Good grief! Why are we going all in on rare earths, with a Charlie Brown moment around the corner?

Albo has had a comparatively friendly meeting with Trump, partly because he was able to offer an agreement on the production of rare earths, and Trump likes rare earths because his grasp of economics stopped developing at the Smaug the Dragon stage and he conceptualises wealth in the form of shiny ingots.

The rest of us, though, should remember the fundamental message of the winner of next year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, who will be, if there’s any justice in the world, me, for formulating Moriarty’s Law: Whatever Donald Trump is in favour of is palpably nonsense.

Australia is now investing heavily in the mining and refining of holmium, europium, ytterbium, thulium, erbium, samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, neodymium, praseodymium and yttrium, among others. As every article on the topic mentions, these are all vital components of modern technological devices such as magnets and computer chips, and without them everything we use would stop working.

The desirability of these minerals is only enhanced by the fact that the vast bulk of them have ended up in the unfriendly hands of the Chinese, who are now exploiting the industrial leverage this gives them as bargaining chips in their trade arguments over Donald Trump’s tariffs.

As these elements are so essential, then, the obvious question is “What stopped us getting into this before?” And we really do need to recollect that that question has some compelling answers.

Rare earths, to begin with, aren’t particularly rare. Any country made of dirt has quite a few of them. Australia has a lot of them, but then Australia has a lot of dirt generally. Myanmar has lots. Canada, Nigeria the US, Russia have lots. So why aren’t they all rushing in?

Because rare earths aren’t just not rare, they’re also not that expensive. Neodymium, for example, is something like $250 a kilo, or rather less than a selection of fine chocolates. Hafnium is $3,000, or comparable to truffles. A few score higher than that, but gold, remember, is over $200,000 a kilo. That’s what ‘rare’ means.

And to get truffles out of the ground all you need is a trained pig. To extract gadolinium you have to hoick up a hillside or two of ground and throw nearly all of it away. Every part of this is difficult, expensive, and, perhaps most serious, polluting. For every ton of rare earths, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced.

The reason why the West handed these industries to China in the first place is that the Chinese were willing, then, to have extensive tracts of the country left dangerously radioactive, and we weren’t. Environmental concerns in Malaysia are making it more difficult and expensive for Lynas, an Australian processor, to operate there, so the company is moving parts of its operations elsewhere.