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A conservative estimate of the cost of a transition to “clean energy” is $1.7 trillion needed for mining of copper, cobalt, lithium and other rare earth and exotic metals and minerals. This transition will supposedly fuel electric vehicles (EVs) being cheaper than gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2027, and electric SUVs cheaper by 2026, according to BloombergNEF. Additionally, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a new report found renewable installations for energy to electricity “soared to 280 GW globally in 2020, up 45% from 2019,” with “renewables (solar and wind) accounting for 90% of global electric capacity installations in 2021...

A prestigious intergovernmental organization created by the world’s advanced economies is pointing out the bottleneck in the plans to substitute so-called green energy for hydrocarbon-based energy: the availability of key minerals necessary for battery storage, wind farms, solar panels, and other gizmos necessary for the switchover. Simply put: the world can’t provide the quantity of those minerals that would be necessary, and the environmental and social impact of trying to mine them in sufficient quantities would be devastating.The cure, in other words, is worse than the disease. You can download the 287-page report here.The International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental...

Voters in Greenland have given an opposition party its first-ever chance to form a government after a campaign that sought to define the limits of development on the Arctic island. The Inuit Ataqatigiit party won 37% of the vote, compared with 29% for the ruling social-democratic Siumut party, according to official results reported by Reuters. The vote totals should allow Inuit Ataqatigiit to grab 12 seats in the 31-member unicameral legislature, known as the Inatsisartut, meaning it will likely need to form a coalition with support from one of the smaller parties. At the center of Tuesday's election was the...

Colin Freeman Sat, April 3, 2021, 5:47 AM Picture taken on March 30, 2021 shows a view of Nuuk, Greenland - EMIL HELMS /AFP Picture taken on March 30, 2021 shows a view of Nuuk, Greenland - EMIL HELMS /AFP AS elections go, it sounds rather minor-league: a contest with just 40,000 voters, triggered by a planning row in one of the most remote, inhospitable corners of the planet. On Tuesday, though, diplomats from Washington to Beijing will be watching carefully as Greenland holds snap parliamentary polls. With a total of population of just 56,000, its electorate is smaller than...

Much is made of China's dominance in the rare earth elements (REE). Currently, China controls over 90% of the refined or processed market for REEs. Most advanced technologies, including weapon systems, depend on REEs, and adequate substitutes do not exist. On the surface, China's monopolistic control over refined REEs induces a severe case of the vapors among U.S. national security analysts. But how extensive and stable is China's control of the REE market? If China's market control is neither extensive nor stable, perhaps doing nothing or policies that target China's Achilles heel would be the U.S.'s best course of action....

President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency in the mining industry, ordering the Interior Department to increase domestic production of rare-earth materials to reduce the country’s dependence on China. The order states, “our Nation’s undue reliance on critical minerals, in processed or unprocessed form, from foreign adversaries constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.” The US imported 80 percent of its rare-earth materials and...

China has been quietly exploring the economic damage it could inflict to US and European companies - including defense contractors - if they were to impose export 'restrictions' on 17 rare-earth materials, according to a report in the Financial Times.Notably, the US government relies on these rare earths for the manufacture of F-35 jets and other sophisticated weaponry, which use them for critical components such as electrical power systems and magnets."The government wants to know if the US may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban," said one Chinese government adviser who spoke on condition...

The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded $30 million in funding to Australia’s Lynas Corp to build a rare earth processing plant in Texas, as the nation continues to seek to break its reliance on Chinese imports of the critical minerals. The facility will be able to process light rare earth elements (LREE), which are not only widely used in consumer goods such as cellphones and electric car motors, but also critical to the production of next-generation fighter jets and precision-guided missiles. It’s not the first time Lynas, one of the few major non-Chinese rare earth miners, received federal funding...

One of China's most significant advantages in the race to dominate future hi-tech industrial production, among just about everything else, is its chokehold on "rare earth materials" (REM). These are materials -- and the raw minerals from which they are extracted and processed -- vital to the manufacture, for instance, of advanced weapons, fossil-free alternative energy systems, communication devices, computer products, and microelectronic networks.It is an area in which China has already established dominance . The Chinese Communist Party's near monopoly on most of these 17 rare earth materials is by now a US national security vulnerability of enormous strategic...

MP Materials, which operates the largest rare earth element mines in the Western Hemisphere, had a big week. It was one of three companies on Nov. 17 to receive Defense Department grants intended to return rare earth production to the United States. The following day it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The Pentagon awarded a Defense Production Act Title III grant worth $9.6 million to MP Materials so it can begin to refine the strategic minerals at its Mountain Pass, California, mine. “This grant from the DoD is outstanding. It's humbling. And we're very proud of the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries to look into the country’s reliance on rare earths in his latest bid to end China’s dominance of the industry. The move could lead to tariffs, quotas or other possible import restrictions, according to an executive order released on Wednesday.

The Chinese communist regime is ready—and willing—to use the country’s near monopoly in rare earth elements (REEs) as a trump card in any trade war with the United States, according to China policy analysts. A report out this week from independent strategic consultants Horizon Advisory indicates that China is moving to take advantage of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus crisis to wrest control of strategic markets. Furthermore, Beijing’s fusion of its military and civil spheres—combined with its near-monopoly in rare earths—could make this market the Unites States’ Achilles heel. According to China scholar and Horizon Advisory co-founder, Emily de...

USA Rare Earth, the funding and development partner of the Round Top heavy rare earth project and Texas Mineral Resources announced Thursday that its rare earths pilot plant processing facility in Wheat Ridge, Colorado has received the required permits and officially opened. Once fully commissioned, the plant will be focused on group separation of rare earths into heavy (dysprosium, terbium), middle, and light (neodymium, praseodymium) rare earths (REE’s) and will be the first facility to separate the full range of rare earth elements in the US since 1999. USA Rare Earth’s pilot plant is the second link in a 100%...

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

While the truth might be out there, technological aliens don't seem to be — at least not yet. New results from the most comprehensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program ever undertaken — which surveyed 1,327 nearby stars for signals from intelligent beings — have turned up empty. "There's certainly nothing out there glaringly obvious," ... lead author of a paper about the results, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal, told Live Science. "There's no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters." While the team didn't find anything this time around, Price said that there...

In the scientific community, there is still a great deal of energy devoted to “listening” for evidence or hints of intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations out among the stars. Most of you are probably familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and their decades of work in this field. They’re still at it and, in fact, are upping their game with a new generation of laser sensors. These projects drew fresh attention after the discovery of Tabby’s Star and the frantic speculation over whether or not some ancient civilization had built a Dyson Sphere around their own sun. This has led...

Exoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe--most vastly different from Earth By Shannon Hall on February 19, 2016 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Email Print Share via Google+Stumble Upon NASA/ESA/ESO Advertisement More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been...

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.” But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable,...

Earth's flora is responsible for the glaciers and rivers that have created this planet's distinctive landscapeAstronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants. We all know how Earth's landscape came about, right? Oceans and land masses formed, mountains rose, and precipitation washed over its surface; rivers weathered bare rock to create soil and plants took root. Well, new research...

Moons like the Earth's - which are formed in catastrophic collisions - are extremely rare in the Universe, a study by US astronomers suggests. The Moon was created when an object as big as the planet Mars smacked into the Earth billions of years ago. The impact hurled debris into orbit, some of which eventually consolidated to form our Moon. The Astrophysical Journal reports that just 5-10% of planetary systems in the Universe have moons created this way.