World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metal exports

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6082464/World-faces-hi-tech-crunch-as-China-eyes-ban-on-rare-metal-exports.html

by bd • 17 years ago

47 37 17 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

quoderat4• 17 years ago

There are only so many resources on this planet. There are too many of us and too few of them. They will run out, no matter what many have been trained to believe. Not soon after, so will we.

ckinnan• 17 years ago

Resources are a function of technology, which in turn is the result of human ingenuity. There's really no inherent limit, considering the way markets develop substitutes (higher prices encourage both conservation and innovation).

After all, man can turn sand into silicon computer chips...it is the technology and the end use, not the natural resource, that matters.

quoderat4• 17 years ago

Most chip fabrication processes require hafnium, gallium arsenide and helium.

Helium will run out in my lifetime. Look it up yourself.

Hafnium is likely to as well.

I'm amazed by the rah-rah capitalism types (not saying you are one of them) on this site who know so little.

bad_user• 17 years ago

Not to mention that we could develop more efficient ways of recycling.

I think we waist too much though, and it really depends on the resource-type we are talking about.

Offtopic: One thing that worries me is the systematic deforestation. In our country we've had ugly landslides that wiped out entire villages because of uncontrolled deforestation. It also reduces the quality of the land and has dramatic effects on wildlife. I don't think such effects happening on a massive scale are reversible.

hughprime3• 17 years ago

Advice: this comment would seem far less aggressive, yet have its meaning unchanged, if you removed the words "have been trained to" before "believe".

quoderat4• 17 years ago

The problem is, I do believe it's training. There are large vested interest with absolute gobs of money who don't want folks to believe that resources are not infinite. Because if we did believe resources were finite, we'd change our behavior quite a lot -- thus resulting in loss of profit.

These people have, using the media and effective control of government (the US's is basically an arm of Goldman Sachs), trained people to believe things that will harm them -- and everyone.

It's not a conspiracy, just a lot of disproportionately greedy people behaving to maximize the same thing, and to achieve the same goal.

drubio• 17 years ago

I believe an eminent economist named Thomas Malthus said the same thing almost 200 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

Nothing has run out yet, we're all still here

CWuestefeld2• 17 years ago

And Paul Ehrlich, a sort-of disciple of Malthus, made a famous wager that prices of several metals would rise due to increasing scarcity over the 1980-1990 period. Guess what: the prices fell, because consumers of such stuff constantly find substitute goods and processes.

See full article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

d4nt2• 17 years ago

I can't quite see this happening, it would trigger all kinds of retaliation and WTO type wrangling. I suspect China is doing a bit of posturing ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference.

coliveira• 17 years ago

I don't think what they are trying to do is illegal, because they want to use the resources for themselves. Nobody can be forced to sell what they need to use...

d4nt2• 17 years ago

I don't mean to suggest it would be illegal. I just think that if they refuse to sell us these minerals, then we might refuse to sell them BMWs or the video games... and so on until somebody sees sense.

dkersten• 17 years ago

Nobody should be forced to sell regardless of if they need to use it themselves or not.

jhancock• 17 years ago

most likely this is posturing, at least in part. One key difference between Chinese and Western culture is the degree to which "a deal can be renegotiated". The Chinese tend more towards "a deal is always open to renegotiation". Western minds tend to try to live with and work around the ink that's already dry.

btw, I have no idea what WTO agreements are in place on these issues. There may be little details that hold China to being required to export these materials.

amalcon• 17 years ago

Keep in mind that rare earth metals aren't all that rare. They're just named that because they're similar in certain ways to the "common earth metals". There are many known deposits, that just aren't profitable. Most locations simply can't compete with the infamous cheap Chinese labor.

If China stops its exports, there will be a little bit of a shock period and a modest price increase thereafter, not the end of the world.

jpcx01• 17 years ago

Agreed. Every country has loads of dirt and rock. Just no one wants to dig it up for slave wages. Once the price is right, we'll be happy to do the work.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

This is all true. But here's a fun hypothetical. At what costs does mining in space become profitable? How expensive would a metal have to be per ounce?

fnid• 17 years ago

"slave wages" is not exactly correct. If a chinese worker from the south of china goes to north china to work for a couple years making shower curtains, they return home and pay cash for a house.

What you consider slave wages is a lot of money to them. If you went there and did the work, you'd consider it slave wages, but they consider it very good money.

gwern• 17 years ago

This is a good point. Even if China succeeds in this restriction, the rise in prices outside China will cause all sorts of effects undoing it; new deposits will be located, old deposits exploited, and you can be sure that if the price difference gets too large, there will be lots of smuggling of the raw metals out - having built a large lawless economy, officials will find it difficult to suppress exportation of small volumes of extremely valuable metal. Consider the cited example of ore at 21 million USD a ton. How many cargo containers is that? 1? 2? How much of a % increase would it take to make it worth smuggling? Not much...

uhjnybt• 17 years ago

Alternate headline - world buys magnets cheap from china. Instead of world buys niobium from china, makes it into expensive magnets and ships magnets to china to build into stuff.

Anyway I though civilisation was going to collapse because Tantalum was only available in a couple of war torn African countries?

riobard• 17 years ago

Easy. Manufacture Prius in China and then export the final cars.

jerryji• 17 years ago

I'm done with all the hatred, parochial, and ignorant comments out there.

Now I turn to HN readers for truth wisdom -- would the future of the US/global high tech industry really be so adversely affected as the original article tries to imply?

pmorici2• 17 years ago

Seems like they might be doing this to protect their manufacturing jobs. I read an article one that said one reason countries like Africa are perpetually poor even though many of them have a lot of good farm land and natural resources is because they only export raw goods and materials where as a lot of the profit is in refining these materials to more finished products. I believe the example given was peanuts are grown there but they don't manufacture peanut butter.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

China is assembling most of those hi-tech gadgets, so its move is clear to encourage export of its goods rather than its minerals. Very smart move.

sho• 17 years ago

That's how I read it too. A move in strategy away from exporting raw materials, to focus on the value added manufactured goods. Regrettable perhaps but understandable enough. Doubt they'll be able to enforce it though.

World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metal exports

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