The Magic of Rare Earth Elements & the Hypocrisy of Clean Energy
What
is the purpose of the game Monopoly? To drive your opponents into
poverty so that you get rich. This is the meaning of success that we all
grew up on.
Nomads of Mongolia
Mongolia. I’ve always wanted to go there. About seven years ago, I
packed what I had into a storage unit (I’ve never been big on material
possessions, I’m a serious wanderer) and took off with a small bag, my
most important possession being my computer to write on, and began
traveling wherever I wanted to go. This didn’t mean staying in resort
hotels, it meant going off the beaten track and living in places for
periods of time, from a few months in Sucre, Bolivia, Costa Rica and the
Sahara Desert, to almost three years in Luxor, Egypt, and many places
in-between. I made it back to Phoenix, Arizona from Egypt about six
months into the pandemic.
Mongolia could well have been next on
my list. But now, with the way things are going, I wonder if I will ever
make it. I refuse to be vaccinated with an experimental gene therapy,
and the hoops one has to jump through to fly internationally have made
travel lose its appeal.
So perhaps the city of Baotou, whose name
translated means “place with deer,” will remain of mystery. The nearby
Gobi desert calls to me. I love deserts more than anything. Long ago,
the region was free of cities, inhabited by nomads. I would like to have
seen it back then. With the Industrial Revolution, Baotou became known
as “the city of steel.” Now it is known for processing rare earth
elements, metals, or minerals, mined in Bayan Obo.
Processing
rare earth elements, or REEs, is a deadly and dirty business. In order
to extract the ore from the radioactive materials around it,
carcinogenic toxins like sulfates, ammonia and hydrochloric acid must be
used. It’s hard to even fathom how toxic this process is. Processing
one ton of rare earths produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste; Baotou's rare
earths enterprises produce 10m tons of wastewater per year.
A worker in the REEs processing plants of China
The
soil and groundwater are now saturated with toxic substances.
Eventually, Li had to get rid of his sick pigs, the last survivors of a
collection of cows, horses, chickens and goats, killed off by the
toxins.
Lately, I’ve become fascinated with rare earth elements. Like the
alchemists of old, their magic is in how something invaluable can be
separated and made into something valuable. In ancient times, alchemists
dreamed of turning ordinary metals into gold, fit for kings.
Now
the kings of our earth have found ways to turn these metals into
fabulous riches for themselves, beyond what anyone could imagine.
Indeed, they hold the key to the most desired goal of all: space
migration. Who knows what richest we could find to exploit out there?
It
should be of no surprise that these metals, whose processing is so
toxic, need to be known to the general public NOT as pollutants, but as
the key to ushering in an era of “clean energy.”
Most of us don’t
think much about REEs. But our modern lives would be impossible without
them. There are 17 in all, and from cellphones to missile guidance
systems, rare-earth metals are an essential component of thousands of
consumer products and military weapons.
Like Li, we also say,
“How could we have known?” Just as we couldn’t have foreseen how
addictive the drugs Big Pharma fed us would become, little did we
realize how addictive our technological devices would become, nor did we
understand the dark secrets of how they were made.
Let’s look at a few of these magical rare earth elements.
Cobalt
is known as the “goblin ore.” Long ago, when German miners fell sick
from inhaling toxic fumes while extracting the ores, they blamed it on
goblins. Cobalt is used in magnets, high speed motors and even guitar
picks.
Niobium is the “tear of the goddess.” It is named after
the Greek goddess of tears, Niobe. She was the daughter of the mythical
Tantalus, whose name was given to the metal tantalum. These two metals
are always found together in nature. The magic of niobium is that when
it is added to steel, it creates an incredible strength, far beyond its
0.1% representation of the alloy. Niobium is used in jet engines,
superconducting magnets and MRI machines.
Lithium is known as the
“prime matter.” It is a soft, silvery white alkali and the lightest and
least dense solid element. Lithium is one of three elements formed
during the Big Bang. It is said there should be 3 times as much Lithium
in the universe than there is and no one knows what happened to the rest
of it. Lithium has many uses, such as in aircraft manufacture,
batteries, optics and air purification. It is even used in mental health
as a treatment for bipolar disorder. Where would we be without it?
Rare earth elements can help build a rocket ship to space or an atomic bomb to destroy the world.
In
1939, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear
fission of uranium, identifying rare earth elements in fission products
leading to the invention of the atomic bomb. The United States built an
atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project, thanks to the expertise of
rare earth chemist, Frank Spedding. In the process of purifying the
uranium, rare earths needed to be separated and removed. Out of this
grew the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, now the U.S.
government’s premier rare earth elements research facility.
It was
fine to pursue this process for specific needs such as atomic bombs.
But on a larger scale, separating rare earths from the materials they
are embedded in is extremely difficult and costly. Moving production to
other countries that had loser controls made these products cheaper for
Americans to buy.
And that’s where China comes in.
A Forbes, March 11, 2021 article
tells us “While the extraction of these minerals is dispersed across
countries, all roads lead to China. The Asian giant has a near-monopoly
position in transforming these raw materials into usable products,
controlling roughly 80%
of the world’s rare earth production capacity, 43% of exports, and
nearly 90% of refining. Beyond REEs, China also leads global refining capacity
for lithium, cobalt and nickel, accounting for 61%, 72%, and 16%
respectively. The People’s Republic only trails Russia in nickel
refining capacity, which holds 20% of the world total.
“US nickel production was virtually nonexistent in 2020, accounting for less than 1% of the world total. In fact, the US is 50-100% dependent on imports for 28 of the 35 minerals
on the critical minerals list. Although REE deposits have been
identified in 19 states, there is only one active mine in the US. Some
95% of America’s REE imports come from China. This is a strategic
vulnerability.”
And herein lies one of the great mysteries of
REEs. If they are so necessary, why hasn’t the US done more to become
energy independent? Instead, it seems we have done the exact opposite.
It
was in 1997 that America’s leading rare earths company was sold to an
investment consortium consisting of Archibald Coz, Jr (son of the
Watergate prosecutor) and two Chinese state-owned metals firms, San Huan
New Materials and China National Nonferrous Metals Import and Export
Company. Everything moved to China at that point. The only remaining
rare earths producer was Molycorp, which owned the Mountain Pass rare
earth mine in California. That company bit the dust in 2015, however
there have been attempts to revive it, interestingly, partly funded by,
yes, you guessed it, a Chinese company.
Trump was the only United States president since Nixon to achieve what every president had promised: energy independence.
Under Trump, the U.S. relied less on foreign energy than any other time
since 1991. As a businessman not a politician, Trump recognized that we
didn’t need more talks and photo ops with world leaders making promises
they had no intention of keeping. We needed to get out of the way of
companies and let them do what they do best: produce.
In
contrast, the Biden administration is doing the opposite. For example,
even as he has cut oil production at home, he has called for
oil-producing countries to "do more." In his withdrawal from
Afghanistan, disastrous on so many levels, Biden abandoned untapped
reserves of rare-earth metals in Taliban hands. Yes, rare earth metals
are notoriously difficult to extract, however, during all those years in
Afghanistan it is interesting that no attempt ever got off the ground
to mine these metals. It will be further interesting to see what China
does with this new opportunity.
We all understand the need to
reduce use of fossil fuels. But in reducing them, all we have done is
shift to other energy needs that promise to far outstrip our cravings
for oil and natural gas, and with potentially worse consequences for the
planet. Furthermore, when making such a shift, surely our government
shouldn’t kill the economy of its own people while boosting the
economies of those it claims are our enemies?
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Colorado-based Western Energy Alliance, states, “I’ve
actually never seen an energy issue crystalize so clearly in the
American mind, as people are feeling the squeeze of high energy prices
and looking on with disbelief as this president favors OPEC+ over
American producers,”
Demand for REEs is currently outstripping supply by about 3,000 tons per year according to Julie Klinger, the author of "Rare Earth Frontiers." The US needs 10X more rare earth metals to hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle goals. As for defense, if you just take an ordinary F-35 fighter, it contains nearly 1,000 pounds of rare earths. Every cell phone and every Electric Vehicle motor needs powerful permanent magnets made from REEs.
Unlike
the West, China has never had a problem with polluting its own land or
exploiting its own people. In the West, our leaders have had to give the
appearance of caring about the planet. For Americans, we’ve been molded
into thinking that appearance is everything. And so, just as we feigned
horror over the morality of gain of function research, allowing China
to do the dirty work for us while continuing to fund it, we have done
the same with REEs.
The greed and hypocrisy of our leaders has
only seemed to grow exponentially with the necessity to hide
it—something that has proved increasingly difficult to do with the
advent of the internet. Along with hiding the truth about COVID, the
need to hide the truth about clean energy has meant that the internet is
now being regulated and access to information beyond the State
sanctioned narrative is increasingly hard to find.
There is a
brilliant new series out called Comrade Detective. The episodes are
presented as a fictional lost 1980s era Romanian television show,
commissioned by the Communist Party as propaganda against the evils of
capitalism.
Comrade Detective. Gregor is on the left and Iosef is on our right. The
woman in the middle is the United States Ambassador to Romania, who is
secretly appalled at the evil excess of the United States and is in love
with Gregor.
Two detectives, Gregor and Iosef, are the heroes of the show and they
spend all their time fighting capitalist corruption and greed in the
form of gangsters who smuggle products into Romania such as jeans, drugs
and soda.
An hilarious scene involves the game of Monopoly.
The two detectives find the game hidden in the lining of a car seat and
can’t figure out what it is. Gregor says he knows two people who can
help them, but he warns Iosif to watch out as they are crafty and
dangerous. Gregor and Iosif travel in their decrepit little car to a
prison outside of town. There they interrogate a dejected older couple
who’ve been imprisoned for betraying their country after falling under
the temptations of capitalism.
When Gregor asks them about Monopoly, this is what happens:
Male prisoner: The object of the game is to purchase property and hope that your opponent lands on the property that you own.
Gregor (confused): Why?
Female
prisoner: That way they pay you rent. The more rent you get paid, the
more money you make, the more properties you purchase.
Male
prisoner: And when your opponents have no money left and are completely
in your debt, then, and only then, do you win the game.
Iosif
(shocked and disgusted): You’re telling me that the purpose of this game
is to drive your fellow citizens into poverty so that you may get rich?
Female prisoner laughs.
Iosif: That’s diabolical!
Female prisoner shrugs: It’s just a game.
Male prisoner: Nowadays the West finds it a useful tool to indoctrinate young children into the capitalist system.
Gregor
and Iosif leave the prison in subdued silence. Iosif can tell something
is bothering Gregor. He asks Gregor how he knew about the two
criminals. Gregor confesses with loathing that they are his own parents.
He is the one who turned them in.
Iosif nods in understanding and tells Gregor he did the right thing.
The
scene is funny, but it’s also disconcerting. I’d played Monopoly a
hundred times as a kid but had never looked at it like that. How about
the game Risk? I’d been very good at killing off everyone else and
taking over the world. What if these games had really been a sinister
plot to indoctrinate youth and turn them into evil capitalists? Because,
looked at from this perspective, capitalism surely is diabolical, just
as Iosif says.
Even more diabolical, what if the ultimate purpose
had been to make children accept that only a few succeed at the expense
of everyone else because that’s the meaning of success?
Maybe
people will find my saying this about capitalism offensive, but in the
end, how is the ultimate result of capitalism any different from the
ultimate result of communism? Or fascism? Or any political ideology
ever, for that matter?
The bad guy in Comrade Detective goes around killing people wearing a Reagan mask.
On Sunday, October 31st, the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the
Parties (COP26) will begin in Glasgow, Scotland. It will last 12 days
and promises to be the largest gathering of world leaders ever to take
place on British soil. I can assure you, the conference is all for show.
It is behind the scenes that the important deals are made. And many of
them are about REEs.
Conspicuously missing will be Vladimir Putin
and Xi Jinping. But really, why should they attend? What do they have
to gain by parading about for the sake of a few media photo ops? Unlike
Western leaders, they don’t play those self-righteous games.
Western world leaders are still convinced that if they at least appear to be clean energy warriors, people will believe them.
Just
a few nights ago, some of the cream of the crop dined with Prime
Minister Boris Johnson. Among them were Bill Gates; Goldman Sachs boss,
David Solomon; JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon; Jes Staley, head
of Barclays; Larry Fink, boss of the investment firm BlackRock; Stephen
Schwarzman, the chief executive of the private equity firm Blackstone.
These
are the men who quietly run the world. The pandemic has been good to
them. Bezos and Musk weren’t at that dinner but they will be at COP26.
In their cozy little competition to rule the world, Musk just sent
Bezos a silver medal emoji on Twitter, now that Musk, as the richest
man on the planet, is worth almost $30 billion more than Bezos.
Musk
successfully sold the story that his electric vehicles are “clean”
energy because they are run with a lithium-ion rechargeable batteries
instead of dirty oil. This is a complete and utter lie. There is nothing
clean about lithium. Oh, but it will be in the future.
Elon Musk’s electric vehicles use from 100-150% more of these vital metals and REEs than cars with internal combustion engines. He tweeted
in February that “nickel is our biggest concern for scaling lithium-ion
cell production," adding that nickel production in the US is
"objectively very lame."
US nickel production was virtually nonexistent in 2020, accounting for less than 1% of the world total. Research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated
that demand for the mineral will increase by 64 percent between 2019
and 2025. It could even be more now. Canada Nickel Company claims it can
extract the metal almost carbon free, but that remains to be seen. How
much will that cost?
It will take years for the United States to
catch up with China in processing of REES, if it ever does. Processing
facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.
In the meantime, where have all these leaders who claim to care about the environment been getting their EERs?
Mostly from China, of course!
While
small business owners saw their doors closing and families were unable
to pay their mortgages and rents, the top 1 % saw their wealth grow to
16 % greater than the bottom 50 %—not because they cared about the
planet but because they exploited it. As a result, the wealthiest 10% of
Americans own about 89% of stocks and mutual funds held in the U.S. as
of the first quarter of 2021, according to Fed data. The bottom 50% of U.S. households hold around 0.5%.
And
just watch. As they ramp up production of the REEs they crave, the
common people will need to subsist on less and less, all the while being
blamed for any disastrous effects incurred upon the planet.
The “National Intelligence Estimate” on
climate warns how “a changing climate could upend societies and topple
governments,” and how we need to “inoculate the public against
misinformation on climate change.”
Interesting the choices of the words inoculate and misinformation.
If
there’s anything we are supposed to have learned during the course of
this pandemic it’s that nothing makes you safer than an inoculation!
And it wouldn’t be surprising if spreading misinformation soon became a crime, punishable by prison.
And rightly so!
There
have been so many dangerous conspiracy theories floating about lately.
Luckily, we have expert fact checkers to shut them down—like that absurd
idea that the NIH was funding gain of function research in China.
But
climate change, now that’s real, and honestly, I’m not saying it isn’t.
But just like the lying State experts on COVID, we cannot trust the
“data” or the “science” on climate change, we would be fools to do so.
We
have all heard the ominous predictions of rising sea levels, shrinking
mountain glaciers, accelerating ice melts in Greenland, Antarctica and
the Arctic, resulting in mass migrations, unrest, famine and drought if
we don’t do something about it.
Never fear. The elite are
coming to the rescue—when have they ever let us down before? Watch in
amazement as they arrive at COP26 in their private jets, having left
their massive mansions in the care of housekeepers and security guards.
Besides
those in the highest echelons of power, up to 25,000 government
representatives, media and campaigners from around the world will be
scurrying about at the convention, wheeling and dealing.
It’s no
surprise, given the importance of this conference, that the pandemic has
promised to stay away. Unlike the rest of us who find our freedoms
increasingly dependent on whether or not we’ve submitted to an
experimental gene therapy injected into our bodies, the attendees of the CPO26 will not be required to be fully vaccinated.
Yes, you heard that right.
Remember, this is a pandemic. Only
yesterday, an old friend of mine who no longer talks to me, posted on
Facebook how her own son suffered from tinnitus and severe fatigue after
receiving the vaccine. But that’s better than dying, right?
Yes, she said that.
If we don’t get the shot we will die.
Many believe this. Even as the elite travel quite happily without such
restrictions. It is really quite incredible how well they have succeeded
in their propaganda campaign.
I don’t recall reading about the
elite holding parties during the Bubonic Plague. Once they realized how
dangerous it was, they wasted no time in scurrying off to their country
estates where they locked themselves down until everyone outside of the gates who was going to die did. Only then, did they reappear.
Obviously,
the overlords have gained some kind of superhero powers since the
1300s, where the illnesses that kill the rest of us don’t affect them at
all.
Thankfully so, since they have such important work to do, all to protect the rest of us.
The
goal of the climate czars is to keep the earth’s temperature from
rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If we don’t
do this, we will be living under water, or maybe there will be no water
at all. Or it will all be polluted. The air will be unbreathable. Earth
will become a desolate wasteland.
Whatever. It will all be bad.
Where Trump called out the hypocrisy of the climate hysteria and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord,
Biden has eagerly joined again, offering up the United States as an
example of self-sacrifice. Biden has pledged the United States will cut
greenhouse emissions in half by 2030 and will reach 0 emissions by 2050.
China’s leaders are chuckling and rubbing their hands together
in glee. China obviously understood something the rest of the world
didn’t. As far back as 1992, Deng Xiaoping stressed that “the Middle
East has oil; China has rare earths.”
While COP26 will be for
show, the biggest deals are the ones we rarely ever hear about. What is
the ultimate goal? Something I’ve talked about through other lenses in
previous essays: The wide open expanse of Space and the riches it surely
holds. Because, just as all roads lead to China when it comes to REEs,
all roads lead to space when it comes to the ultimate use of those REEs.
And to get there, the overlords must perpetuate the lie that they will
replace dirty energy with clean energy.
As we have seen, up until
the very moment I am writing these words, calling the mining of REEs
“clean” energy has been a lie. What reason do we have to think, based on
everything we know from history, that this reality will change in the
future?
During Trump’s reign, he signed an executive order to support moon mining and to tap asteroid resources. This added on to a 2015 federal law allowing American companies and citizens to mine moon
and asteroid resources but stressed that there would not be a need to
get bogged down with international treaties to do so. In other words,
neither the Moon nor asteroids would be viewed as “global commons.”
Meaning
that, just like your very DNA can now be owned by Bill Gates and Big
Pharma, the moon and other locations can be owned by whoever gets there
first and plants their flag. Our overlords fully intend to exploit
everything they can here on earth so that they can then exploit what
they find in space. Elon Musk has said his first task will be to beam
down ads from space. Just think how rich he can get doing that?
The
sky above us will be owned. No more gazing at the mystery of the
twinkling stars. No kissing under the light of the moon. No more magic
at all.
Hmm, I wonder what the Chinese have to say about that? Or
the Russians? Judging by the wars we have engaged in on earth, just
imagine the wars over ownership in space. Star Wars will pale in
comparison.
If there are aliens out there, no wonder they are
monitoring us. Clearly they are more advanced than we are and I can’t
see them being any too happy about such a violent race making its way
beyond planet Earth.
I watched with some fascination as William
Shatner came back after being shot into space by Bezos’s penis-shaped
rocket. He hugged a rather stiff Bezos and thanked him. “What you’ve
given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” he said. Adding
that it was “unbelievable” and something “everyone in the world needs
to do.”
I grew up watching Captain Kirk explore “space, the final
frontier” in the Star Ship Enterprise. The crew had all kinds of
adventures I’d love to have, encountering aliens both good and evil,
traveling at warp speed, and shooting lazar guns. Now, here was the real
man, William Shatner, being shot a mere 65 miles into the air and
realizing the profundity of even that small distance.
Out there was death. While looking back at Earth, he saw Life.
Shatner
was teary-eyed in his thanks, only to have Bezos bring us all back to
harsh reality by popping open a champagne bottle and interrupting
Shatner with the jarring words, “Here, you want a little of this?” An
offer Shatner declined.
This is of no surprise. To Bezos,
Shatner’s trip to the edge of space wasn’t some spiritual awakening. It
was a golden media moment, calculated to bring him more success. The
success Comrade Detective talks about.
But now, the strangest
thing of all. We’ve been told by our own government that there could
likely be aliens out there. Apparently, just as they lied to us for our
own good about COVID, they’ve been lying to us about aliens and UFOs for
all these years. Those who claimed to have seen them were called, yes,
you guessed it, conspiracy theorists.
Why are they letting that
information out now? I do not have the answer to that question. But I
have no doubt we will find out and it will be interesting to see another
drama unfold.
Years ago, the revelation that UFOs are real
would have been greeted as the biggest story of all time. But now?
People are so bogged down with worries of catching COVID from the
unvaccinated, being evicted from their homes, rising gas and food
prices, backlogs of supplies at sea ports, and on and on, who cares
about aliens being out there and possibly invading our planet?
Whatever
they turn out to be, evil or good, if in fact they are real at all and
not just another story made up to manipulate us, they certainly must be
shaking their heads in perplexity. Just one look at our highways and the
horrific crashes must have them wondering how we faithfully get into
our death machines every day with the odds of 1 in 103 dying, while
simultaneously cowering in our homes over fear of a virus with a 99.9%
survival rate.
Observing Bezos’s rocket shoot into the atmosphere
must have looked to the aliens like a group of ants climbing onto a
blade of grass and claiming they were exploring the entire world when
all they were doing was exploring a tiny section of someone’s backyard.
It
might be a good idea to clean up that backyard first—truly clean it
up—before we ventured into space. Somehow, I feel the overlords out
there won’t go for us expanding our mess beyond our own planet.
Is there still a chance I can make it to Mongolia one day? I certainly hope so!
Source: Break Free with Karen Hunt
