Just How Anxious Is Obama To Cripple Our Economy And Culture [Reader Post]

Minerals from the rare earth mine at Thor Lake in Canada

President Obama is anxious to get us off oil and embrace alternative energy while creating millions of new jobs, the millions of new jobs are a joke; however, the true ramifications of ending our relationship with oil and switching over to alternative energy will leave us more vulnerable to foreign powers than we were with oil.

From Obama’s Organizing for America website:

America can be the clean energy leader by harnessing the power of alternative and renewable energy, ending our addiction to foreign oil, addressing the global climate crisis, and creating millions of new jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.

The Current Situation

The country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century. For too long, politicians in Washington have been beholden to special interests, but no longer. Our new, responsible energy policy recognizes the relationship between energy, the environment, and our economy and leverages American ingenuity to put people back to work, fight global warming, increase our energy independence and keep us safe.

The Solution

Chart a new energy future:
President Obama has a comprehensive plan to chart a new energy future by embracing alternative and renewable energy, ending our addiction to foreign oil, addressing the global climate crisis and creating millions of new jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.

Invest in clean, renewable energy:
To achieve our goal of generating 25 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2025, we will make unprecedented investments in clean, renewable energy – solar, wind, biofuels, and geothermal power.

Fight climate change:
We will invest in energy efficiency and conservation, two sure-fire ways to decrease deadly pollution and drive down demand. And we will hold special interests accountable as we finally work to address climate change and its potentially catastrophic effects.

There has been concern over the availability of lithium for lithium-ion batteries that are used in Electric Vehicles.   Most experts agree that there is enough Lithium for the foreseeable future; although, many of the world’s deposits are in countries that are ambivalent or hostile towards the U.S., including the new deposits that have been recently surveyed by the U.S. in Afghanistan, that appear to be as large as the deposits in Bolivia, the largest known deposits in the world.

“I highly doubt it will be able to either properly manage these resources or use the riches to build a more peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan for all Afghans,” Janan Mosazai, a political analyst, told AFP.

“We have living examples of other countries where natural riches have actually turned into a curse for peace and prosperity for people,” he said, citing Nigeria’s endemic poverty and conflict despite vast oil exports.

The Afghan government has already reported large deposits of chromite, natural gas, oil and precious and semi-precious stones.

“The only significant new bit of information (this year) is the dollar figure, as Afghan and Soviet geologists already had evidence of the riches,” Mosazai said.

China and India have bid for contracts to develop Afghan mines, with the Chinese winning a huge copper contract. An iron-ore contract is due to be awarded later this year.

A new minerals rush could pit U.S. and Chinese interests against each other. Some critics in Washington grumble that China is reaping rewards from the copper mine while U.S. troops are heavily committed against the Taliban.

However, there is another component necessary for the electric car and many other applications from cell phones to wind turbines– rare earth minerals.  Neodymium, terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium are all being mined in Mongolia by the Chinese Communists and they control or have the bulk of the world’s production.

Chinese Mine Management Will Not Be Hindered With Overbearing Safety Concerns

A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.

Alistair Stephens, of Arafura, an Australian rare metal group reports that his contacts have been shown a  copy of the document ‘Rare Earth Industry Development Plan 2009-2015’, that places limits on the amount of rare earth metals that can be exported.

“This isn’t about the China holding the world to ransom. They are saying we need these resources to develop our own economy and achieve energy efficiency, so go find your own supplies”, he said.

Mr Stephens said China had put global competitors out of business in the early 1990s by flooding the market, leading to the closure of the biggest US rare earth mine at Mountain Pass in California – now being revived by Molycorp Minerals.

New technologies have since increased the value and strategic importance of these metals, but it will take years for fresh supply to come on stream from deposits in Australia, North America, and South Africa. The rare earth family are hard to find, and harder to extract.

Mr Stephens said Arafura’s project in Western Australia produces terbium, which sells for $800,000 a tonne. It is a key ingredient in low-energy light-bulbs. China needs all the terbium it produces as the country switches wholesale from tungsten bulbs to the latest low-wattage bulbs that cut power costs by 40pc.

No replacement has been found for neodymium that enhances the power of magnets at high heat and is crucial for hard-disk drives, wind turbines, and the electric motors of hybrid cars. Each Toyota Prius uses 25 pounds of rare earth elements. Cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters for diesel engines. Europium is used in lasers.

Blackberries, iPods, mobile phones,  TVs, navigation systems, and air defence missiles all use a sprinkling of rare earth metals. They are used to filter viruses and bacteria from water, and cleaning up Sarin gas and VX nerve agents.

Arafura, Mountain Pass, and Lynas Corp in Australia, will be able to produce some 50,000 tonnes of rare earth metals by the mid-decade but that is not enough to meet surging world demand.

New uses are emerging all the time, and some promise quantum leaps in efficiency. The Tokyo Institute of Technology has made a breakthrough in superconductivity using rare earth metals that lower the friction on power lines and could slash electricity leakage.

The Japanese government has drawn up a “Strategy for Ensuring Stable Supplies of Rare Metals”. It calls for `stockpiling’ and plans for “securing overseas resources’. The West has yet to stir.

Mike Crane, runs the EV and hybrid business at the fourth-largest global parts supplier ($20 billion in sales for 2009), Continental Corporation, expressed his views:

Continental has a dog in this hunt. As an alternative to the permanent-magnet motors in most electric cars, it is deploying a brushed synchronous motor that uses no rare earth metals. The motor will be used in a European EV coming to the market next year.

“Rare earth availability is a serious problem as the EV market grows, though I’m not seeing much consternation about it yet,” said Crane in an interview. “We could be trading dependence on one commodity, foreign oil, for another, rare earth metals.”

The Chinese appear to be tightening their control over rare earth production. Crane points out that mining rights for the 17 rare earth metals would be restricted to state-controlled mining companies under a draft proposal submitted to China’s cabinet. China also capped production levels for 2010, and imposed a moratorium on new mining licenses until next summer.

“There are other reserves around the world, but they’re not as rich as China’s,” Crane said. “And then there’s the question of whether it will be economic to mine the reserves in places like California, given much lower labor costs in China.” The U.S. was a major player in rare earth metals, but between 2005 and 2008, 91 percent of its supply came from China.

An estimated 180,000 Toyota Priuses will be sold in the U.S. this year, and every single one of them uses in its electric motor some 2.2 pounds of neodymium, a rare earth mineral that is mostly found in China. Hybrid and electric cars (as well as wind turbines) use various rare earths in abundance, which is a growing problem as China starts to electrify its vehicle fleet and will need those metals for its own production.

The U.S. has some rare earth reserves, and a rare earth mine is expected to open in California in 2012, but some 95 percent of the supply is believed to be in China. One bright spot in this picture is the new major metals find in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon says could be “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

Rare earth supplies are crucial, because more than 30 companies have hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid and battery EV programs underway, and 18 million vehicles will use nickel-metal-hydride and lithium batteries by 2025.

The search appears to be on for sources of rare earth metals. Japanese firms are, according to Reuters, “showing strong interest” in a Canadian rare earth site at Thor Lake in the Northwest Territories. Toyota is among them (it’s also exploring Vietnam), because according to strategic metals expert Jack Lifton its Prius is “the biggest user of rare earth metals of any object in the world.”

The Department of Energy is debating creation of what could be called the National Research Center on Rare Earths and Energy. It looks like we’re going to need it.

Of course Obama’s answer will be another incompetent bureau passing self defeating regulations for the US that place us out of contention in the race for the technology of the future.  Since Obama is content to place any country ahead of the US in competition for the economic struggle, so that we are always operating from a deficit, it is no surprise that he is painting the US into a corner so that we will be at the mercy of China, the Communist dynamo that is sapping America’s vitality while Obama vacations, plays golf, puts on parties, and giggles while America drowns in Obama’s Socialism.

Using his preoccupation with sports, especially basketball, Obama finds guidance for dealing with China in a basketball player.

“I have learned from the words of Yao Ming, who said, ‘No matter whether you are new or an old team member, you need time to adjust to one another.’ Well, through the constructive meetings that we’ve already had, and through this dialogue, I’m confident that we will meet Yao’s standard.”

The United States is on a precipice of economic disaster and our president quotes a basketball player at the opening meeting of the first China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) on July 27, 2009,  the Chinese-born NBA star Yao Ming.  While the Chinese laugh their asses off at the man child president as he returns home to tell us how great China is and how we should emulate their success.