Sunday, May 10, 2009

Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the effort to keep the world from getting hotter than it already is.

Mountain Pass’s mine contains a rare-earth ore that yields neodymium, the pixie dust of green tech—necessary for the lightweight permanent magnets that make Prius motors zoom and for the generators that give wind turbines their electrical buzz. In fact, if we are going to make even a few million of the hybrid and electric cars that are supposed to help rescue the planet from global warming, we will need to double production of neodymium in short order.

But in 2006, nearly all of the world’s roughly 137,000-ton supply of rare-earth oxides came from China. And over the past few years, China has cut exports to nurture its own permanent-magnet industry, sending the price of neodymium oxide to a high of $60 a kilo in 2007. This worries analysts like Irving Mintzer, a senior adviser to the Potomac Energy Fund who sees shortages stifling clean-tech industry, and worse. “If we don’t think this through, we could be trading a troubling dependence on Middle Eastern oil for a troubling dependence on Chinese neodymium.”

Read it all here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/hybrid-cars-minerals

3 comments:

  1. Looks like we'll be out of the frying pan and into the fire. China already owns us with all of our debt that they carry. Now we will be even more beholden to the Chinese for energy? Do these policy makers ever think anything through? Or does only the agenda matter?

    I'm glad my daughter is learning Mandarin in school.

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  2. One of the biggest lies today is that people can somehow live on earth without ever using any resources or impacting the earth is any way.

    I have no problem wit hnew technologies. I have no problem with education or market forces and public opinion playing on companies and individuals. I do have a problem with government using force to bring about change.

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  3. MICH: "One of the biggest lies today is that people can somehow live on earth without ever using any resources or impacting the earth is any way."

    I think one of the biggest lies today is *saying that anyone ever said* that people can somehow live on earth without ever using any resources or impacting the earth in any way.

    Who has ever said this Michelle?

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