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Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech

Accusations of dumping are an easy political attack based on lower costs than you. A good response to any imagined dumping is to buy it as a strategic reserve. Subsidizing domestic production can have a national security benefit to have plants exist, but it is actual steel that is national security, and cheaper steel makes better manufacturing inputs. Buying “their” steel makes their manufacturers pay more for it.

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MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s good to have production capacity ready to go, underutilizing input streams. Things like steel can do this very well, things like state of the art microchips? not as much.

It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible, if we could buy the bulk ores and just have our own mines ready to start producing if the ore shipments ever stop, that’s the ideal circumstance - but going at it like that is a little transparent.

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- humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible
  
  Iron ore is available everywhere. Steel production is more of a bottle neck, even if emergency development of a new mine might take 1 year (but increased production from existing mines is much quicker). In US, more iron ore is exported than used in domestic steel production.
  
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  - MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I mean, if people will pay us for gases extracted from the atmosphere, I’m all for that. And iron ore doesn’t seem to be nearly as concerning as things like copper, cobalt, lithium (though I bet the “lithosphere” has much more available lithium in it than we currently know.)
    
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