China’s rare earth grab isn’t our problem — it’s Japan’s

Over at the New York Times, I’m part of a panel discussing whether the United States needs to re-create a homegrown rare-earths industry even though such mining can be highly polluting. One point I make is that so many companies are responding to China’s actions that we are actually in danger of a rare-earths bubble in a few years. The trick will be bridging the gap between the current shortage – in which China enjoys a near monopoly — and a future period of abundance.  Reuters raises the same point in an interview with a clutch of experts. One answer seems likely to be found in countries like South Korea, which says it has found a new rare earths deposit.

There has been talk that China is going to further tighten rare earth exports next year. On Friday, Trade Minister Chen Deming sought to tamp down the alarm by saying that exports will remain the same in 2011 as this year. But that served to confuse the situation as just three days earlier a ministry spokesman said the exports will be cut slightly in 2011. China meanwhile is also mulling tighter environmental rules governing rare earth mining.

I emailed a couple of experts in the field asking about the wisdom of a push for U.S.-produced rare earths. David Trueman, a Canadian geologist who has been specializing in rare earths for three decades, said that one American company, Molycorp., has wrongly drummed up worry of a strategic military failure without a U.S. supply. He says that neodymium — which the military needs for magnets — does not have "a stressed supply":

Molycorp is trying to raise federal funds to help it re-open its rare-earths mine in the Mojave Desert. Molycorp has been using hysteria to finance itself back into production. It has been doing this because it sells stock, and the principles of the company get rich. The outstanding question is whether California will give them a mining permit.

Trueman says that the rare earths supply is in the right place given where they are used the most: in China, Japan, and South Korea, which make the lion’s share of the world’s flat screen TVs, cell phones, and smart phones. "Is there an activity left in the States that needs rare-earth oxides?" Trueman asked. "The countries at risk are Japan and South Korea."

I also emailed Jack Lifton, a rare-earths specialist and director of Technology Metals Research. He said that the environmental danger of rare earths mining has been exaggerated.

It’s a news media generated fantasy that the production of rare earths, in general, cannot be environmentally friendly. This tale has been spun out the fact that Chinese rare earth mining has up until now been environmentally unfriendly and decidedly primitive by American standards. Is gold mining "dirty" because historically in developed countries and unfortunately currently in remote parts of countries where the rule of law is weak gold was (is) recovered by amalgamation with liquid mercury metal followed by boiling off the mercury to recover the gold? People are dying agonizing deaths from mercury poisoning so Barbra and Michelle can wear gold bangles.

This "environmental concern" is ironic, because without the rare earths we won’t be going green any time soon. If there is no compromise between knee-jerk activism, as exemplified by California and its obtuse and hypocritical legislators, then we will leave the benefits of the green revolution for our Chinese friends to enjoy because we are willing to take no risk at all of any negative impact whatsoever to preserve the fantasy of an eternally stable environment when, in fact we live in a dynamic world of constantly changing radiation background, temperature, species extinction, and wild variations in precipitation the history of which beyond a paltry century of record-keeping we can only guess at and the future of which we know nothing at all about.

We have now reached the point that every politician dreads; it’s time to make a decision! Green future or not. Rare earth mining with every possible safeguard for health and the environment, or a society locked in the present forever watching other societies go green as we go black?