fucking clickbait titles
"It turns out the United States is almost entirely dependent on foreign suppliers for rare earth metals. More importantly, it's almost entirely dependent on China specifically for rare earth metals that have been processed into a final and usable form.
Basically, if China really wanted to mess with America, it could just clamp down on these exports."
Source in the source to give more context on how this all started:
Rare Earth Elements
the fucked up thing is that if we just recycled our own electronics, we wouldn't even need them as much
Isn't it a bit redundant to day China can win a tradewar when a tradewar is basically never a win for anybody.
The one who started will loose out the most, the other party reacting to it will loose out as well.
Overall its just a pretty stupid thing to do as history has shown before.
This one started by Trump is even more none sense because it is basically started because Trump felt like it or read it on Fox News.
China is already holding back, the first reaction tariffs are mild compared to what they can do even outside of rare earth metals.
It is just stupid to watch this hissy fit by Trump
I think there's a certain degree of feasibility here preventing this
It's even stupider than that.
Trump started the whole thing by slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum, back in January. That pissed off the EU and Canada (Canada got an exception before it took effect but that wasn't stated on announcement).
If Trump was planning a trade war with China, the thing to do would be gather allies to help us, not piss off all the countries that could have helped us. A trade war of US versus China is a lot harder to win than a trade war of US, Canada, UK, the EU, Australia, Japan and Korea, versus China.
China has actually been economically abusive. They need to be forced to play by the same rules. No more dumping goods at below cost, no more lax labor laws. It's been a problem for years. A trade war, while painful, is ultimately necessary - but Trump seems to be doing his best to lose. We're not hitting China where it hurts them, we're not enlisting allies, we've completely forfeited any PR victory because Trump's framed it as "fuck the rest of the world and even most of America, this is good for a handful of people who voted for me".
Trump is systematically damaging US interests abroad and alienating your economic and military allies. I wonder who could have put him up to that?
tax the rice, trade war now
Russia isn't a superpower, by any reasonable definition of the word. A superpower is one that is able to project power globally - every country, everywhere, has to consider the superpower in their strategies.
During the Cold War, pretty much every nation on Earth aligned themselves with a superpower - you were either a US ally, or a USSR ally, or you were in the middle of a civil war with a faction allied with either side. That is no longer true.
Russia has regional power. They are a military threat to neighbors - as Ukraine has sadly learned. They have very limited ability to project military power, as evidenced in Syria. They wield economic power only by virtue of their oil industry, and Europe's dependence on it - but that is limited and dwindling rapidly. Russia has no allies worth speaking of - the CIS is both less tight, and less powerful, than NATO or the EU. Other than Russia, none of the CIS states have any sort of global influence. Nobody considers the #2 country in CIS, Kazakhstan, to be even remotely on par with the #2 country in NATO, the UK.
Russia has two things that matter on the global stage right now. They're a nuclear power, which basically protects them from military force being used to coerce them. And they have a pretty potent propaganda/intelligence machine - but that has limits. Even having placed a compromised candidate in the White House, they still can't lift the sanctions, or achieve any other significant goals.
China has global economic reach - every product-making corporation on Earth either manufactures something in China, or competes with someone who manufactures in China. Their military is a regional powerhouse - but only regional, although they're building towards it. They're courting allies in Africa, which is a long game but if Nigeria ends up as the next South Korea, that'll have been a good play. They're not a superpower yet but they're ascending, while it's hard to see Russia as anything but collapsing.
Demand for devices containing rare-earth metals is only going to increase, so we're going to need more material, and I doubt we can get all we need from recycling, especially when you consider idiots who just throw away old electronics instead of recycling them.
I shudder to think how much lead, cadmium, and mercury are slowly making their way towards our already dwindling water-table as we speak...
But at any rate, we'd basically have to go full turbo-prospector mode in our landfills to get them back, and even then, it's not going to be enough to keep up with demand I feel, not for the cost. Our only other bet would be to either:
1) Find another supplier (which you'd think we'd have found one already)
2) Buy second-hand from countries whose leaders haven't done everything in their power to piss in China's mouth (expensive, and still effectively paying China for the materials_
3) Mine outer space (AHAHAHAHAHAHAnot happenin')
There's actually a lot of sources for rare-earth metals. A lot of mines were shuttered in the 90s... when China started dumping theirs onto the market for dirt cheap. Some already started gearing up to resume production in the early 2010s, when China tried to raise their prices to start turning a profit.
If China were to completely cut off their exports, they'd cause some industries to freeze up for a year or two, because restarting mining isn't fast, but things would be moving back to normal by 2020. Recycling could be a way to ameliorate things during that gap - it wouldn't be a full replacement but it would make it hurt less, and it only has to last five years, max, which is perfectly feasible when there's fifty years' worth of garbage.
Still going to see the prices of devices reliant on rare-earth metals to shoot straight up like the Saturn-fuckin'-V.
Sure, there would be a price increase - but the demand is generally pretty elastic.
Hybrid/electric car motors, BEV batteries, and FCEV fuel cells? The price rise will be dampened by people buying ICE cars instead. Wind turbine generators? Price rise dampened by building PV panels instead, which just use silicon.
Hard drives are similarly buoyed by SSDs. Portable electronics like smartphones are already seeing a sales slump because advertizers can't convince people to spend money to replace what they already have. And both of those are, AIUI, pretty low-volume uses, since each product only uses a tiny amount in total.
On top of that, there's already some non-Chinese exporters. They're only 80% of the market - in the immediate aftermath of an export freeze, Australia would become the dominant supplier, and might be able to quickly increase production to start alleviating things within a few months, half a year.
This would absolutely not be like the 70s oil crises. Rare earth metals are not a daily requirement for modern life. It would not be instant victory for China - in fact, I question whether it would even be to China's advantage in the long run.
That's it? if china cut their supply, first off the WTO would cry afoul, second off, supplies in the US might last a bit, then third off, mines across the world that have been kept shuttered due to chinese price fixing would jump back into production, including the US mine.
if china really really wanted to fuck us over, they'd dump their US bonds
You can't recycle the more toxic forms we use for things like batteries.
It would jsut create a short term shortage, a slight price incrase followed by the US reevaluating it's rules on extracting radioactive minerals. Something that should already have been done.
"just use silicon"
Yes, which we get from sand. Know what else we're starting to run low on?
FUCKING SAND.
The World is Running Out of Sand
|
Science | Smithsonia..
Silicon is literally the second-most-common element of the Earth's crust, second only to oxygen. We are not going to run out of silicon.
Sand isn't even the only current source for semiconductor silicon - we also use quartzite, a pretty common rock, although we currently get our needed supply from only a few high-purity sources. And if things somehow got desperate enough, quartz (silicon dioxide) is literally the most common mineral, found in such ubiquitous rocks as granite, sandstone, and shale.
The only way we will ever be running out of silicon on Earth is if we literally strip-mine the entire planet to a depth of about a hundred kilometers.
There probably isn't much interest in a cost effective solution when it's already cheaper to just buy more from China. If push comes to shove they could probably develop a cost effective solution.
Sure, eventually
There has to be a reason to do it, because otherwise no one will be interested in it. Cash is king.
Destroying massive ecosystems in the process, yes.
The Earth is more than a Magic Raw Material ball, dude.
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