In particular, this specific mine in Greenland is also a uranium deposit, and could be especially devastating to the environment, at relatively little yield[1]. Greenlanders are correct to be skeptical and concerned (especially given that Greenland Minerals is actually an Australian-Chinese company).
[1] https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2021/01/08/canadian-...
A major reason why the mine is being opposed is that a lackadaisical approach to toxic / radioactive waste is not in fact endemic to rare earth mining. It is seemingly endemic in multinational state-corporate enterprises (on which Greenlanders will have very little influence, cf the Malaysian government’s experience with that mine, which was also owned/administered by an Australian company).
I agree with everything in your comment, except for where you say that the parent’s idea is myopic.
Why do you think that?
> the end result of this thinking is that critical stuff like electric cars, wind turbines, etc is completely dependent on a totalitarian country
while ignoring that the end result of their thinking is a race-to-the-bottom of nations poisoning their own people to combat China. It’s why I think they are being myopic - they are taking environmental devastation as a given and arguing that China must be stopped at all costs. (Not to mention the conflation of “resources not physically in China” with “non-Chinese resources” which, as stated above, is not actually true here).
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
"Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. ... his team built a working reactor .... and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973."
They are needed for high performance electric motors though.
Cadmium-telluride and CIGS cells use more rare elements, but they have been overtaken by the ongoing fall in cost of conventional silicon wafer cells, so you won't see too many of them being installed at the moment.
(The failure of CdTe is probably for the best given how spectacularly poisonous both of those metals are)
Despite their name rare-earth elements are not that rare either. They occur in rather low concentrations though and never pure either (i.e. always as compounds) which makes mining and processing them complex.
It's just the price is set by people who can mine it for nearly free from the most rich deposits in the world.
Who do you mean by "our"?
I believe the Greenlanders' point is that it's their minerals and their local environment that may be wrecked, so they wish to either prevent this or set terms on which it is done.
There are other sources of rare earths - they can even be found in the tailings of other mines.
This has real impacts. Because if your resource models are inaccurate, then your environmental impact is magnified. What's worse is that mine lifecycles are very long. Long enough to mean the decision makers when opening a mine, might not be around when the mine closes. Which can cause carelessness, especially if they don't live in the area.
Stricter environmental impact assessment rules might work. But geo-scientific research is underfunded. So making it harder to open a mine, might cause the overall funding for research to reduce. Causing our models, especially in the mineral exploration stage, to not really advance much. So nothing really gets done until some country deregulates the industry, and so the problem persists.
So moves like this can work, but the research has to be there to support the new age of mining. There's some trade off here, between mining and burning fossil fuels. But this seems to be an example of where the negative effects of mining more REM are local, where as the negative effects of burning more Fossil fuels are global. But it's not a binary decision in most cases.
Rare earth mining seems pretty bad.