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China Moving To Restrict Neodymium Supply
GuyFawkes writes with this quote from the Independent:
"Britain and other Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production, is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds. Failure to secure alternative long-term sources of rare earth elements (REEs) would affect the manufacturing and development of low-carbon technology, which relies on the unique properties of the 17 metals to mass-produce eco-friendly innovations such as wind turbines and low-energy light bulbs. China, whose mines account for 97 per cent of global supplies, is trying to ensure that all raw REE materials are processed within its borders. During the past seven years it has reduced by 40 per cent the amount of rare earths available for export."
They have fought to secure those same elements and done their homework. it gives them an economic advantage with both manufacturing and raw mining/refining done in the same place. most western countries in the same position would do the same as would any corporate entity in the western hemisphere. they can export the finished products at a huge markup compared to what they would get for raw minerals.
China is mining a vein of Unobtainium!
Anybody want my mod points?
The whole point of free trade was to unlink, fundamentally, resources from national ownership. Now that the Chinese have crossed the rubicon on the basic issue of access to materials on open markets, what is really the point of pretending that they are genuinely interested in free trade? Do we still want to pretend that they are interested in moving towards western liberalism. As much as Republicans called liberals Chamberlins on other issues, conservatives still ignoring the growing failure of free trade with the east are really, fundamentally, the genuine Chamberlins of our day. I hope they choke on their Walmart stock.
This is my sig.
This has been discussed here on Slashdot before, but rare earths are not as difficult to mine and produce as the term "rare" implies; they are rare only in a relative sense compared to other common elements of the Earth's crust. They are mostly not rare on the same order as gold or platinum group metals, although there are exceptions. There are plenty of sources for most of these elements in the continental United States and other nations outside of China; it just costs a certain amount of money to mine and refine them. If China chokes off supplies from their own mines and processors then it will make those same sorts of mines and processors cost-competitive again here in the United States and elsewhere in the world. This really isn't that big of a deal.
I always have to wonder at what point the "if you owe the bank $10,000 you have a problem, if you owe the bank $10,000,000 they have a problem" principle kicks in...
The willingness of China to send actual goods(at the cost of deferring domestic consumption) in exchange for little green US treasury gift cards as some sort of neo-mercantilist scheme is rather convenient.
The following link is ESSENTIAL reading
http://seekingalpha.com/article/178225-on-the-rare-earth-crisis-of-2009
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Umm, the Chinese did not cut off the supply of Opium. They cut off the demand for opium. The British were illegally smuggling opium from India into China, then the Chinese enforced their laws, leading to war.
This was discussed previously on http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/2119201/China-Considering-Cuts-In-Rare-Earth-Metal-Exports
:)
If you hurry up and copy/paste a few comments from there, you may be able to get a cheap +5 Informative.
Or more likely, Japan will just shift its neodymium orders to mines in the US, Australia, Brazil, and elsewhere, as these will increase their output when China drives up global prices by restricting her exports. Rare earth metals are only relatively rare -- we're not nearly about to run out of the things, and China isn't the only country with significant total reserves. At any rate, Japan doesn't owe China war reparations anymore anyway: Mao Zedong waived all reparations as part of the price for buying Japan's diplomatic recognition in 1972.
The global economy is an illusion. China controls its exchange rate. If they let it float, chinese products would double
triple or maybe even 10X in price almost overnight. China controls imports thru numerous techniques (as do we and everyone else).
They just recently clamped down on even what web sites will be visible. China is a tightly controlled economy which plans on being number 1 in 5 to 10 years. They think long term and are willing to abuse its citizens in the process. My big worry is once they get those subs they are bulding up & running, the west is screwed. They will now be able to offer the one "product" that up until now, only we could offer. Security. Imagine if you are the Arab nations with all that oil and you can either trade with the US and collect "dollars in an account" and a guarantee of protection or you can get "computers, cars, boats, appliances, furniture, pillows, blankets, screws, bolts, steel, aluminum, pipe, tools, and pretty much anything you want" AND protection from the chinese, who would you sell your oil to? For that matter, ANY raw material producing country will do biz with the chinese, not us. China has played the capitalists over the past couple of decades very well.
a return to subsistence-style living and community-driven societies
We have over 6bn people on this planet. If we all went back to subsistence farming, 3/4 or the world will begin to starve in very short order. Starving people tend to do weird things, like start wars, skirmishes, riots and things like that - over suddenly scarce resources (oh like, I dunno... food supplies , arable land, things like that?)
...with countries like Poland, who have just absolutely amazing self-reliant and vibrant communities...
It's not a question of being lazy - it's a simple question of logistics that don't fit the paradigm, no matter how utopian and pretty it seems on the surface. There's also the the fact that a subsistence population tends to have astronomically higher birthrates, which tends to increase the pressures instead of alleviating them (but then with the return of disease and a higher child mortality rate, coupled with a lower life expectancy, who knows?)
...are you ready for that change...
I suggest extra ammunition and a rather large stockpile of MRE's until the excess population either dies of starvation or kills each other off. Defensible modifications to your house would help as well. May want to move to a sparsely-populated area as well and ride it out there.
-OR-
I suggest that you've spent way too many evenings watching Life After People re-runs, and fantasizing about some sort of post-armageddon future where you get to re-populate a shattered Earth with a gaggle of cute chicks who look to you as some sort of leader... or similar. May not want to close on that farmhouse in Idaho just yet, though.
It is my contention that:
1) The whole "Peak Oil" thing is somewhat of a sham, given that technology is emerging beyond a dependence on petroleum (we should be there completely within a couple of decades under normal market conditions, and if oil does start to become scarce, I'm certain that we'll get there even sooner due to simple market pressures). That said, it does have its uses in getting people to move to cleaner tech sooner (and no, you don't necessarily need Chinese rare earth metals to do it - see also hydroelectricity, monocrystal photovoltaics, etc).
2) China isn't the one and only repository of rare earth metals on this planet - if sufficiently motivated, I suspect that other sources will be found and/or synthesized if need be. Also, there are alternate means of creating clean tech w/o using rare metals to do it - it's all a question of economics and need.
3) People have been constructing and selling apocalyptic vision ever since St. John wrote his version on the Isle of Patmos. May not want to hold your breath just yet.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
And how much of that stuff is dependent today on Chinese supply of components? And how much is stagnating in the west, and just being shifted to China? How much is "assembled here" as opposed to really "made here"? And what have the trends been? That's the main point and is related to the entire topic.
Here's one example from your list, Caterpillar, two articles that should to to show what I am talking about
http://www.chinasourcingnews.com/2008/08/29/12503-caterpiller-expands-its-global-business-model-in-china/
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/CG24504.htm
And you can go back and look, or remember, Cat was one of the primary lobbyest forces to restrict imported steel tariffs. Using them as an example of "all made in merika!" is just false. They use a lot of foreign sourced, and are gradually shifting production eastward, just like every other manufacturing industry has been doing. Of course not all the way yet, but this is the trend, and thousands and thousands of abandoned factories in the US prove this.
When I was a kid, and the US was the largest creditor nation, we really *did* have a lot of "all made here" things, heck, most everything was. As manufacturing keeps getting outright offshored or has become dependent on imported components so all there is is the last stage assembly, we have gradually replaced produced wealth from the "vertical stack" manufacturing model we used to have with *debt*, national and private, and running trade deficits, and have been sneaking up on economic collapse. This economic situation has exactly paralleled the shift in manufacturing.
Manufacturing is the big kahuna on producing wealth. You stop doing it, you start to go downhill. You increase doing it, you prosper. The more that is vertically integrated within your own area, the more those currency units get spent and respent and respent where they improve the over all local economy. The more you ship them out, the more the local economy goes sour and the more in debt you go.
There is going to come up a point where the manufacturing nations like china will no longer be interested in IOUs and will only want to do business with such areas as provide them with real wealth, the raw resources and energythey need, for their products (a few billion people, a good market size), and that combined with their own internal markets will be *large enough* for them to just say "thanks, but don't really need ya anymore as customers old western nations, see ya!" to the nations that previously made stuff..like the US.
Now I know this doesn't matter to the top 1%, they are globalists and can just move, they don't care. The rest of the people though..
This is the deal, is this economy, the "official" numbers, a reflection of the good deal for wall street, their economy, or of main street? Which is more important, making sure the top 1% keep getting richer, or trying to maintain a better balance, especially within your own middle class?
The Chinese "communist" dictatorship - the most murderous in human history - has obviously a long list of crimes to their "credit" (modern corporate speak), but in this context it might also be relevant to mention that part of that regime's near total control over the rare earth elements is due to China's invasion and ongoing genocidal occupation of Tibet since 1950.
Mao Zedong may have "only" wanted pre-one-child-policy era lebensraum for the Chinese masses (from 1950 to 1970 the Chinese population doubled from 500 million to 1 billion), geopolitical and military control over the Central Asian highlands of Tibet and incomprehensible (in communist terms anyway) validation of China's fairytale-like feudal imperial claims over the absolutely non-Chinese Tibetan people when he sent his Communist Party's then-idle wardogs to invade and occupy Tibet, but it turned out that the subsequent Chinese national-socialist (read: Chinazi) leaders and their affiliated business "princelings" have found it incredibly lucrative to ransack Tibet of its natural resources.
Nearly all historically invaluable precious metal artifacts and statues were melted for Mao's foreign currency purchases (while the invaluable Buddhist scriptures and almost all of the more than 6000 monasteries were simply burned down or bombed. Tibet's forests have been hacked down and shipped off to China (leaving only erosion behind). Uranium, gas and oil are extracted by Party-affiliated cronies and the Chinese regime only leaving behind severe pollution. All profitable industrial metals, including the rare earth metals, are being excavated while protesting native Tibetans get the old Gestapo treatment. Et cetera and et cetera.
Did I mention that the Chinese dictatorship is hard at work damming and diverting the major Asian rivers originating in Tibet and providing lifeline to over a billion South-Asians (incl. India) downstream, in order to generate electric power and to provide water for the occupying Chinese state and the newly settled Chinese instead? United Nations' conventions be damned in every case.
So what if the Chinese regime now wants to restrict the supply of crucial industrial metals? Don't say you didn't see it coming. Consider sending a distress signal to your democratic representative, that is if the "western" corporations don't already have him or her in their pocket.
The Western and democratic peoples need to either shut up and live with the consequences, or do something before it's too late for all of us.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?