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April 27, 2022
It's Crucial To Understand The Globalists Interest In 'China's Secret Weapon', Rare Earth Metals, And Their Use In Current And Future Technologies - China Dominates The Industry
Way back in the middle of February, we did a column on the phenomenon of electric cars and uncontrollable fires that the lithium batteries used in modern electric cars cause and now we are hearing that electric bicycles suffer from the same malady. No surprise, as the batteries are the same, just fewer of them, and any internal short will cause a fire and the electrolyte in them is very highly flammable when in contact with water, or even air with some complaints that they just blow up. “Electric Bike Batteries Have Been Exploding, Causing Property Damage, Injuring and Killing People” sang out one headline and the first video below shows four E-bike fires in NYC in one day reported on April 22nd this year, just a few days ago. The link above shows many videos of burning/exploding bikes including one in an occupied elevator and others detailing deaths they caused. But that is not the thrust of this particular article; just a quick catch-up of what is going on with them. Evidently work on solid state lithium batteries is supposedly going to quell those fires as it is the liquid electrolyte that is the guilty component, but they are slow in coming to fruition thus far.
What seems much worse is the damage to our environment that is done mining for those rare earth metals and the refining processes required that are the real problem. And that problem is not going to go away but will get far worse as the push to eliminate carbon fueled energy is pushed more and more. With all of the evil and destruction going on in this world at the present time, it may seem odd that I do a story on rare earth production, but that is only one more aspect of the destruction of this earth caused by the tremendous evil and stupidity of the so called elites that drive it. Let’s look first at a secondary problem as given in an NIH article in PubMed titled “Effects of contaminated surface water and groundwater from a rare earth mining area on the biology and the physiology of Sprague-Dawley rats” and although there is only an abstract printed, they have the links to the full study and other studies such as water, sediment and agricultural soil contamination from rare earth mining, so our government is well aware of the damage that it is doing. And we may assume all of the little “me too” tofu eating earth child Tesla drivers as well as old age Subaru hippies and Mocha health tea sippers wearing Obama t-shirts also know of the massive sacrifice of our environment for the sake of saving our environment (what an oxymoronic phrase that is) from the evils of the earth generated coal, petroleum and natural gas energy sources that work so well for us, especially with the latest pollution controls as mandated in the USA are proving so effective. We should not hold them to the high standard that they demand we be held to; that would not be “equitable” using their parlance.
While communist China is the world’s leading producer of rare earth metals, the USA is trying to up production even though many studies show we do not have the resources in our own nation that we can mine. The first graphic above shows that the distribution of rare earth metals does not favor us; even combined with Canada we have only about 2% of the world’s resources. China (37.9%), Vietnam (18.9%) and India (5.9%) have about 2/3rds of the world supply while even Russia at 10.32% dwarfs us. Our nearest source on this half of the world is Brazil with 18.1% and China is actively destroying rain forest to get at it and still the twinkled toed “save the rainforest” crowd loudly proclaim we MUST drive electric vehicles to save the planet from the deadly travesty of melted polar ice caps, which in fact are not melting. Even Australia has nearly triple what the US has at 3.5%, and yes China is after theirs as well. In 2020 China produced 85% of the worlds refined rare earth metals even though their production of them went from 92% in 2010 down to 58% in 2020. According to Mining, “In the rare earth industry, China’s dominance has been no accident. Years of research and industrial policy helped the nation develop a superior position in the market, and now the country has the ability to control production and the global availability of these valuable metals.
This tight control of the supply of these important metals has the world searching for their own supplies” and is why the comparative production has fallen since 2010, but their control of those metals has not as there are only six companies in China allowed to produce refined rare metals. The US Geological Survey put it this way. “Because of their unique special chemical properties, many of the metals in the group of rare earth elements (REEs) have essential applications in 21st century technologies. Examples of products that use REEs are cell phones, computers, fluorescent and light-emitting-diode lights, flat-screen television and computer monitors, and in high-strength magnets used by clean energy technologies such as the generators of wind turbines and batteries of hybrid and electric vehicles. REEs are used in many defense applications, such as in components of jet engines, missile guidance systems, antimissile defense systems, satellites, and communication systems.
The rare earth elements have become vital to manufacturing numerous high-tech products, which has been accompanied by a large increase in their demand. At the same time, there has been concern by the United States and many other Nations about the near-monopoly of mining, processing, and supply of REEs from one Nation, China.” And that concern is critical. Even with nearly 38% of the world’s rare earth metals, China claims they are worried about running out which is ridiculous but shows how they wish to choke the world’s supplies to maintain control of them. According to that Wired article, “The current near-monopoly China holds on rare earth minerals came as a result of the country massively ramping up its production levels through the 1980s and 1990s. By the time China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 its exports of rare earth minerals had grown so large, and worldwide prices plunged to new lows, that mines around the rest of the world were forced out of business.”
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Defense News said a couple years ago that lessons were learned from the collapse of America’s rare earth mining, “Out in the Mojave Desert in California lies the Mountain Pass mine, once the world’s foremost supplier of valuable rare earth minerals — 17 elements deemed critical to modern society. In an age where China controls 80 percent of the global output of these minerals, it is strange to believe that a once-dominant source sits within the United States.” They continued on with the part I am more interested in at this point of the story; “In 1952, Mountain Pass [California] opened. First explored as a uranium deposit, it soon supplied rare earths for the electronic needs of the Cold War economy. Until the 1990s, it stood alone as the only major source of rare earths worldwide.
By 2002, however, the mine was defunct. In the eyes of the U.S. government and major manufacturers, it no longer made sense to acquire rare earths from a U.S. source subject to stringent environmental regulations. Instead, the hard business of extracting useful minerals was exported to other countries, where environmental damage was safely out of sight. China happily obliged, allowing environmental harm to proliferate so long as the costs of rare earth mining were kept down.”
So we exported our toxic production systems to China and they destroyed their environment while our more restrictive environmental laws protected us, but who seems to give a damn what happens to the Chinese people? Yale school of the environment said “Beginning in the 1990s, rare earth mining took off in this region, located in Southeast China about 300 miles north of Hong Kong. As China began to produce more smartphones, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other high-tech products requiring rare earth elements, the mining intensified. But the removal of these elements from the earth’s crust, using a mix of water and chemicals, caused extensive water and soil pollution.” And although China now claims they are cleaning things up in their own backyard, which does not seem to extend to their operations in other nations. “Tougher regulations governing rare earth mining and in-situ leaching operations were introduced in 2016, but by then significant damage had been done” and that applies to China, not elsewhere. It seems they learned from us, and now they do not give a damn what happens elsewhere either.
One year ago, CNBC had an article about the increases in US production “The United States has made previous attempts to reemerge as a dominant player in a rare earths supply chain that is responsible for some of the most important materials involved in electric vehicle production, battery making, renewable energy systems and technology manufacturing.” They noted that under Biden there has been a renewed effort to produce our own rare earth metals, and “Biden’s sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure legislation seeks to remake the power and transportation markets in the U.S. and rebuild the country’s semiconductor industry.” And all of that requires the rare earth metals while climate envoy John Kerry is supposed to care for our environment in all of this, with his history do not bet on anything of the sort. Money rules and rules must account for that.
“While companies like Lynas and MP Materials are eager to ramp up the domestic supply chains, extracting rare earths is a difficult process due to a combination of environmental, technical and political factors. Many regions, including the European Union, have an abundance of these resources but lack the expertise that other countries like China have…. Many rare earth elements reside among mineral deposits with radioactive materials that can leach into the water table. Mining, processing and disposal can also contribute to ecosystem disruption and release hazardous byproducts into the atmosphere….. In recent years, Lynas came under scrutiny from activists and the Malaysian government for radioactive waste that it produces as part of its enrichment process….” And Lynas is an American rare earth production company.
A year plus ago, Forbes actually put the matter into a good perspective when they said “The widespread view that fossil fuels are “dirty” and renewables such as wind and solar energy and electric vehicles are “clean” has become a fixture of mainstream media and policy assumptions across the political spectrum in developed countries, perhaps with the exception of the Trump-led US administration. Indeed the ultimate question we are led to believe is how quickly can enlightened Western governments, led by an alleged scientific consensus, “decarbonize” with clean energy in a race to save the world from impending climate catastrophe. The ‘net zero by 2050’ mantra, calling for carbon emissions to be completely mitigated within three decades, is now the clarion call by governments and intergovernmental agencies around the developed world”. They continued on with this insightful view that “if one looks under the hood of “clean energy” battery-driven EVs, the dirt found would surprise most. The most important component in the EV is the lithium-ion rechargeable battery which relies on critical mineral commodities such as cobalt, graphite, lithium, and manganese. Tracing the source of these minerals, in what is called “full-cycle economics”, it becomes apparent that EVs create a trail of dirt from the mining and processing of minerals upstream.” They then quoted Professor Kelly from the university of Cambridge’s school of technology as saying “if we replace all of the UK vehicle fleet with EVs, assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation batteries, we would need the following materials: about twice the annual global production of cobalt; three quarters of the world’s production lithium carbonate; nearly the entire world production of neodymium; and more than half the world’s production of copper in 2018.” That was in 2018 not now, and that is only in the UK, not the rest of the world. The goal for replacing all carbon fueled cars (and trucks?) by 2030 is totally unrealistic, or even possible. It is a fabrication of the lefts sick minds and nothing else. To equip the whole world with electric vehicles is absolutely impossible using the worlds known reserves of those metals mentioned plus so many others not mentioned.
And all of that is supposed to replace vehicles that are now very clean with current technology using the replenishable reserves of the petroleum produced deep inside of the earth using a process called an adiabatic process. That is why old wells fill up from the bottom; why oil is found miles below where the dead dinosaurs end, why it is produced from areas that never had massive flora and fauna that could have produced the quantities of it; why it is one of God’s great gifts to man as a resource to make man’s life here better and this earth into a paradise if used properly. Instead, the idiots that are in charge do everything they can to destroy what is left of our natural beauty and pretend they are making things better. Yeh, 6uild 6ack 6etter is their stated goal while exactly the opposite is what is happening.
As that Forbes article said, “Proponents of EVs might counter by saying that despite these evident environmental and social problems associated with mining in many third world countries, the case remains that EVs help reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with the internal combustion engines run on gasoline and diesel fuels. According to the reigning climate change narrative, it is after all carbon dioxide emissions that are threatening environmental catastrophe on a global scale. For the sake of saving the world, the climate crusaders of the richer nations might be willing to ignore the local pollution and human rights violations involved in mining for minerals and rare earths in Africa, China, Latin America and elsewhere.” That is just what I mentioned above about we deceived China by letting them destroy their environment, and then they learned from us and now do the same elsewhere. This is the gross hypocrisy of the satanic leftists that run things now and a great shame to this once great nation. As well as the fact that “if an EV is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the EV will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles.”
Have we mentioned the costs for the production of enough power to charge those vehicles? No? How about the generation of electricity during the day while that charging will be at night, or the costs for solar panels that only last about 15 years in sufficient power generating efficiency capacities and then must be replaced, or the rare earth metals used to produce them or the destructions in hail storms of the glass used or the destruction of the eco-systems where they are laid out or the huge inefficiencies in the conversions required to get it into the form needed for transmission or so many other drawbacks.
Some other great articles from both normal and leftist sources that can be considered if you are not yet convinced of the horrible disaster that rare earth mining is can be found in the following articles among so many that are out on the web and elsewhere;
And many more – these stories go back many years, even decades. They know full well what harm they are doing.
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