The Rare Earth Conundrum | Hacker News Reader

The Rare Earth Conundrum

freakonomics.com

4 pointsrobg9 comments

"Ninety-five percent of the world’s output of rare-earth metals today comes from one country: China."

These are some awesomely alarmist weasel words. Please note, that doesn't say where 95% of the actual reserves are. Just where stuff is currently produced. (And the history of that is basically China Walmarting the market, by undercutting competitors until they folded and now they're jacking up the price, like the good totalitarian capitalists they've learned to be from Western resource companies).

Let me quote from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element#Geological_d... ):

As a result of the increased demand and tightening restrictions on exports of the metals from China, searches for alternative sources in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Greenland, and the United States are ongoing.[20] Mines in these countries were closed when China undercut world prices in the 1990s, and it will take a few years to restart production as there are many barriers to entry.[16]

I agree, one would assume an economist would have this basic understanding of supply and demand.

There are the regulatory and market aspects. Would you want to make a major investment in U.S. development, right now? Or elsewhere, with the Chinese machine as competitors?

There may be plenty of reserves. If other polities/economies can't get their act together to develop them, you still have a crisis.

These days, the U.S. can't even manage its budget (not without a cr-pload of manipulative hysterics). I'm not altogether optimistic.

Separately, they are messy projects. I hope we won't be forced into a "race to the bottom" in terms of ecological impacts.

As usual, the Freakonomics brand name stands for an idea that seems sensible and provocatively contrarian on cursory examination, but fails hold up when you dig into the facts. There are some issues with the current rare earths supply, but most commentators believe they are transient and will disappear now that prices have risen to the point that production makes economic sense.

One of the many inconvenient truths about electric cars. We're trading dependence on oil with dependence of rare earth metals.

The two do not compare in the least.

Dependence on oil has direct costs in extraction, and high potential for environmental disaster associated with it. Then, on top of that, there are ongoing costs for physical distribution of fuel, and then after all of that additional environmental consequences of using the fuel.

Rare earth metals are a component that are extracted from the ground, manufactured into the structures we need for electric cars, and then put in the cars until the component wears out.

So, sure, long as we need stuff, you're never going to get rid of dependence on everything. But lets have a reasonable sense of proportion here.

In other words: it's a good trade.

Many electric car components can be be made without resorting to "rare earth" metals, and have successfully been implemented by Tesla, for example, which supposedly doesn't use these metals at all.

http://www.economist.com/node/18750574

Agreed. Permanent magnet synchronous motors are just one kind of traction motor. There are alternatives out there that don't require rare earth magnets. See this nice table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_motor#Categorization

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