I think we can all agree things went downhill fast in the most colossal way.
Good.. maybe we can get back to reality.
The article is misleading from several aspects. China mostly refines the gallium and germanium as opposed to mining them. This is the case with most of the “rare” earths. They buy the ore. The reason they do most of the refining is they have zero environmental regulations. Most of the metals require numerous acid baths and the processes are very dirty. Thus, the mines in the US were shut down as it was either that or send the ore to China to be refined. It is cheaper to mine in Africa and South America because they too have few if any environmental laws. Therefore, in those countries you can cheaply pressure wash mountains down to the ground and nobody protests. The lithium mines in Africa are defines as “boutique” operations because they use very little equipment. Instead, they have tiny, barefoot children who are essentially slaves. (Aren’t Tesla’s awesome?) The US has plenty of gallium and germanium. What we don’t do is anything “dirty.” So we can have pristine everything and no cell phones or we can spend a bit more and have pristine land and cell phones.
When China tried this with the rare earths Trump husbanded a mine in California and it was just getting itself certified when he left office. Don’t know if Biden shut it down or not. Even though the processes were certified as baby-butt clean the enviorwhackos wanted it shut down.
We don’t have a shortage of anything because we can’t get or produce that thing. We have artificial shortages because we have liberals.
Ban Coal and you lose Germanium ,
As they metals gained as a byproducts of other smelting processes it can be made on other countries. The issue is that the process is dirty in the extraction and the Chinese government was willing to be the producer and pollute their land due to crappy environmental laws and corruption. Therefore they made the cost cheaper to sell to chip and electronics manufacturers and cornering the market.
The NIMBY folks will flip if they have to start producing here in the US or other woke western countries to get their cellphone fix and other electronic toys and conveniences.
Hard to see why we need ‘chips’ to defeat China. After all, ‘chips’ hadn’t even been invented for ALL of World War 2, and we STILL won.
(don’t laugh, that is EXACTLY what the Ukraine Cheerleaders are now thinking with regard to China)
The US used to produce as much Gallium and Germanium as necessary. Then the government essentially banned mining and smelting lead and zinc ores, where it is most plentiful.
So now we have to rely on people who are not our friends for both the base metals and the rarer elements they contain.
Production of synthetic rubber in the United States expanded greatly during World War II since the Axis powers controlled nearly all the world's limited supplies of natural rubber by mid-1942, following the Japanese conquest of most of Asia, particularly in the Southeast Asian colonies of British Malaya (now Malaysia) and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) from where much of the global supply of natural rubber was sourced.[6] |
I guess we'll just have to find something else to use!
If western countries had any balls, they’d ban exports of coal to China for national security reasons.