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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."
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yep, clueless, check this story
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram
Indeed, im not sure about all these -iums, which are no doubt toxic to us anyways... but zinc and copper is pretty easy to recycle, and in a decade, we might not need the -iums we (dont really) need now...
Especially if we upgrade all the phone and cable lines to optical, and recycle those trillion miles of copper, and as we move away from coin money (another debate unto itself) there's also that (both copper and zinc), replacing copper pipes with plastic, etc, etc, etc... although, all that plastic is also another debate.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
Easter Island. When they cut down the last tree (for moving those carved heads around on rollers), they couldn't build boats to go fish with, or leave. Invoking economics will not always get you out of a man-made catastrophe - global warming anyone?
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.