Ever since I learned of Jevon's Paradox[0], headlines like this make me a bit anxious. Between the lines I tend to read "don't worry, we can pretend that we don't have to actually own up to our wastefulness for a little while longer, and make the problem even worse in the process!"
I'm fully aware that that is just how I interpret things, and maybe I'm being too cynical, but it does feel like we are focusing on the wrong long-term solution if we just keep looking for new ways to extract resources, if you know what I mean.
I wouldn't worry about resources being finite. There's a nice negative feedback loop. The less we have of them left, the higher the price and more incentive to develop alternative solutions.
I have no idea about environmental impact of mining these.
While an elegant theory, that approach to economics is about as realistic and practical as spherical cows in a vacuum[0] are to biology. In real life markets are a lot more complicated and irrational (because they involve humans).
That Jevon's Paradox wikipedia article I linked to in the first comment is one example of such a complication.
> Simon didn't see the growing population as a catastrophic problem. He explained that we are not like any other species. We have an economy and markets. So, according to Simon, if the world demands more oil, the price of oil will go up, and there will be an incentive to find more, or find an alternative.
> Simon proposed that they bet on what would happen to the price of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — over a decade.
> And the logic was that these metals were essential for all kinds of stuff — electronics, cars, buildings. So, if Ehrlich was right, more people on the planet would mean we would start running out of stuff, and the price of these things should go up.
> Those next 10 years, from 1980 to 1990, crept by. The world population grew by 800 million people. Then it was 1990. And they tallied it up. Simon, the economist, decisively won. Prices for the five metals went down by an average of 50 percent.
> One of the reasons the prices dropped was just what Simon said. The catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting just did not happen. People invented substitutes, like companies switching from aluminum to plastic for packaging.
Markets are more complicated and people are often irrational, but that doesn't mean the feedback loop isn't there. It is fallacious to assume that substitutes will be found and that technology will continually advance directionally. Conceptually, prices could simply rise to the point where only the very rich get to use personal computers until, 200 years later, genetic engineering brings organic AI.
In reality it's some mix of all the above and much more precisely because the world is irreducibly complex. But I think the point of creating and relying upon transparent markets is precisely so that pricing signals can reach people quickly; and if this induces the wrong behavior according to our normative objectives then it's easier to identify this and we can react accordingly without having to rely on conjecture and our imaginations.
"The less we have of it left, the higher the price and more incentive to develop alternative solutions."
Does not work like this for oil. The price the most people can pay for gas is very limited. The people who say we will never run out of oil are correct. We will indeed never run out of oil. Most of the oil that is still left in the ground will likely stay there.
I admit I only skimmed it but I definitely disagree with the conclusion which seems to be somewhat summed up in this earlier sentence:
> If we think about it, the prices of basic commodities, such as food and fuel, cannot rise too high relative to the wages of ordinary (also called “non-elite”) workers, or the system will grind to a halt.
I don't see it. If fuel is too expensive we start driving electric vehicles. This one is easy because we already have solution that we know it's viable but in many such cases we don't even know the alternative solution yet because there was no incentive to develop it.
Food market is also evolving and becoming more efficient (optimization functions leave something to be desired but that's another story).
I have not enough knowledge to have a strong opinion on peak oil, but if it stays cheap then so be it. Just don't make other people life miserable. So if it enforces some cost on other people, they should cover it (or ideally it should be opt-in), which would make the price, which now includes that cost, higher.
Shared resources like clean air and ocean are a complex problem and the dynamic I described above doesn't apply because prisoners dilema etc.
I'd love to learn btw, if there is at least any theoretical utopia system (even if it's not feasible to implement it) in which market could reasonably manage those shared resources. Just going to war with country which won't limit pollution to the limit we agreed on seems suboptimal. Trade war seems like an improvement but just moves the problem (there's now prisoners dilemma regarding trading with given country)
If gasoline costs get out of hand I think its more likely that existing cars switch to hydrogen, and the hydrogen is generated using the grid, and the grid is supplied by whatever is currently the cheapest means of producing electricity.
I can't see any problem with it. This is just how markets work. There is no way to bend the market forces without crippling the whole economy, so better not try.
The article is 6 months old and the study it's based on is more than 1 year old. How is the project?
There are rare earth minerals everywhere. Even when they are economically viable to extract, most countries are unwilling to, because of the environmental costs associated with mining and refining. As well as the human health costs for workers. I'm not sure Japan will be willing to pay that price.
Maybe you meant to be sarcastic but being underwater doesn't negate any of the environmental concerns linked with pollution, treatment of by-products and their effect on the ecosystem.
To quote from the 2018 Nature article: "During
these cruises, Rare Earth Yttrium-rich mud having a maximum of almost 8,000 ppm of total REY content (ΣREY) was confrmed."
8000 ppm would be 0.8% concentration. Most of the samples are poorer than that.
Thanks for adding that context. But without this post, I would have missed that bit of information, like I missed this news the previous times it came around.
The reason why China is the source of all of our rare-earth metals is because they are aggressively mining & processing it. There are a variety of reasons why China is doing the mining and processing, including factors like proximity to supply chains, China's strategic goals, different environmental & labor laws, land use laws, etc.
As soon as it gets more expensive to source rare-earth metals from China, other sources will come online. Other countries could ramp up mining & processing, perhaps as a "matter of national security", but for whatever reason that hasn't happened yet. This is done in other areas, there are a fair number of industries that only exist in the US because the military-industrial complex is interested in keeping supply chains independent of influence by foreign powers.
Problem is China artificially deflating the price of their metals when other facilities do come online, forcing those newly opened operations to shut down.
I understand that this is a problem for the operators, but this not a problem for consumers. Those other facilities will just come online when the price goes back up.
I sometimes wonder if you could strategically gamble this mechanism as a state actor. You drive the prize up, other companys invest heavily to enter the market, you drive the prize down, buy the bankrupt remains, rince and repeat until you bought all the montan-companies.
This "finding keeps popping up as a new finding...
My understanding is that its huge, but underwater and dredging/vacuuming it up would be massively damaging to the ocean environment not to mention so expensive it's not really cost effective.
Yet.
It depends on what China does with their huge reserves...
China made it a strategic goal to become globally dominant in rare earths. It was a position the US held previously. China's share of the market eventually climbed into the high 90% range. It's now back down to closer to 70% to 75% depending on the source. Between their state subsidies for the sector, meant to maintain their position, and their willingness to ignore the environmental disaster that the rare earth metals industry often is, they can simply do it cheaper than everyone else.
Japan's moves after China used rare earths against them a decade ago, were extremely successful. They were largely responsible for the drop in China's market share.
The US has been very irresponsible about this. It's pretty wild that the military industrial complex has not been forcing the issue extremely aggressively. It would not be difficult for the US to be entirely self-sufficient on rare earths.
If the US were not so circus-like on matters of strategic importance (too many clowns focused on everything that isn't actually important), it would immediately put $10-$20 billion to work with the Army Corp of Engineers and whatever US mining companies were necessary (the US has several of the world's largest miners), and it'd nationalize the Mountain Pass mine as an issue of extreme national security. There would be no niceness, no pleasantries. All environmental reviews would be ignored as a matter of national security, it would be a violent rush to production no matter the initial cost. It would then ramp up production enough to deflate China's position down toward 50% globally (through a combination of domestic production and working with foreign partners eg in Australia and elsewhere to boost their production further asap), and ensure the US has a lever it can always use if China tries to pull this again. It's simply taking the club out of China's hands on this issue. And as far as stupid spending goes, this would not be all that expensive.
The US would further use the nationalized mine (ideally do this with multiple mines) - in a modestly subsidized fashion over time - to build up an enormous stockpile of rare earths, exactly like and for the same reason as the strategic petroleum reserve. The US has a small version of this now, it should increase that drastically.
> There would be no niceness, no pleasantries. All environmental reviews would be ignored as a matter of national security, it would be a violent rush to production no matter the initial cost
How many people would you poison to, essentially, make a point against China? Besides, the whole project of demonstrating how the US is a superior place to China by, er, nationalising a mine at gunpoint, poisoning the surroundings, and disallowing people legal redress for complaints?
Isn’t that like the whole point of globalization? It’s an equalizer for all countries in the world. For the US to realistically stay competitive in rare earths it has to run similar tactics that other countries with less environmental regulations use. It’s a race to the bottom.
The same could also be said about wages and income inequality. I don’t see how globalization will prevent the bottom half of the labor force from competing against Indian peasants.
The nuclear weapons and the carrier battle groups do that, surely?
Messing around with the flow of trade goods to disrupt the economy of other countries that you're nontheless inextricable from is a form of conflict, but not a warlike one.
That plan has a lot of unnecessarily extreme facets.
The US could just impose a strategic subsidy or tweak the legislation to allow rare earths a special exemption from environmental legislation. No need to nationalise anything or send in the army corps.
The US crushed the Soviet Union by being able to fund their logistical support networks while the soviets couldn't. Arbitrary nationalisation of things because there are security issues is a great way to see the roles reversed for the tussle with China.
Rare earths can be mined anywhere at a nominal profit, mining isn't a game of cheap labour. It is only the USs environmental standards that is making a difference between mining in the US vs China.
One of the things I worry about is how much of raw materials we have left for various compounds. As a civilization we are consuming enormous amount of stuff and dumping them in sea or underground every year. Things like iron, silicon, aluminium are abundent and we easily have supply for probably few 10s of thousands of years (at current rate of consumption) however what about everything else like gold, iridium, rhodium, platinum etc which are required to make many many things we treasure dearly. When might this party end?
But saying "mine asteroids" is like walking up to a stone age man and saying "why are you walking, just build a Bugatti Veyron and drive there dummy".
Even if we do develop technology to mine asteroids (note that several of the companies that were attempting this in recent years have gone out of business or been acquired extremely cheaply) it's still a relatively short term solution. The asteroid belt only contains material equal to (roughly) 4% of the mass of the Moon.
That 4% mass of the Moon is spread out over mind boggling distances that doesn't even start untill roughly beyond the orbit of Mars. At those distances, PV power is going to be worthless, even at Mars the maximum solar irradiance is only about 59% of that on Earth so you're going to need to either build massive solar arrays and use wireless transmission to get the power down to the mining craft/drones (which will have to have considerable batteries in the event they get out of line of sight) or power them with some sort of nuclear solution.
Now, you'll be pulling a good deal of material off that you use purely for reaction mass. You'll also be pulling off a lot of stuff that won't really be worth sending back to Earth in any appreciable quantity like nickel and iron (although could be useful for construction in space and possibly worth sending to Mars) so when you do actually get to rare earths/precious metals you'll likely be able to mine more in a decade (if not a year) than earth has ever of say gold or platinum metal groups, but by even assuming you develop all the technology you need to do this, by the time you safely land it back on Earth it'll still be fantastically expensive to get to point of first delivery and a very very time consuming process purely due to the distances and practical limit on reaction mass for accelerating and decelerating.
Then you're still only talking 4% the mass of the Moon, if you were making a decent effort at mining the asteroids you might pull worthwhile material out for a century or two before you've exhausted the bulk of it and then it is "well, I hope we've developed FTL travel or generation ships!"
I would compare it to telling Wright brothers after their first airplane flight that we will land on the Moon in 66 years. If there will be a reason to do it, we will. Still, I would agree that we will have close to 100% effective recycling of metals before we will start bringing them to Earth from space.
But in time we will start to utilize space resources.
SpaceX, Blue Origin will latch to any possibility to make money in space.
Space mining is exactly how Bezos thinks O'Neill cylinder could be built in 100-200 years.
BTW - You could bet for worthless internet points on Metaculus:
To access an equivalent amount of mass from the moon you would need to strip mine it to a depth of about 23.5km. On earth it would be about 1km. Your point about losing a lot of it as reaction mass still stands, but 4% of the moon is actually quite a lot.
Yes, and it is spread out over a huge amount of space. The asteroid belt occupies 1AU of space that starts 2.2 AU out and and ends 3.2 AU out.
Sure, roughly half of the belt's mass is contained in just four asteroids - Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea.
Ceres alone is the 33rd largest known object in our solar system and simply mining it might be realistic but its orbit is 2.5-3 AU out but from what we've observed it is estimated to be 20% carbon by mass in its near surface, that is a LOT of material that you have to remove just to get at other stuff. With a (believed) rocky core, you have 70-190km of ice that likely varies considerably in composition and concentration.
Even if you can get out there, even if you can mine it at -36F in direct sunlight, you're going to have a world of trouble doing it and may not even find a worthwhile concentration of materials you actually want, you may be processing ice and dust attempting to skim the rare earths and precious metals out of the dust.
Thought there are two tactic resources that threatening USA - rare earth which china news agent starting to voice about. But that may slowdown economy but unlike chip probably can really be stored.
The second one is antibiotics. Not sure about that one. It can kill as it is now t easy to replace in short term and demand is inelastic to a certain extent. Wonder more about that more.
I'm sure this is wildly naive, but I'm a little surprised we haven't figured out how to synthesize these minerals. Maybe it's just not economically worthwhile.
Indeed. Rare earths are specific elements in the periodic table. The only way we could "synthesize" these elements is atomically -- by bombarding other elements with nucleons and hope they stick or split. "Not economically worthwhile" is a massive understatement. :)
A similar process is required to turn lead into gold!
We're doing it already, in every nuclear power plant. We might as well harvest the results. Many won't be radioactive, with the problematic isotopes disappearing quickly, and anyway we know how to separate isotopes.
Particularly common: yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and samarium.
For political reasons, the USA is one of the few nuclear countries that does not reprocess fuel. Besides missing out on rare earths, we're discarding about 95% of the uranium as waste. (discarding about 90% of the energy, with overhead taking a bit) Russia, China, France, India, and Pakistan all have reprocessing plants.
Is this actually a significant source of rare earth elements? My understanding is that they’re rare compared with things like carbon, nitrogen, etc. Cerium, one of the rare earths, is apparently more common than copper, even.
Seems like extracting them from spent nuclear fuel would be much less economic than just grinding them out of rocks, but IANANE.
Well rare earth elements are heavy metals, and so it's about their atoms that is important. It's not something you can make via chemical processes, you'd need some kind of nuclear process, like how new atoms are made (kind of like how scientists make synthetic elements with more than 92 protons). Either that or split a heavier larger atom into the metals you want, although this means it would in either case be unstable.
The amount of energy to do these is so incomparably huge to just digging them out of the ground.
The main value of the minerals is in the rare-earth elements they contain. If you already had access to those elements in a different form, synthesizing the minerals is of little value. (And of course nuclear synthesis of the rare-earth elements, to the extent it's possible, is very very far from being economically viable.)
Though it is a bit disappointing that a purported science journalism outlet contributed to the OPs confusion by calling the minerals and the elements both „minerals“ by e.g. claiming that the minerals are formed in supernovas.
Rare-earth elements are formed in supernovae, so if you happen to have a supernova in your backyard, you’re golden! Otherwise, it’s a rather expensive ordeal, battling those subnuclear forces.
If you're lucky enough to have a supernova, it's also probably a good idea to be very very patient while you wait for the various radioisotopes to calm down before you use your nice shiny new REEs.
I'm fully aware that that is just how I interpret things, and maybe I'm being too cynical, but it does feel like we are focusing on the wrong long-term solution if we just keep looking for new ways to extract resources, if you know what I mean.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox