

The hand giveth, the hand taketh away




Rare earth metals
China controls 97 percent of the world's rare earth metal production.
[Source: Wikimedia Commons]







Source: AP

Comments     Threshold


RE: Tree hugging retards.
By Solandri on 10/21/2011 2:12:30 AM , Rating: 2
Agreed it had nothing to do with environmentalists. However, it was good economic policy. Someone was willing to sell us their rare earths for much cheaper than it cost us to mine ours. Better to buy theirs and save ours for later. Mining and refining aren't exactly cutting edge technology, so there was literally nothing to lose by doing so.

A few mining companies who paid for land leases for those rare earth mines got burned, but the U.S. lost practically nothing. If there was a screwup, it was not stockpiling enough of those purchased rare earths to tide us over until we could get our own mining and production up to speed.

RE: Tree hugging retards.
By mindless1 on 10/21/2011 12:24:30 PM , Rating: 3
We can't really consider that a "screwup". We depend on MANY foreign supplies/etc, to stockpile them all to that scale of reserve would be a large economic burden.

While in hindsight we could idealize that we're "saving ours for later", that's not really the case at all. It was simply a matter of it not being cost effective to pay more to mine than it costs for the ore constituents... but you already stated as much.

It did have to do with environmental issues though, that makes it more costly to process in countries with stricter regulations.

