Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Saudis of Green...and Green
Everybody makes a big fat hairy deal over the fact that Saudi Arabia possesses 10% of the world's known oil reserves. Yeah, well guess what. Our good old buddies, the Chinese - those individuals are sitting on 95-99% of the world's known rare-earth elements also known as the lanthanides (praseodymium and neodymium, especially). So, why is this important, you ask? It's important because these are the key elements that go into a lot of the new green energy technologies (neodymium-iron-boron magnets, for example, are critical for wind turbines) that the U.S. government is currently pushing on us (via crony capitalism). How in the hell does it make sense for a country to go from 10% dependency on a questionable source to 95% dependency on an even more questionable source? I mean, it's not as if these wind turbines accomplish anything or anything.
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19 comments:
They are also critical components in our military weapon systems.
An excellent point that I should have included.
And smart phones too, right?
Things are not quite as dire as you imply. As discussed in this Forbes article, the US consumes 15,000 to 18,000 metric tons of rare earth metals per year. With the reopen ing of the Mountain Pass mine, US production will be 19,000 metric tons by the end of the year, expanding to 40,000 metric tons when phase 2 is completed.
Also, while China currently provides about 95% of the world's production, it is estimated that they have only 23% of the world's reserves.
Also, the US military says that it will be able to meet almost all of its demands from US sources by the end of the year.
Obama is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars... really a shame how he got in again. Now he mentions "global warming" in every speech, as if it was real. The Liberals must be overjoyed. Wonder if he'll disappoint them by OKing Keystone?
If they can ever get the stuff out of the earth, that will be awesome, Jerry. In the mean time, we had better not piss off the Chinese.......Just a minor correction, Barlowe. Obama doesn't use the term global warming any more. He calls it climate change now. He has to in that the temps have actually been coming down since 1998 (this according to the satellite data and not the thermometers that the zealots often put next to airports).
Short term fluctuations are all part of longer term trends as explained here.
Jerry, even using the graph that Gore himself has used, the largest part of the warming of the past 150 years took place in the first half of the 20th century, and then after WW2 when worldwide industrialization finally took off, we basically had 35 consecutive years of global cooling - so much so that Newsweek had a cover warning us of the coming ice age. And I ask you again, look at the satellite data from 1979 to today. AT MOST, the temp has gone up .3 Celcius. That and the Antarctic ice shelf is growing.
And why did the Vikings settle in Greenland in the 10th and 11th century? They settled there because it was habitable to point that they could actually grow crops there....And what happened to 50% of Florida? Nothing.
A person that looks at only the red spots on a picture that is 90% green will say that it is a red picture.
As far as Antarctic ice is concerned, I suggest you read the following and in particular note the difference between land ice and sea ice.
You might also,read up about the Medieval Warm Period and check out the plot of the northern hemisphere temperature over the last 2000 years.
On the rare earths (yet another construct that wd didn't even know existed til he started trolling here), Jerry, no, maybe it isn't dire, but we still have only 13 metric tons (as opposed to 36 million ton in China) of proven reserves and, according to this web-site (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19753-us-reserves-of-rare-earth-elements-assessed-for-first-time.html), it's literally going to take years to access it (the permit process is agonizingly slow, it appears - our government at work yet again). Like I said before, let's not piss off the Chinese.
Jerry, the Argo system is the most reliable indicator of ocean temperature and these have consistently shown that ocean temperatures have been flat since 2003. As for the ocean levels, satellites have shown them to be rising at an approximately 3.3 centimeters per century clip, hardly a crisis.......As for that Wikipedia page, that graph looks a lot like the one that Michael Mann monkeyed around with to flatten out the Medieval warming period (which had to have been warmer - you can't grow crops in Greenland today) and "hide the decline" post 2000.
I would also ask you to look at the IPCC computer models. All of them (mainly because they didn't take into consideration anything other than man-made CO2) have been astronomically off in their predictions (they said that the temps would be skyrocketing and they obviously haven't been) and their authors wearing egg on their faces.
And I think that the red spots are man-made CO2 - the green being non-man-made CO2 (underwater volcanoes, decaying plants and animals, bacteria, etc.), sunspot cycles, solar flares, solar cycles, plate tectonics, lunar cycles, galactic cycles, cosmic rays, cloud cover, water vapor, the Pacific Decodal Oscillation, etc........And, get this, according to Alan Mix from Oregon State University, from 6 million years ago to 3 million years ago (from the late Miocene to the beginning of the Pliocene), the earth's temperature was consistently 2-3 degrees warmer than it is today and life on the planet thrived. Global cooling - now that's what we really have to worry about.
Nobody is disputing the fact that the earth has gone through cooling and warming trends in the past. The question is the amount of influence that human activity is having on the current trends.
Jerry: but I don't think "solutions" like the Kyoto Accords, which had mainland China significantly increase so-called greenhouse gases was any sort of good idea at all. Do you?
I suspect that man-made CO2 does cause some warming but a) it's probably marginal and b) these so-called solutions such as ethanol and wind energy (thousands and thousands of tons of concrete and steel PER TURBINE) really don't reduce it all that much (when the energy source isn't sufficient enough to produce itself, you've really got a problem).
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