Slashdot Mirror
China Begins Stockpiling Rare Earths, Draws WTO Attention
eldavojohn writes "A report by China Securities Journal claims that China is now stockpiling rare earths although it has not indicated when this stockpiling started. Many WTO members have complained about China's tightening restrictions on exports of rare earths while China maintains that such restrictions are an attempt to clean up its environmental problems. A WTO special conference scheduled for July 10th will hopefully decide if China's restrictions are unfair trade practices or if the US, the EU and Japan are merely upset that they can't export their pollution and receive rare earths at low prices. Last year, China granted its mining companies the right to export 30,200 tons but in actuality only 18,600 tons were shipped out of country."
China thinks ahead, but doesn't play nice.
They could be doing it not just for practical purposes but possibly for setting up a DeBeers of rare earth metals.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The minerals are theirs; why shouldn't they keep them?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Even if it harms the businesses and the fellow travelers that aid and abet such a hostile regime, it is time that the world plays hardball on China.
Things like this are why Faustian deals of getting a pliant slave-labor workforce are always a bad idea. Trade is no excuse for appeasement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So why isn't the WTO complaining about OPEC?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Just so I have this straight, China unfairly damages the US economy when they:
1. Trade low-cost goods with us.
2. Don't trade low-cost goods with us.
Those bastards! *shakes fist*
They can't and won't. They're afraid of China.
The world will eventually regret not opposing the rise of China, because they will be bullies 100 times worse than the Americans at their worst, with the added bonus that the Chinese are fiercely xenophobic and have a massive chip on their shoulder from their "100 years of humiliation".
I'm looking forward to an age of oppression and tyranny under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party.
I thought that this is what the Free Market is all about. Why do I have to hear my country's (USA) leaders complain ONLY when it doesn't benefit us? It's not like we're an impoverished nation. China can do whatever they want, and we can pay them for the resources or not buy them. It's not like we can't survive without them providing rare earth metals. So tired of the hypocritical whining ONLY when things don't go our way.
America has done well without ever having the best grades in math and science .
Yeah, but we also have environmental regulations that make it VERY difficult(costly) extract the Rare Earth Elements. It's these environmental regulations that is the only reason that China is the leading producer of these elements. Getting this stuff out of the ore is a rather nasty processes which is expensive to do in the US.
Also until recently it was not clear it was worth extracting these elements. I know that there was a large mine that used to produce much of the worlds supply in the 80's-90's located in California. They shutdown because of the regulations and the fact that they couldn't compete with the low cost of stuff coming out of China. At that time it wasn't clear that these elements were that vital. Long term this action will cause other countries to re-open old mines or start extraction of new deposits. Rare-Earth deposits aren't really that rare it's the concentration of these elements in the "ore" that are low which is why they are called "rare".
This action by the Chinese has only caused people to start looking for new deposits and different methods of extraction. Last I heard, the Californian mine is in the process of being re-opened and should start producing in 2013.
Molycorp, which owns a big rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, California, is back on line. That mine used to supply 100% of US demand, plus exports. It was shut down in 2002 due to cheaper rare earths from China. Now it's back.
Rare earths aren't that rare. They're just present in small concentrations. So mining produces huge volumes of waste for small amounts of product. The big rare earths mine in China is an environmental disaster area. The one in California had to comply with US and California regulations. At current rare earths prices, that's not a problem. (They do, however, ship some of the sludge to Nevada through a 20 mile pipeline. Really).
A year from now, rare earth supplies won't be a problem. Then people will be bitching about the Molycorp monopoly.
America used to be a place where effort was rewarded with success, so the people who did well in Math and Science were rewarded. Now it is all about making things "fair" to all the various "groups".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Stockpiling does two things:
1) In the short term it limits supply, causing prices and profits to rise.
2) In the medium term, it gives the Chinese the means to flood the market, driving out new competitors and restoring their near monopoly.
Rinse, lather, repeat
You guessed my location wrong too.
I can now narrow your location to Alberta based on your sensitivity towards jokes about the US.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Start a Thorium energy program. This makes lots of heavy rare earth deposits in the US economical to mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=tyqYP6f66Mw&NR=1
The USA and several other countries had their own mining operations inside their own borders which produced meaningful amounts of "rare earth" metals. The US companies chose to close them and purchase cheaper Chinese metals instead. Thereby handing China an effective monopoly on rare earth metals.
Now everyone is screaming that China has a monopoly and is not playing fair. I mean really, what the fuck did everyone think would happen?
China looks at the long game. We look towards the next quarters profits. I am sure that from China's point of view, this is all poetic payback from how the western world fucked them as hard as possible in the 18th and 19th century.
I just do not see how China is the bad guy here for putting itself in a position of power. A position, like the US, where everyone else is afraid to piss them off. Hell, we do it every chance we get and we are somehow the moral compass of world.
Allowing people to do stupid shit to themselves is my idea of "fair". What is unfair is expecting the rest of us to bail out their stupidity in the name of "fairness" or whatever. Sorry, but trying to fix people's idiocy doesn't accomplish a thing except make a few people feel better about themselves as being some form of superior or another.
Stupid should hurt. That is how some people learn (and often the ONLY way they learn)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Hmm, let's see. China have invaded and occupied Tibet. Invaded Vietnam. Invaded Korea to prop up one of the worst regimes the planet has seen. Bombarded Taiwan for decades and threaten to invade. Dominate Mongolia (who had to turn to the Soviets for assistance). Bully Vietnam, Japan and The Phillipines at sea. Fought Russia in Siberia on and off for decades. Use cyber and economic warfare around the globe. Conduct military and industrial espionage around the globe. Exploit Africa worse than any former colonial power. All this while the Chinese feel they are weak. Once they feel they are strong they will be more than a handful. Wake up and don't buy the 'China is peaceful and non-expansionist' line - it does not match the historical facts.
Last I checked the "free market" slowly ended between the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, and that's just fine with me. As far as letting the Chinese government hoard or restrict the sale of rare earths, that is clearly a government restriction of free trade, as there are no private companies independently choosing to do so. And in China, the notion of an independent company becomes muddied by the fact that the Chinese government is the principal shareholder of all "private" Chinese companies.
Of course the US does it as well, such as the stockpiling of the Strategic Oil Reserve, $11 billion of gold held by the US Treasury, and the massive tracts of public land that the government strategically leases for logging, mining, and grazing in accordance to its objectives to stabilize [manipulate] the commodities market.
www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/
fms.treas.gov/gold/current.html
http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en.html
I was going to mention the stockpiling of Helium, but it looks like the US has depleted an/or privatized it's National Helium Reserve.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve