The militarists must be having a wonderful time: it seems there's SO MUCH to go to war over these days.

What we'll have to do is what we've been doing for quite a while now (like with steel):  recycle :3  Gotta keep those Hybrid and electric vehicles a'comin!

Here's something fun from Newscientist magazine

What I also found interesting is that while China currently controls these minerals, there was no need for that situation.  Apparently they are found elsewhere, even in Canada, but other countries, including ourselves, have been so focused on gas and oil that the not so sleeping dragon managed to corner the market.

Now I may be wrong, wouldn't be the first time, but while Canadians may be willing to take the bus to work, would they give up their cheap electronics?  Never!

LB

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

     Friedrich Nietzsche

Oh yea, well we have, um , um ..........................snow!

Don't forget such things as hybrid and electric cars, wind turbines, MRI machines, LEDs (green light sources in Africa) and catalytic converters, m'dear. 

Quite a bit of this 'green technology' that it seems the world is adopting needs things like Rare Earths...

It seems that everything has a cost.  And it gets very complicated with people,  particularly when soverignity enters the picture...

Scientific American article.  Mine rare earths, pollute the environment; ok, stop that, that is bad, but then, where do we get rare earths from?  Tis a complex web of costs...

Nothing in life is free, as they say. 

I guess what I find amusing, not in the 'belly laugh ha, ha' way but in the 'shake my head' way, is that one would think that 'the powers that be' would have realized that allowing any one nation to capture control of a commodity is, uh, not very economically sound.  I see it as one more example of ignoring both past and future that ends up raising the cost for the present moment....

Canada is three decades behind China in developing the rare earth industry, Jones said, because 30 years ago, China saw the potential and dramatically increased production.

      CBCNews, February 2010

Thank you for the article Innana.  It only adds to my head shaking as I  ponder the question:  if instead of ignoring the situation and relying on the Chinese to pollute their environment, would the  past 30 years have provided a cleaner mining method for a key element of Green Technology?

What a fascinating article, Inanna - thanks for sharing!

It worries me, however, that rare earth may become an element so high in demand that mining it and repossessing recycled bits of it will become more important than finding alternatives.

The way I see it is that many forms of 'green' energy are still very much in progress.  Wind, for example, is nowhere near the efficiency it needs to be to be considered an 'alternate' source.  Solar panels are not collecting as much as they could.  Nuclear plants (if even considered green) are still responsible for radioactive waste that will be ecologically detrimental for eons.  Electric cars still depend on batteries, which depend on these rare earths.  These should be considered steps towards other alternatives, not goals. 

And knowing our thirst for technological developments, I imagine it won't take long to make solar panels that are 15x more efficient than they are today.  Or turbines that don't depend on fossil fuels.  Or other incredible discoveries we can't predict.  But until then, I have a huge fear that our oil/gas dependency will not change.  Our craving for new technology (like iPhones and GPS systems) will not diminish.  Something's going to have to give... and I'm hoping it isn't going to be our planet.

There are always costs.  China tries to keep its population down, look what happens, too few women and too many men.  Give women more choice with their fertility and population growth goes to zero or below.  Invent a wonderful substance that is chemically inert and thermally stable that can be utilized in a wide array of uses, but the side effect is that it happens to destroy the ozone.

Popular Mechanics Article "Debunking the Top 10 Energy Myths"

So the funny thing is that, depending on one's BS, there are costs that are acceptable and costs that aren't acceptable.  I'm wondering if there is one series of costs that can be acceptable to everyone and, if not, how to deal with these conflicting ideas?

Such is the human condition.

THIS.  I agree completely, Inanna, that there are costs attached to everything.  Perhaps we should be thinking as a global whole as to which costs we can all agree on, and work from there.  This 'out for ourselves' perspective is only going to speed up the inevitable draining of resources everywhere.  Not to mention make everyone hoard them the minute we start scraping the bottom of the barrel - and that definitely won't end peacefully.

I know.  This is going to (has been) annoy such groups as the "Unregulated market" crowd and the "Nature is divine and shall not be polluted at all" crowd.  This is how I see that to survive, we are all going to have to actually practice agape.  There's so much going on in the world that it is madness -- like Babel :3  We have a powerful environmental movement that is heavily influenced by Marxists and anticorporatism.  It seems we are living in a world that is being created for the likes of the fundamental units being Corporations.  We have this fierce fundamentalism that is going around, people forcing their self-creative acts on each other.  We have the internet, which is still a new thing, which has a great capacity to get us practicing agape and get involved in the intentional evolution of our planet, but as it is right now it is controlled in a top-down fashion by a minority of people.  We have countries that are still living under the 'horrors of history'.  We still have great portions of humanity's population living in poverty, without fresh drinking water and still affected by needless diseases.

I guess humanity has a lot to keep it busy :3

We have energy for all within our grasp...

National Geographic blog aboot...Cell Phones...

InannaWhimsey, you'll like this one too...

Oil-sands report criticizes all stakeholders 
 

 Most readers seem to be missing the context--this is an action China took to the detriment of Japan (who are big manufacturers of goods using the rare earths).   The rest of the world is just collateral damage.

The situation in east Asia is looking a little threatening, with China now determined to assert its position and North Korea apparently going bonkers.  

There are various disputes going on over small islands here and there (also between Japan and Russia).   

The whole global balance of power is shifting.    Keep watching.