In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 400-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. … While the Chinese government has attempted to reduce the rare earth industry’s environmental impact in recent years, decades of poorly regulated production, along with illegal mining, have caused significant air and water pollution, leaving behind nightmarish waste ponds filled with heavy metals and radioactive elements.