As Deng Xiaoping, the then-Chinese Communist Party leader said in 1992, “The Middle East has oil: China has rare earth materials.”

Yes, and the U.S. has abundant quantities of them also, but keeps them untapped subject to environmental opposition to mining them resulting in a regulatory minefield of local, state, and federal rules that has turned permitting into a costly decadeslong process.

Lawmakers have all but banned rare earth mineral exploration and development on materials-rich federal lands, and the few once-active mines have been shuttered largely due to compliance costs.

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