Posted on 09/01/2010 10:15:00 AM PDT by decimon
China's monopoly on the global supply of elements critical for production of computer hard disc drives, hybrid-electric cars, military weapons, and other key products — and its increasingly strict limits on exports — is setting the stage for a crisis in the United States. That's the topic of the cover story of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
C&EN Senior Editor Mitch Jacoby and Contributing Editor Jessie Jiang explain that the situation involves a family of chemical elements that may soon start to live up to their name, the "rare earths." China has virtually cornered the global market on them, and produces most of the world's supply. Since 2005, China has been raising prices and restricting exports, most recently in 2010, fostering a potential supply crisis in the U.S.
The article describes how the U.S. is now responding to this emerging crisis. To boost supplies, for instance, plans are being developed to resume production at the largest U.S. rare-earth mine — Mountain Pass in southern California — which has been dormant since 2002. The U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Defense are among the government agencies grappling with the problem.
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ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "Securing the Supply of Rare Earths"
This story is available at http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/88/8835cover.html
Why do we need natural resources when we have Obama-care and unemployment compensation? A better investment than natural resources like energy, metals, is stimulating the economy with food stamps.
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH! I knew this would happen. We have to appropriate China.
Yup... it’s a REAL problem.
China is doing whatever they can to force hi-tech manufacturing to re-locate within the country... to provide more jobs.. and, to make it easier for them to steal the technology.
The sad part is... companies are already falling all over themselves to do just that.
“....computer hard disc drives, hybrid-electric cars, military weapons, and other key products”
Why...no problem....just buy these items from China!
my take is that our stratege of drowning them with dollars isn’t working at some point they will run out of stuff to buy and sellers that will take dollars in trade
What will we do without our electric cars!?!
“World Resources: Rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust, but discovered minable concentrations are less common than for most other ores. U.S. and world resources are contained primarily in bastnäsite and monazite. Bastnäsite deposits in China and the United States constitute the largest percentage of the world’s rare-earth economic resources, while monazite deposits in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the United States constitute the second largest segment. Apatite, cheralite, eudialyte, loparite, phosphorites, rare-earth-bearing (ion adsorption) clays, secondary monazite, spent uranium solutions, and xenotime make up most of the remaining resources. Undiscovered resources are thought to be very large relative to expected demand.”
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2010-raree.pdf
There is no exploration for these deposits in the USA because we depend on China. Of course if China cuts us off the envirowackos won’t let us explore and mine our own resources. Note that the USGS (above) considers undiscovered resources to be “very large”.
I am particularly fond of the unofficial “ food stamps for crack “ program....
LOL - you left off the /s tag for liberal lurkers...
This works with chain migration. "Family-sponsored" green card holders get food stamps, especially if they have kids. They know lots of illegals (and their friends too) from their home towns south of the border. Food stamps are easy to sell, and they don't feel guilty about doing it.
I am not making this up. I reported one of the green card holders to "La Migra" but they were not interested. I don't think the person selling the food stamps was involved with illegal drugs, but after the food stamps go into the black market economy, who knows.
It's worse than that. China is set to take advantage of future mineral discoveries in Africa, using Chinese immigrants to prepare for political and economic leverage, and huge csah reserves to buy up key industries. Meanwhile, we are spending our borrowed money on big government and bailouts.
Thanks decimon. Africa (here and there) also has supplies of certain rare-earth elements that are necessary in small quantities for electronics. No surprise that the Chinese have been working on influence in Africa at least since they backed the FNLA in Angola’s civil war. Nowadays they’re getting ready to industrialize certain countries, mainly to build stuff cheap enough to make money selling into the Chinese market. Chinese consumers have money to spend, and like the Japanese, the local capacity builds for export.
One run-of-the-mill metal-rich big asteroid can contain more metals than have ever been mined in Earth’s history. Gosh, what to do, what to do. And Obama is killing the space program as well, gosh, what’s *that* about?
Japanese industry minister Masayuki Naoshima asked Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Li Yizhong and Commerce Minister Chen Deming for reductions to this year's export quota to be reversed in a meeting at the “Japan-China high-level economic dialogue” of economic ministers in Beijing.
Naoshima told the Chinese ministers: “In the second half of this year alone, the export quota is being reduced by 70 percent. The reduction is too sharp.”
The Japanese side repeated the request at the main session of the conference, with all economy-related ministers from both countries present.
But China, which produces more than 90 percent of the world's rare-earth metals, refused to budge on its policy of limiting access.
1) He wants to protect outer space from the evil USA capitalists by declaring outer space a national wildlife refuge.
2) He want to claim that he is saving money by eliminating the few useful programs government pays for. It's cheaper for NASA to do Muslim Outreach and support the IPCC than actually explore space.
3) He wants to make the world better by removing the USA from the list of 1st world nations.
He wants to usher in an era of the world caliphate, which means, no more national boundaries.
China on Saturday rejected a request from the Japanese government not to cut exports of rare-earth metals that are vital to the production of a wide range of electrical products, such as hybrid vehicles and liquid crystal displays."If ya can't party with the big boys, don't show up." -- Andrew 'Dice' Clay
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