and moderate to low intensity.
It definitely is enough to make the west wary of starting a war against China next year or the year after but they’re schemers and they’ll go to incredible lengths to get around this.
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when Bessent panics, the world smiles
Idk somewhere between an hour to more than 103000000000 years based on half life.
Is there any way around a substack paywall?
someone who subscribes copy-and-pastes the content into a hexbear comment
sadly no
Truly, Substack is the China of bloggers, and their articles the rare earths we crave
as an aside, i wish he didn’t put his stuff behind paywalls. he seems very well heeled already.
Indeed, he tends to have good insights. I’d love to see the whole article.
“never enough” mentality
Even if the West could perform miracle and ramp up rare earth extraction and refining to match Chinese output in a handful of years, all it would do it bring them back to the starting line they were at in January of 2025.
China Commands the very elements to destroy the US
千年美国国耻
