It upsets me that I don’t see people recognizing that the rare earth issue isn’t a one-off.  As we noted before that wasn’t an act of God—it was a case where the Chinese figured out something we didn’t.  We as a country were structurally unable to plan for the future.  And we’re still that way. We haven’t always been quite so bad, but with the Republican private-sector orthodoxy and now Trump that’s where we are.

In that last piece I talked about slashed support for scientific research as a reason why we’re just waiting for the next such example to happen.  But I should have been more emphatic; there is already an obvious example right now—our electrical infrastructure.

The US electric power network is antiquated, disorganized, and insecure. The Chinese could put it out of service any time they really wanted to. It needs major investment so that it can act as a resource for the economic development of the country.  This isn’t just a matter of tweaks—there is every reason to believe that that the electrical network is going to drive much more of the economy in the future than it does today.  That has to do with new power sources (e.g. fusion or other nuclear), new application areas (e.g. datacenters), and also (whether we like it or not) climate change.  The network has to enable all kinds of new application businesses that will access power wherever it is needed.  China is already making huge investments, employing new higher-capacity technologies that exist nowhere here.

What are we doing?  We have to make major new investments to power the tremendous energy needs of the coming gigawatt datacenters.  But we aren’t doing anything about our network—we’re making it exclusively a matter for the datacenters themselves, and we’re doing everything possible to prevent use of wind and solar. We’re going out of our way to prevent development of a secure and capable electrical power infrastructure.  We’re going to build and power all of those datacenters and then figure out that it’s a one-trick pony, AND we’ve lost the time we’ll need for the real infrastructure to catch up.

We refuse to think beyond the immediate needs of today’s businesses. Same as for rare earths.