Highlights
- TIME magazine explores the critical rare earth elements crisis.
- The U.S. lost global production leadership to China’s strategic industrial policy.
- The article reveals significant challenges in REE production, including:
- Technological barriers
- Regulatory delays
- The need for a comprehensive industrial strategy
- Overcoming China’s rare earth dominance requires:
- Coordinated international efforts
- Advanced separation technologies
- Strategic policy interventions
In his recent feature for TIME, Charlie Campbell paints a vivid and largely accurate picture of the rare earth element (REE) crisis now gripping U.S. industry and national security policy. The article is informative, well-researched, and commendably accessible for general readers. However, when examined alongside known developments and analyses published by Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx), several critical omissions and underemphasized realities become apparent. These gaps—relating to technology, permitting, and allied capacity—limit the piece’s strategic depth at a moment when precision is paramount.
On the Money
Campbell’s narrative excels in chronicling how the U.S. once led global REE production from Mountain Pass, only to lose that edge as China subsidized its way to dominance. The historical account is accurate: environmental missteps, a toxic spill, and a lack of federal industrial policy led to the shuttering of the U.S. separation facility in the early 2000s, while China built the world’s most integrated mining and refining complex, now processing 90% of global supply.
The piece also correctly flags the chemical specificity of REEs. Mountain Pass may produce large amounts of neodymium, but without access to heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium (needed for heat resistance in magnets), it’s functionally incomplete. This explains why China left neodymium off its April 2025 export restriction list—it knows the West can’t use it effectively without Chinese additives.
Campbell also underscores China’s price manipulation strategy. When foreign competition rises, Beijing floods the market, collapsing prices and bankrupting newcomers. This is not a market failure—it’s a feature of China’s strategic state capitalism, and TIME is right to emphasize it.
What’s Missing or Underplayed
Still, several critical dimensions of the REE crisis—well documented by REEx—are barely mentioned or entirely omitted.
1. U.S. Private-Sector Activity Beyond MP and Lynas
TIME highlights MP Materials and Lynas, but ignores newer players like Energy Fuels, which is processing monazite sands for rare earths in Utah, or HyProMag, whose patented magnet recycling technology could significantly reduce dependence on mined Chinese rare earth elements (REEs). These developments, supported by U.S. Department of Energy funding, represent tangible progress and deserve attention.
2. Regulatory Bottlenecks and Permitting Delays
Campbell touches on rising CAPEX needs at Lynas Texas but underplays the structural issues throttling U.S. progress: multi-year permitting delays, litigation threats, and federal environmental reviews. As REEx has reported, these hurdles—not just costs—are a primary reason why no U.S.-based heavy rare earth element (REE) separation facility will be online before 2026 at the earliest.
3. Allied and Partner Capacity Is Underexplored
While Japan’s and Saudi Arabia’s REE initiatives are covered, other key players, such as Canada (with advanced-stage projects in Quebec and Saskatchewan) and Australia (beyond Lynas), are glossed over. Brazil, despite having the third-largest global reserves, receives only cursory mention. This lack of strategic mapping undercuts the reader’s sense of where diversified supply might actually come from.
4. Separation Technology Choke Points
TIME correctly notes that China placed export restrictions on separation and refining equipment in December 2023. Still, it overlooks the broader implication: the U.S. and its allies must now either reverse-engineer or reinvent decades of Chinese technological dominance. No current facility outside China has demonstrated commercial-scale capability for separating heavy rare earths, such as dysprosium, at competitive cost and purity on a large scale. This is arguably the most important—and underexamined—barrier to reshoring.
Note Lynas has begun producing dysprosium in Malaysia (as TIME notes: “first batch of dysprosium produced in May 2025, terbium expected soon”, however, the scale remains limited, and the Seadrift plant is not yet operational.
A point here is that the TIME piece omits the term “industrial policy” and the importance in transcending this current situation.
Final Assessment
TIME’s article is a strong primer, but it oversimplifies the depth and scale of the rare earth challenge. Overcoming China’s dominance is not simply a matter of outspending Beijing or enacting more tariffs. It requires the slow, deliberate construction of a parallel industrial ecosystem—with permanent policy, streamlined permitting, international coordination, and pricing supports such as Contracts for Difference or Offtake Guarantees.
While Trump’s emergency declarations, Truth Social posts, and symbolic Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) draw headlines, the real race is being run in labs, mines, and pilot plants, not to mention policy coverage in Washington, D.C.
The race will likely be won or lost on the back of quiet, coordinated execution, far from the spotlight.
REEx will continue to provide accurate, ground-level intelligence as the global rare earths supply chain evolves from crisis to a competitive landscape.
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