UPDATE: Curiouser and curiouser. Global Witness is an environmental group and may be presenting a darker picture than necessary but mining is intrinsically environmentally risky. They give an interesting take on the consequences of the mining and causes of the shortage of ore:
"Interviews with local mine workers and community members suggest that the impact on workers’ health, on the environment and on local communities continue to be devastating. One community member in the town of Chipwe said: “There are no longer fish in the waters. Stepping into the water can cause itching and infections. When the animals drink the water, they die.”"
Concerning the supply of ore:
"Myanmar’s lucrative trade in HREE [heavy rare earth elements]– worth $1.4 billion in 2023 – risks financing conflict and destruction in a highly volatile region. In 2018 Myanmar’s civilian-led government banned exports and ordered Chinese miners to wind down operations. Since 2021, extraction has continued in the context of a ruthless dictatorship and widening civil conflict. The vast majority of the country’s extraction is explicitly illegal – controlled by an illegitimate military-aligned militia which, according to Kachin sources, has no regulation on mining standards."
Mining is never without ecological risk. At least in the U.S., these problems will be visible and likely regulated to reduce externalities imposed on nonconsensuals. In the same way that globalization exported jobs to China where labor laws were weakly enforced, if at all, letting China and Myanmmar do all the dirty work just moves it somewhere we do not see.
Moving the mining and extraction closer to the people who drive electric cars makes it harder for them to virtue signal without shame.
Curiouser and Curioser.
ReplyDeleteWhen the SR- 71 was being designed and built, they were built using Titanium mined by the Soviet Union, the very country the "Blackbird was being built to spy on, through multiple layers of shell corporations and cutouts. Admittedly nowadays the Chinese can produce enough money to meet and beat any price, but why not do this again?
During World War Two, the Western Allies were able to buy all the tungsten the Germans needed from Germany's erstwhile ally, Spain, by the simple expedient of outbidding the German acquisition mission in Madrid at every turn. This turned out to be a very simple technique, as the tungsten in the area of Spain where it was "mined" existed on the surface in the form of nodules and chunks of nearly pure tungsten. Essentially every sheepherder, goatherd and caballero was in the Tungsten mining business once he knew what to look for, and knowing the Americanos paid crazy high prices, comparatively speaking, compared to the dour Germans meant that the tungsten went easily and quickly to the western allies and not to the Axis.