China rules the rare earth market because it was willing to take on the pollution that others refused. For years, Western countries enjoyed clean energy dreams powered by Chinese processing plants that quietly handled the toxic side of the green transition. Now the world is scrambling to fix a problem it helped create.
How China Took Over
In the 1980s, the United States supplied most of the world’s rare earths from the Mountain Pass mine in California. It was a global giant. Then came spills, scandals, and rising environmental pressure. Regulators shut the mine down, and Western governments decided that rare earth mining was too dirty and too expensive.
China saw opportunity where others saw trouble. It poured money into extraction and refining throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Today, Chinese firms produce most of the world’s raw rare earths and refine almost all of them. Much of the heaviest and most valuable supply flows through Myanmar into Chinese facto
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