China Moving To Restrict Neodymium Supply 477
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."
and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Proof free trade is a failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like the WTO could have a bit of leverage considering how much comes out of China right now that could be gradually restricted...
And replaced with what? And what if the Chinese decide to retaliate and simply shut down exports for a couple of months? Who do you think will cry uncle first?
Re:Proof free trade is a failure. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're confusing Corporatists with Conservatives.
And Corporatists come in all political flavors. Did you think the left wing of that particular ugly flapping bird won't be choking on their Target stock?
Time to explore for new deposits (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to explore for new deposits. If the price of rare earth elements increases enough, it'll be worthwhile. Australia, the American west, and Africa still have vast unexploited mineral wealth.
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
In a free trade system U.S. buyers could negotiate with various Chinese suppliers. It sounds to me like the Chinese government is creating a defacto monopoly where there shouldn't be one.
We buy far too much chinese stuff as it is and it's largely due to the false economy of the chinese currency. Another factor in the trade deficit is their willingness to simply rip off Western IP. Most of their products are very low quality anyway and end up costing more in the long run.
Re:and why not ? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Another factor in the trade deficit is their willingness to simply rip off Western IP
And the fault for that lies where, exactly? With the countries dumb enough to shift their economy to make trivially copied virtual products? Or the one smart enough to create actual goods which other people want to buy?
Yep, I thought so. One side is being an idiot. The other is being smart. News flash! Smart eventually wins.
Re:Proof free trade is a failure. (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, and the comparison is apt. Fundamentally, China is practicing mercantilism, but we've hamstrung ourselves by making it politically impossible to fight back.
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny side note- I thought one of the big points of "green" tech was to cut down on Americas dependence on other countries when it comes to energy.
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think about it, it's allowing China to profit twice on the same resource. They get mark-up on the material, and then if you have to process it in-country, they get markup a second time in processing. They'd be fools to do it any other way, since there's approximately zero chance of anyone bringing rare earths INTO China and providing them with processing business for ore other than that produced in-country. Processing their own ore is the only way they make business on it, may as well demand all you can.
Re:and why not ? (Score:5, Insightful)
China is in the drivers seat here , do you really think they will stop abusing the power they have ? China is not going to give in easily , more then likely they will agree to some agreement that allows them to do what they want , and then cut production to fall under the line and keep doing what they want.
Everything is made in China , they can be penalized and they won't care. They will keep doing it until we bar all Chinese products , good luck doing that.
Re:Proof free trade is a failure. (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of free trade was to unlink, fundamentally, resources from national ownership
I think you are wrong. Ownership doesn't enter into the question at all - free trade is simply a matter of making it easier to conduct business; there is nothing to say that national governments or state-owned enterprises can't take part in that.
I think your attitude is bizarre; it seems that you think that anything done or provided by society is by definition evil. I guess this is the sad result of the Cold-War conditioning that afflicts so many Americans - you have learned that government is a sort of Communist conspiracy that is only out to take your money and that tax is nothing short of state-sanctioned theft. Strangely, those who think this way don't seem to feel that using infra-structure, which has mostly been paid for by other tax-payers than themselves, is theft from their compatriots.
However, the real thieves in this picture are not ordinary tax-payers, but the big corporations, who are more than happy to use roads and other things paid for by the public, but who are rather reluctant when it comes to paying their taxes - ie they prefer to be free-loaders.
Re:not so green, huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
the first is just the irony of the country touted as having "A Bad Human Rights Record" (when in fact they are just using common sense to keep control over 1.3 billion people)
What the...?
People don't say that China has a bad human rights record because of the One Child Policy. They say that for, among other things, the One China Policy. Did you hear about the unrest of the Tibetans and the slaughter they endured as a result? Did you hear about the Uyghur towns in XinJiang Province wherein the government went in one day saying that everyone needs to be in their homes tomorrow or be shot and then coming through the next day and killing everyone on the streets?
You seem like a relatively informed person, did you hear about the rocket tests that destroyed entire towns?
How about the supremely corrupt officials covering up reports of lakes polluted to the point of poisoning absolutely every last person in the bordering towns?
Don't get me wrong. I love China. Wonderful place, great people, amazing food, and a beautiful land. But that government is abhorrent when it comes to treating its people right.
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The rule you're looking for is "If it works, it isn't stupid."
And for China, the current economy works wonders of almost biblical proportions. Millions have now decent homes, electricity, food, water and clothing who previously had none. Billions in the world now have cheap commodities and consumer goods. They will not stop any time soon and frankly I can't hold it against them, because currently it works extremely well.
While we spend our energy battling ecological strawmen and Islam, China will begin to top out the US in terms of power and wealth.
I would rather ask what we did wrong so it could come to this, what our faults were concerning the trade balance, national debts, tax, regulations, protective tariffs and all that.
Time for the weekly China bashing article, I see (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you looked at your furnature? The cloth, nails, foam, and porbably all the shaped wood excluding the frame itself was probably made in China. Even the major brands get the majority of the raw parts from the cheapest distribution methods out there, and that's China. Mexico really for the local labor of assembly. Even La-Z-Boy relocated their assembly shops down there last year.
Cost wise, the computer parts and kitchen equipment components in your house all count as parts from over seas manufacturing plants.
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly , what happens when OPEC decides they want more ? They cut production. And the WTO just begs for them to produce more. Any of these organizations are a waste of money and barely ever serve a purpose.
of what? (Score:2, Insightful)
What "4 to 5 times of" do western industrialized nations produce more of (limited to manufactured articles), and of those, how many "things" that are still produced in the west are in at least part dependent on Chinese manufactured components? Remember it takes all of the parts to make a "whole". "Assembled in western nation" is not the same for the economy as "totally manufactured in western nation". Or just "rebadged and sold in western nation with a corporate name that reflects a contract in a drawer in Delaware" is not the same as totally manufactured and sold in western nation.
And within that ratio, how much of a percentage of various national economies does that really represent? Example,. if western nation A produces 4-5 times as many automated shoe lace tiers, is that really something to brag on? Ok here's one that still really exists, big commercial airplanes, still mostly made in the west, this is a gimmee, (although china's domestic airplane production is rapidly advancing), but how much of a big new airliner is dependent on chinese parts? How about autos? How about high tech new medical equipment? Stuff like that.
Or are you including such things as **AA "copies" being worth such and such according to their figures, along with casino banking paper financial theoretical products like those wonderful collateralized debt obligation pieces of paper, all of those non product products, and just printed up pictures of dead political leaders being passed off as real products?
There's this rosy picture wall street and DC talking heads "economy" that includes debt being called an asset, the same one that needed trillions in emergency inflationary pictures of dead political leaders to "keep afloat" (same in Europe), then there is the real no BS economy, so which are you referring to?
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and why not ? (Score:1, Insightful)
what happened then is deemed to happen again: as the quality of life grows the people will realize that indiscriminate pollution is affecting their life and mining their children future, and will start to demand better life for themselves.
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
When the WTO issues a huge fine, will we send the Marines to Beijing to collect it? Will we settle it against the national debt?
Our forces are overextended enough as it is. Within five years, we have Iran or Israel burning and in desperate need of democratization and/or support. Within fifteen years, we will probably have an open insurgency somewhere in the Greater London, Brussels or Paris when their Muslim reaches the size of a small Arab state like Lebanon and Syria. And neither Afghanistan or Iraq will be a stable democracy by then and will collapse as soon as we leave or already did.
Our democratic system contains a serious flaw because budget deficits are allowed, enabling instant gratification for all elected officials with payments beginning only after their term of office. Since tax payers and voters are different electorates, iterative evolution preferred parties exploiting it to the fullest for which is what we had for almost 20 years now in all Western countries. All types of government struggle hard when the budget is strained too far and has to be cut back, but I seriously doubt a Western-style democracy is able to do that, especially as there is no more defined "demos" anywhere that could come to a finite set of consensuses, but a gaggle of minorities clamoring for their share of the loot.
If the national deficit spending continues, China could buy back all of Taiwan simply by relieving some percent of our national debt and we will still be thankful to have some room in our budgets again. We will never recover from our debts and we cannot survive without China giving us more loans every year, so they can practically demand whatever they want. In our world, politically correct may trump factually correct, but in the real world, all lunches must be paid for.
Illusion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lithium as well I believe.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not so green, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [history.com] 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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Our forces are overextended enough as it is. Within five years, we have Iran or Israel burning and in desperate need of democratization and/or support. Within fifteen years, we will probably have an open insurgency somewhere in the Greater London, Brussels or Paris when their Muslim reaches the size of a small Arab state like Lebanon and Syria. And neither Afghanistan or Iraq will be a stable democracy by then and will collapse as soon as we leave or already did."
If Israel wants to fend off its neighbors in the next war, it has tactical nukes. We don't need to mess with Iran, because it will remain Jihadist and no outcome we could influence will change that. Unless they have some wonderful equivalent of the French Revolution where they slaughter the Mullah, it will be "same shit, different day". T
he Iranian protestors aren't rejecting Islam, they chant "God is great!". Don't ever forget that.
Like the Cultural Revolution in China, not our problem and the more violent things get in an _enemy_ country the better.
"If the national deficit spending continues, China could buy back all of Taiwan simply by relieving some percent of our national debt and we will still be thankful to have some room in our budgets again."
Works for me. Taiwan is in Chinas sphere of influence, which it why it is full of Chinese. The cult of Suicide for Taiwan doesn't benefit the US.
How many dead G.I.s is Taiwan worth? None by my metrics. Go enlist in their Army if you like.
"We will never recover from our debts and we cannot survive without China giving us more loans every year, so they can practically demand whatever they want. In our world, politically correct may trump factually correct, but in the real world, all lunches must be paid for."
China is the natural master of Asia, NOT the US! Such neocolonial nostalgia is disgusting and no wonder the ChiComs are pissed when it is expressed!
China is tough enough to help fight radical Islam. China is progressing at an amazing pace, so the old idea of preparing for confrontation is silly.
We should be cooperating to carve out influence instead of competing. We have mutual cultural enemies in the Jihadists.
Re:I predict the next US invasion will be Madagasc (Score:3, Insightful)
"Future wars will be fought not about oil but rare earth materials."
Nonsense. The model for getting those already exists in Africa, where one pays the locals what the market will bear and they handle the light work,
War disrupts mining, while unconventional logistics route around inconvenient situations.
Re:and why not ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The WTO doesn't levy fines, it authorizes retaliatory tariffs. You know what that sort of thing does to an export-based economy?
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
All the points you mentioned are factually correct and I'm not politically correct enough to disagree with that.
It will however mean a huge loss of influence, leading to an equal reduction in trade and wealth influx and also require the forfeit of several of our ideals of humanity, civilization, freedom, democracy and all that.
I don't know if we're ready to sacrifice our holy cows just yet. Ironically, the refusal to deny or cut back on any of our holy ideas is what brought us the wealth in the first place AND then squandered it.
Now excuse me while I start flogging myself to relieve me of my White Guilt again.
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you propose lowing our standards to those of China?
That's not fighting back. That's capitulation.
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also,
Are you seriously proposing that the rich (who pay more taxes) have more votes than ordinary people?
Are you out of your blasted mind? Concentration of power in the hands of a monied few is the root cause of our present political disease.
Re:and why not ? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm thinking... wind turbines, WTF? Wind power is fundamentally old technology; why is the new supposedly-greener generation dependent on stuff the old generation wasn't??
Yes, I keep hearing this claim lately and my first reaction was the same as yours, surely non-green electrical generators and motors require good magnets?
Also TFA is complete bullshit, China cannot corner the Neodymium market [wikipedia.org]:- "The main mining areas are China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia; and reserves of neodymium are estimated at about 8 million tonnes. Although it belongs to "rare earth metals," neodymium is not rare at all - its abundance in the Earth crust is about 38 mg/kg,, which is the second among rare-earth elements after cerium. The world production of neodymium is about 7,000 tonnes per year."
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:and why not ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise, Canada wouldn't create a wood shortage if they announced that they will no longer sell logs but instead sell only kiln-dried boards.
And we (Canada) are wasting our economy with such a high proportion of our exports being raw materials (I think it's something like 90%), instead of refining/processing them within our borders before export, thus creating jobs (and higher-level ones to boot).
China might have fewer restraints than Canada (Free Trade agreements and so on), but in terms of economic growth, they're doing it right.
- RG>
Re:and why not ? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Also TFA is complete bullshit, China cannot corner the Neodymium market:"
While that statement is true, you are distracting from the real issue. China is indeed striving to corner strategic mineral markets, and it's not "news".
http://www.asianresearch.org/articles/3124.html [asianresearch.org] 2008 article which points out China's growing presence in the African mineral trade market.
http://www.chinamining.org/Companies/2009-03-26/1238054106d22981.html [chinamining.org] March 2009 article about China's growing presence in the common metals market, with passing reference to strategic metals.
http://www.domain-b.com/industry/Mining/20090327_australia_rejects.html [domain-b.com] March 2009 story about China making a bid to take over Australian mining.
http://english.cri.cn/7146/2009/01/08/1481s441134.htm [english.cri.cn] January 2009 More to the point of this thread on slashdot, China is regulating the mining and export of strategic metals.
And, of course, this all goes back to their 10-year plans, and their bid to dominate the world, economically, politically, and militarily - the "Assassin's Mace". People with the slightest clue are worried about neodymium - but they are still missing the "big picture". That damned Assassin's Mace is a working plan, that is moving ahead, while the rest of the world sleeps.
The world economy won't improve, so long as China is waging an economic war, and we don't even realize it.