5 ms·

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

47 points by bd 17y ago

quoderat 17y 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 17y 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.
  - quoderat 17y 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.
    - a-priori 17y ago
      Okay, so when Helium starts getting scarce (and thus expensive), we'll switch to a new fabrication technique that doesn't use it. Life will go on.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      And if hafnium runs out, we'll have a great new business in scraping it off old chips to put on new ones. The atoms aren't going anywhere. Helium atoms _are_ going somewhere (up!) but we can always get that in small from fusion if we really need it. Fusion is easy as long as you don't care about getting more energy out than you put in.
      - quoderat 17y ago
        Over the past few months, I’ve gone from some optimism that we’ll be able to solve the environmental and climatic problems the world faces to complete pessimism. Even if everyone on the planet were on board with the fact that climate change is real, and it will be disastrous, that soil depletion is happening and is effectively irreversible, it’d still be a hard slog to change it before mass death and possible human extinction occur. But given that half or more of the planet doesn’t believe it, or doesn’t care, then there is just no chance at all. So, what to do? Me, I’m going to selfishly enjoy the good times that are left, and support activities like establishing seed banks and archives of humanity’s achievements (because we have done some amazing things) in case there is any resurgence of human life or other intelligent life in the future. But the hope of humanity even beginning to turn the tide against what’s coming? Evidence suggests it’ll be impossible. There’s too many us -- far, far too many of us -- and not enough who care about what’s happening, or even believe it. What’s next is a fait accompli.
        davidw 17y ago
        DOOM! GLOOOOOOM! "Lucky for me I'd been off-planet on vacation at the time of the war. There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked, so I spent most of my time looking for beer. One day I was out looking for a nice place to build a city for my children when I spotted a mutant in the forbidden zone. I landed my vehicle to pursue and destroy this genetic freak before he could warn other mutants in the underground caves." This sort of article seems to be what I'd call "reddit bait" in that it brings out these sorts of fruitless discussions.
    - pmorici 17y ago
      I found this article from 2008. http://www.physorg.com/news118491348.html http://www.physorg.com/news118491348.html It seems reasonable that Helium from the one place in Texas where most of it currently comes from may run out but the article eludes that there are surely deposits in other countries like Russia that haven't been tapped simply because there isn't demand.
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      This is a constant process throughout history. It was impossible to hunt enough game to feed everyone, so we invented husbandry and agriculture. Then there wasn't enough arable land to grow food for everyone, so our ancestors invented terraced farming and irrigation. There's not enough space for everyone to live while being able to get to work, etc., so we invented high-rise buildings. There's not enough forests for everyone to burn wood to heat their houses, so we've gone through many generations of improved heating systems. Humanity is always on the brink of disaster, but as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. When the stakes get high enough, the market promises riches to whoever can offer a solution. This motivates people to think and look hard for it. That is the beauty of the market. Search for discussions of Malthus and Ehrlich. Now, with a centrally-managed economy, the only way to find a solution is through politics. Thus, we now have most of our cards riding on biofuels and ethanol for energy, since so much of the US Congress is in the pocket of Archer Daniels Midland, etc. That's a bold bet, staking so much on one narrow option. Of course we could be investing more in sources like windpower, but that would disturb Ted Kennedy's scenic view. My point is that the market drives people to come up with the best possible solution. The only other option that's been found is to let corrupt politicians make the choices based on poor information and questionable motivations.
  - bad_user 17y 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.
- hughprime 17y 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".
  - quoderat 17y 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.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      To some extent everyone's beliefs are the result of what could, for some value of the word, be called "training". But that includes yours.
- drubio 17y ago
  I believe an eminent economist named Thomas Malthus said the same thing almost 200 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Nothing has run out yet, we're all still here
  - CWuestefeld 17y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
d4nt 17y 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 17y 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...
  - d4nt 17y 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.
    - cglee 17y ago
      Aren't BMWs German? And no one in China buys video games. They all play online versions. We could stop selling them Starbucks, McDonald's and Coke I guess.
      - warfangle 17y ago
        We (the US, at least) also have to tread carefully around China. They hold a majority of our government's debt...
        bwhite 17y ago
        This isn't right. China holds between 22-25% of US debt, which is a plurality, not close to a majority (http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt). China has also indicated that it would prefer to buy less US debt, though it's unclear if this is posturing or not. Both countries are over each other's barrels, to mangle the metaphor. If you owe the bank $10,000 and you walk in and tell them you're struggling, they'll just look at you funny. If you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 dollars and you walk in and tell them you're struggling, you better believe they'll want to work with you. The USD makes up about 65% of foreign reserves (down from about a steady 70-ish% between 2001-2007). China doesn't keep buying USDs for fun. They buy them for profit, stability, and for preventing the appreciation of the yuan.
amalcon 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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?
    - jerf 17y ago
      This is the first thing that lept to my mind, too. There's a lot of that sort of thing in space. Private industry is currently stuck trying to emulate NASA, but when it will really take off is when it finds something it can do better. Space mining is a very viable candidate on the decade time scale.
      - silentOpen 17y ago
        Need to do the nanotube thang first, though. We need materials with enough tensile strength to withstand the stress of a space elevator. Then you'll see space mining and solar collection.
  - fnid 17y 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.
uhjnybt 17y 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 17y ago
Easy. Manufacture Prius in China and then export the final cars.
jerryji 17y 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?
pmorici 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.

47 points by bd 17y 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 17y 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.
- quoderat 17y 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.
  - a-priori 17y ago
    Okay, so when Helium starts getting scarce (and thus expensive), we'll switch to a new fabrication technique that doesn't use it. Life will go on.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    And if hafnium runs out, we'll have a great new business in scraping it off old chips to put on new ones. The atoms aren't going anywhere. Helium atoms _are_ going somewhere (up!) but we can always get that in small from fusion if we really need it. Fusion is easy as long as you don't care about getting more energy out than you put in.
    - quoderat 17y ago
      Over the past few months, I’ve gone from some optimism that we’ll be able to solve the environmental and climatic problems the world faces to complete pessimism. Even if everyone on the planet were on board with the fact that climate change is real, and it will be disastrous, that soil depletion is happening and is effectively irreversible, it’d still be a hard slog to change it before mass death and possible human extinction occur. But given that half or more of the planet doesn’t believe it, or doesn’t care, then there is just no chance at all. So, what to do? Me, I’m going to selfishly enjoy the good times that are left, and support activities like establishing seed banks and archives of humanity’s achievements (because we have done some amazing things) in case there is any resurgence of human life or other intelligent life in the future. But the hope of humanity even beginning to turn the tide against what’s coming? Evidence suggests it’ll be impossible. There’s too many us -- far, far too many of us -- and not enough who care about what’s happening, or even believe it. What’s next is a fait accompli.
      - davidw 17y ago
        DOOM! GLOOOOOOM! "Lucky for me I'd been off-planet on vacation at the time of the war. There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked, so I spent most of my time looking for beer. One day I was out looking for a nice place to build a city for my children when I spotted a mutant in the forbidden zone. I landed my vehicle to pursue and destroy this genetic freak before he could warn other mutants in the underground caves." This sort of article seems to be what I'd call "reddit bait" in that it brings out these sorts of fruitless discussions.
  - pmorici 17y ago
    I found this article from 2008. http://www.physorg.com/news118491348.html http://www.physorg.com/news118491348.html It seems reasonable that Helium from the one place in Texas where most of it currently comes from may run out but the article eludes that there are surely deposits in other countries like Russia that haven't been tapped simply because there isn't demand.
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    This is a constant process throughout history. It was impossible to hunt enough game to feed everyone, so we invented husbandry and agriculture. Then there wasn't enough arable land to grow food for everyone, so our ancestors invented terraced farming and irrigation. There's not enough space for everyone to live while being able to get to work, etc., so we invented high-rise buildings. There's not enough forests for everyone to burn wood to heat their houses, so we've gone through many generations of improved heating systems. Humanity is always on the brink of disaster, but as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. When the stakes get high enough, the market promises riches to whoever can offer a solution. This motivates people to think and look hard for it. That is the beauty of the market. Search for discussions of Malthus and Ehrlich. Now, with a centrally-managed economy, the only way to find a solution is through politics. Thus, we now have most of our cards riding on biofuels and ethanol for energy, since so much of the US Congress is in the pocket of Archer Daniels Midland, etc. That's a bold bet, staking so much on one narrow option. Of course we could be investing more in sources like windpower, but that would disturb Ted Kennedy's scenic view. My point is that the market drives people to come up with the best possible solution. The only other option that's been found is to let corrupt politicians make the choices based on poor information and questionable motivations.
- bad_user 17y 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.
hughprime 17y 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".
- quoderat 17y 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.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    To some extent everyone's beliefs are the result of what could, for some value of the word, be called "training". But that includes yours.
drubio 17y ago
I believe an eminent economist named Thomas Malthus said the same thing almost 200 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe Nothing has run out yet, we're all still here
- CWuestefeld 17y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

d4nt 17y 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 17y 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...
- d4nt 17y 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.
  - cglee 17y ago
    Aren't BMWs German? And no one in China buys video games. They all play online versions. We could stop selling them Starbucks, McDonald's and Coke I guess.
    - warfangle 17y ago
      We (the US, at least) also have to tread carefully around China. They hold a majority of our government's debt...
      - bwhite 17y ago
        This isn't right. China holds between 22-25% of US debt, which is a plurality, not close to a majority (http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt). China has also indicated that it would prefer to buy less US debt, though it's unclear if this is posturing or not. Both countries are over each other's barrels, to mangle the metaphor. If you owe the bank $10,000 and you walk in and tell them you're struggling, they'll just look at you funny. If you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 dollars and you walk in and tell them you're struggling, you better believe they'll want to work with you. The USD makes up about 65% of foreign reserves (down from about a steady 70-ish% between 2001-2007). China doesn't keep buying USDs for fun. They buy them for profit, stability, and for preventing the appreciation of the yuan.

amalcon 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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?
  - jerf 17y ago
    This is the first thing that lept to my mind, too. There's a lot of that sort of thing in space. Private industry is currently stuck trying to emulate NASA, but when it will really take off is when it finds something it can do better. Space mining is a very viable candidate on the decade time scale.
    - silentOpen 17y ago
      Need to do the nanotube thang first, though. We need materials with enough tensile strength to withstand the stress of a space elevator. Then you'll see space mining and solar collection.
- fnid 17y 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.

uhjnybt 17y 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 17y ago

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

jerryji 17y 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?

pmorici 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.