“As Europe seeks to curb its dependence on China for rare earths, plans to mine the continent’s biggest deposit [an estimated 8.8 million tons of rare earths, in Norway] have hit a roadblock over fears that mining operations could harm endangered beetles, mosses and mushrooms…
[rare earth] elements, used to make magnets crucial to the auto, electronics and defense industries, have been defined by the European Union as critical raw materials…
Today, European industry imports almost all of the rare earths it needs—98%—from one single country: China… in its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) aimed at securing Europe’s supply, the EU has set as an objective that at least 10% of its needs should be extracted within the bloc by 2030…
No rare earth deposits are currently being mined in Europe… due to environmental concerns, Rare Earths Norway has already been forced to push back its schedule. Now it aims to begin mining in the first half of the 2030s.”
The real world requires tradeoffs. You can either degrade your own environment to get the raw materials you need, or you can trade with countries that are willing to do it themselves… and have your international relations constrained by that economic dependence. That’s not to say you can’t extract resources in a relatively environmentally-friendly way, but there’s no free lunch.
Perhaps the instruments of national power should separate Resources from Economic… DIMER & MIDLIFER / DIMEFILER ?
(If you’re uninformed about how much mining matters to our daily lives, I highly the book Material World by Ed Conway.)