U.S. dependence on China for rare earth minerals has sparked bipartisan concern, and policymakers are trying to figure out how to protect American competitiveness. Bret Manley, executive director of the Energy Fair Trade Coalition, says the United States must “move quickly” to reclaim control over its supply chains and enforce fair trade principles in the energy sector.
Manley leads the Energy Fair Trade Coalition, a nonpartisan group that holds global energy companies accountable to U.S. labor and trade laws. According to Manley, energy discussions should focus on costs that directly affect American families. “California has committed energy suicide over the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. “They were shutting down all the nuclear plants until they finally realized that was insane and saved Diablo Canyon.”
His interest in trade came from watching the evolution of U.S. trade politics. “I grew up kind of a traditional, country club Republican. Free trade was the milieu of the Republican Party,” he says. But over time, he saw how outsourcing eroded American manufacturing. “Trump really forced Americans to grapple with the idea that if you turn your country into a service-based economy, you put yourself at risk if the supply chain becomes convoluted or controlled by someone with different geopolitical goals.” He now puts energy security in the same category as food and national defense, each of which he says is essential to sovereignty.
Manley says that the United States has access to rare earth minerals but lacks processing capacity. “We have these minerals, but we outsource the production or refining. The U.S. does not have the technology or the “prowess” to make them usable, he says. That dependency has given China leverage. “It makes perfect logical sense that President Xi would use this as a leverage point–I would if I were him.”
According to Manley, America’s short election cycles encourage risk-averse policymaking. “The Chinese are very good at thinking and planning ten, 20, 30 years in advance,” he says. “That’s largely been absent in the United States. If there’s short-term pain involved, the incentive for a politician to avoid that decision is a no-brainer.”
He says our military is especially reliant on the minerals. “A lot of our guided missile capacity and capabilities are governed with a complex set of materials that require access to rare earth minerals. These are systems that cannot be reproduced rapidly without them.” Another vulnerability is satellites. “If you were to target a GPS system in space, you could knock out a significant military capability of the United States relatively quickly. It’d be very difficult to replace that in a speedy fashion.”
Policy changes, according to Manley, must keep as much of the supply chain as possible within the United States or among close allies. “If you can’t vertically integrate totally, at least integrate with allies,” he says, pointing to Europe, Australia, and even Greenland as potential partners. But he is realistic about the timeline. “Assuming nothing changes from a regulatory standpoint, it’ll take anywhere from three to five years to get a mine online. This is really a five- to ten-year project.”
Manley says investment from the federal government, streamlined permitting, and use of the Defense Production Act to accelerate projects are needed. “Ultimately, capital is going to flow to value,” he says. “If you reduce the regulatory burden, that’s going to unleash a lot of private investment to supplement government efforts.”
According to him, ingenuity is the ultimate advantage. “The one thing we should be proud of as a country is we’ve arrived at this point because we have entrepreneurship, people who can innovate,” he says. “If you start outsourcing those things to other countries, they are going to acquire those capabilities at our expense.”
