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Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
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We arent doomed, zinc will still exist, the amount we consume/need is fractional and exists all over the surface of the planet...
Its just not "farmable" in large amounts that way, therefore they say its "all gone" as far as electronics and such go...
And landfills will become valuable commercial property.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But the price of gallium will affect the availability of gallium in a form that humans find easily useable.
An increase in price means an increase in resources that can be devoted to extracting gallium and still leave the extractor with a profit.
An increase in price also means that alternatives that used to be more expensive could be less expensive now, which lowers demand for gallium.
Economics isn't a perfect science, and it often heavily relies on imperfect data from a biased world. But I wouldn't put it in the same realm as reading tea leaves.
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
More Twoson than Cupertino
We haven't hit peak oil yet.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited ... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.