If you thought the title referred to an album by a white 1970s band signed to the Motown Label, you're wrong. Sorry.
Rare earth elements are that odd series on the periodic table (the lanthanides, primarily) that you were told wouldn't be on the test - the ones that weren't talked about in chem class. They're the elements with weird names like ytterbium and praesodymium. And it turns out they're not all that rare anyway - they occur in the earth's crust with much greater frequency that elements like gold.
But they do have a lot to do with ecology - more properly the environment. And they're on the way to creating their own mini-crisis related to trying to solve environmental problems.
Get Ready
It helps to first understand the significance of rare earth elements in modern technology. The physical chemistry is something I'm not real familiar with, but it turns out these elements begin popping up everywhere since the 1950s.
Some of the elements are useful as phosphors for CRT or flat panel displays. Some of them are necessary to the construction of high energy lasers. They have applications in technology that might make fusion a real energy source. But probably the most important rare earth element at the moment is neodymium.
Basically, neodymium allows you to manufacture strong magnets. Really strong magnets. Super magnets. How strong? A lab tech working with neodymium magnets inadvertently placed his finger in between two magnets about 20 inches apart. The magnets slid together, due to magnetic attraction, with enough force that the tech lost part of his finger (How to remove a finger with two super-magnets (video) - rated R for mild gore). That's somewhat more than what your fridge magnets can do.
Of course we've been able to build strong magnets - for example the ones in junkyards that pick up cars - for a long time. Neodymium magnets are very strong, but also very small for their magnetic strength. They let you make smaller speakers or electric guitar pickups - not that important I suppose. They let you make really small hard disk drives (which are based on magnetics) or motors small enough and strong enough to power portable drills and saws.
But here's where they become important: every Toyota Prius uses 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of neodymium in it's motors. And every wind generator uses neodymium alloys to make efficient, high-power and still lightweight generators. Hybrids and wind generators would be somewhere between more difficult/expensive and nearly impossible without rare earth elements like neodymium.
Some of the other rare earth elements fill equally important technological niches.
I'm losing you
But if the rare earth elements aren't really rare, there's no problem - right? Well, it turns out at the moment that 97% of the rare earth elements mined and refined come from one place - our trading partner China.
Except our Chinese trading partners had a creative idea: they don't want to trade rare earth elements so much.
Britain and other Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production, is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds.
...
China, whose mines account for 97 per cent of global supplies, is trying to ensure that all raw REE [Rare Earth Element] materials are processed within its borders. During the past seven years it has reduced by 40 per cent the amount of rare earths available for export.
Concern as China clamps down on rare earth exports
This is not only a problem for hybrids and wind power, but for the global economy:
Worldwide, the industries reliant on REEs, which produce anything from fibre-optic cables to missile guidance systems, are estimated to be worth £3 trillion, or 5 per cent of global GDP.
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Dr Ian Higgins, general manager of Birkenhead-based Less Common Metals, which specialises in rare earth products, said: "There is a threat that in the next 12 to 18 months, there might be some quite severe shortages of these rare earths. That is certainly going to impact those hi-tech green industries outside China."
ibid
Hey, Big Brother
What does it all mean? Probably not the apocalypse - as noted, rare earth elements just aren't all that rare. They occur in economically-viable deposits in friendlier places like Australia, India, Greenland, Brazil, South Africa and Canada. But mines take time to develop (as much as 5 years by some estimates), and some of those countries may want to play their own resource politics, just as the US did in the 18th and 19th centuries.
How serious this is depends on the "curve-bending" (I hate that phrase) you want to do. How much time does the US have to develop green jobs, given double-digit unemployment? How much time do we have to seriously attack atmospheric CO2 concentrations and emissions? And are these the only elements in short or temporarily restricted supply?
For example, some estimates are that we have about a 10 year supply of copper left, much of it in places like Chile or the Congo. Some of it in wilderness areas (Glacier Peak, for example) in the US. While you're putting away those LED Christmas tree lights that you'll use only a few weeks out of the year, keep in mind that virtually all current LEDs are manufactured with gallium and/or indium - elements considerably less abundant than the misnamed "rare" earth elements.
As early as 1909, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot suggested international participation in a global inventory of resources, already concerned then about a sustainable future. In addition, our obsession with free market mechanisms means there is no central plan or even calculation about what resources are available and where those resources should be deployed. An industrial policy, as just one example, might go along way to avoiding "rare earth shocks" comparable to the oil shocks of the 1970s (or the coming oil shocks, for that matter).
For those who think there is no technological solution to the environmental problems we're facing, I'd point out that all solutions for anything involve technology - it's simply a matter of which technologies you choose and are willing to tolerate. But certainly if we simply use less energy, we'll lower our demand for resources, exotic or not.
But of course we have no plan, so the probability we'll get where we want to go is rapidly approaching zero. There's an argument to be made that we aren't even going in the right direction in the first place.
Maybe somebody should make a list.