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<\/a><\/p>\nJulie Klinger,<\/a>\u00a0Assistant Professor of International Relations at the\u00a0<\/span>Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, co-wrote a recent Op-Ed on rare earth elements and the importance of\u00a0capitalizing on shared global interests to ensure that the new rare earth supply chains are sustainable.<\/span><\/p>\n Klinger’s Op-Ed, entitled “R&D, Not Greenland, Can Solve Our Rare Earth Problem,<\/a>” was published in\u00a0The Hill<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>on September 18, 2019. The Op-Ed was co-written by Roger Turner.<\/p>\n \u00a0From the text of the article:<\/span><\/p>\n While\u00a0President Trump<\/span>‘s proposal to buy Greenland lit up social media feeds and left many scratching their heads, people who work on rare earth elements were not surprised. Greenland has rare earth elements, and currently most are mined in China. Meanwhile, the president\u2019s trade war with China could disrupt access to these metals crucial to green energy, defense systems and consumer technology.<\/p>\n The \u201crare earth\u201d label implies scarcity or extreme value, but the label is little more than a stubborn artifact of 18th-century naming conventions. The mineral gadolinite, first dug up in 1788 and from which the first rare earth elements were separated, was \u201crare\u201d because it had never been found before, and \u201cearth\u201d because it could be dissolved in acid.<\/p>\n The antiquated label persists because it fuels scarcity myths, which in turn have proven useful to justify extreme measures to secure these metals \u2014 like\u00a0repealing mining moratoriums in Greenland\u00a0or\u00a0granting U.S. citizens property rights to outer space\u00a0resources.<\/p>\n Because the rare earth elements are largely produced in China, Americans of all ideological stripes tend to project their anxieties about China onto the rare earths. People use the rare earths to tell stories of\u00a0American industrial decline, the\u00a0power of China\u2019s authoritarian central planning\u00a0or of\u00a0American vulnerability. Rarely told is the story of what is shared by China and the U.S. \u2014 worries about pollution, desires to reap the benefits of natural resources, histories of imposing the\u00a0health and environmental costs of production\u00a0on marginalized people distant from the centers of power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n