Rare earths are used in a wide range of consumer products: the engines of the iPhone electric cars, batteries rechargeable technology found in hybrid cars, from television screens or computer monitors lasers, through fiber optics, superconductors, magnets, catalytic converters, fluorescent lamps, are used in technologies such as magnetic refrigeration, wind turbine, and massively, even in the military.
China, which controls about 97% of world production over the past twelve months has reduced exports by almost half. In a scenario of competitive devaluation of the various countries seeking to depress their currencies to export more and to sustain growth, with the side effect of an appreciation of raw materials and therefore inflation, it could trigger a violent rise in the cost of these rare elements, which inevitably has repercussions the final consumer.
What are Rare Earth? In English "rare earth elements" or "rare earth metals" are a group of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table curious names such as lutetium, yttrium, scandium, europium or neodymium. Are the raw materials of the future for excellence, those at the base of most promising technologies of the twenty-first century, one of all renewable energies (not those we know now, as we know them now), which should "ferry" to a future more "green" and sustainable. The major consumers are China and Japan and the world demand for these items is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, such as that of dysprosium, terbium, neodymium, praseodymium and europium is estimated to increase by a minimum 8% per year, and only with respect to the use of these elements in electric vehicles in the field studies suggest increases of 790% over the next five years. A
their quality mineral, especially popular in the military is engaged in magnetism resistant to high temperatures. But the most interesting strategic
most striking is that 97% of global production of these materials comes from China, and Beijing shows every intention of using its market power in this field to force the rest of the world to accept their conditions and that is not only a transfer net capital, but also work and especially trade secrets to the West from the People's Republic.
"The balance of power in this field are all in favor of China," says a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the U.S., and without these 17 rare earth elements, there is nothing of all that today gives hope to 'industry's most advanced Philips, Siemens, Nokia, Toyota, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Sony, Canon, no large multinational industrial democracies could produce their goods.
According to reports from the GAO report to the U.S. Senate, the monopoly in Beijing in this area is actually the result of foresight government rather than the allocation of raw materials. In fact, China is 37% of known reserves of these 17 items, 18% in the former USSR, the United States 12%. But Russia has the means to extract and America in the last 12 years has blocked (in Mountain Pass, California) in the name of environmental protection.
The fact rare minerals are often combined with radioactive substances and the mines pollute far: in a democracy nobody wants, nobody wants to pay the environmental and social costs. Technologies are needed to protect miners and technologies to limit pollution from the high extraction, high investment, complex permissions, everything in fact China has never been concerned, and for this reason that controls 97% of the world, because no one else is willing to extract these conditions ...
... at least in the West. And 'in fact, news of a few months ago the "discovery" in Afghanistan is an important mineral deposit worth about one trillion dollars. The
poterebbe Afghanistan become the world's largest producer of copper and iron, but would also provide large deposits of niobium, a metal used in the production of superconductors, rare earth and large deposits of gold in the Pashtun areas of southern problems.
Lithium instead would be in large quantities in the salt lakes of western Afghanistan and the first analysis in an area of \u200b\u200bthe province of Ghazni revealed the presence of lithium levels as those of Bolivia.
Perhaps not surprisingly, soon after the announcement of the discovery of mining, it reappeared immediately the ghost of Osama bin Laden to threaten the American invaders and Barack Obama, but certainly no coincidence that the announcement of the discovery of the immense treasure is mine was given directly by General David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, who told the New York Times: "Here is an awesome potential. There are many "ifs", but I think it is potentially extremely important. "
A "we" can not know nothing but what you want to say, the rest you can only try to reconstruct, perhaps wrongly, a very difficult puzzle with many pieces missing, a question, and one certainty: Afghanistan is not the West ... and at this point is natural to wonder: "Maybe someone already knew what was there?"
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