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May 22, 2019 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
13:56
RARE Earth minerals and China's THREAT against America
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China is now threatening to halt its exports of rare earth minerals and metals.
We'll just call them rare earths.
They include a lot of rare elements that are used in electronics, even solar panels, for example, or wind turbines.
A lot of industry depends on these rare elements because they have Very interesting and very specific properties in the way they move electrons, for example, or the way they can make special alloys that are used in these exotic systems.
And they include, well, lots of different minerals slash metals slash elements, depending on which one we're talking about.
We use them all the time in our laboratory, like yttrium, for example, or gallium, I mean, gosh.
Just go look at the table of elements.
You can see all these very interesting elements like Iridium.
You know, a lot of people think Iridium is just a satellite company.
Well, why was it named Iridium?
Because it was named after the rare element.
In fact, iridium is more valuable than platinum and gold and silver and just about any element you can think of that's non-radioactive.
In any case, China has said that it's going to potentially stop the exports of these rare earth metals in order to try to combat President Trump's trade war.
That Trump is right to be waging against China.
And if Trump holds firm, by the way, he will win.
Why?
Because America is the great consumption land, and China's economy would crater if not for Americans buying Chinese-made stuff.
So China needs America to keep buying.
In fact, the Chinese government, which is of course a totalitarian communist regime, needs to keep its people happy in order for the regime to stay in power.
Thus, the Chinese regime needs Trump to allow Chinese goods to be affordably purchased by American consumers.
Otherwise, the Chinese communist regime itself could be threatened by a popular uprising.
Remember that communism only works If the people can be just sort of kept in enough money that they don't quite rise up, that's what China is today.
So the economy is crucial for China to maintain power over its own domestic situation.
So as part of this trade war, China is now threatening to block exports of rare earth minerals.
Now I've written about this before quite a few times on naturalnews.com if you search for rare earths.
On naturalnews.com, you'll see some of my coverage over the previous years.
And I've warned about the fact that these are strategic resources and that it has been a mistake to shut down the U.S. mining operations and outsource this to countries that are run by communist authoritarian regimes such as China for this precise reason, because then China can threaten the U.S. economy, U.S. technology, U.S. weapons programs, for example, by threatening to block their export of these rare earth minerals.
Of course, a lot of rare earths come from Africa and other nations around the world, but some come primarily from China.
And by the way, this is also one of the dirty little secrets of the green power industry, the green energy sector, that a lot of their products are made using dirty rare earth minerals that come from dirty mining operations in China that lack environmental controls and lack human rights protections for their workers.
But American companies turn a blind eye to this.
And since most consumers don't know the truth about where these rare minerals come from or what conditions under which they are extracted from the earth, Nobody really talks about it, do they?
They don't want you to know about it.
You probably only hear about this from a place like Natural News.
Everybody else just wants you to think, yeah, it's all green.
Yeah, wind power is going to save the world.
Solar energy is all green.
But it's not.
It's actually dirty.
It's like blood diamonds.
There's a lot of blood.
There's a lot of slave labor.
There's a lot of environmental...
Damage that comes from the mining of these metals.
But that has allowed China to mine them much more affordably than the cost at which they could be mined in the United States.
And thus China was able to economically undercut the prices of these minerals from American mines.
And that is ultimately what caused the market to shift to China.
And over the years, the American mines got shut down, and China became the dominant supplier for many of these strategic resources.
This is a huge strategic mistake for the United States of America that Trump is, in essence, trying to break or reverse.
Trump is trying to put us back on an equal playing field with China, and he should be commended for attempting this effort.
If you want to understand the context of this, go back to World War II. In World War II, what was one of the key strategic resources for every nation, for every industrial society, and even for the war effort itself?
The answer is rubber.
Rubber comes from trees.
I know, a lot of people don't know that either.
Rubber comes from rubber trees.
It's actually synthesized by the trees.
It's a latex, natural latex rubber.
And it's grown in trees.
It's part of their sap, basically.
And it's only grown in subtropical or tropical regions around the world.
Rubber trees don't grow in climates that have a freezing winter, for example.
So, if you wanted to build a war machine, if you wanted to build cars or tanks or basically anything, maybe ships, you needed rubber because rubber has a certain kind of Resilience.
Rubber makes gaskets for engines.
Rubber makes O-rings and so on.
You need rubber parts to make mechanical things.
So rubber was a very important strategic resource in World War II. And if you look at the decisions of the United States military in World War II, and you ask questions like, why were we involved in the South Pacific Islands?
Why were we involved in the Philippines?
Why were we involved in operations going on in South America to some extent, at least in terms of economically and politically exercising control over import-export in those regions?
The answer was rubber.
We had to have a supply of rubber.
In fact, the history of rubber is a fascinating history of the industrial age.
Well, today, rare earth elements are kind of the modern-day version of rubber.
And if you don't have a supply of these rare earths, then you won't be able to build the systems that are required to run the electronic age.
So we went to great lengths to protect the rubber supply.
Many generations ago, today, we are being held over a barrel, in essence, by the rare earth minerals.
Now, historically, here's something else that's interesting.
The scientists of the Third Reich, they were experts in petroleum changing around the molecules in hydrocarbons.
So if you take fossil fuels, you have hydrocarbon chains.
And if you can use some very clever laboratory techniques, you can produce many different things out of those hydrocarbons.
In fact, the Nazis at the time, the German scientists, remember it was Germans that led the world in physics before Adolf Hitler came on the scene.
A lot of the early work in 20th century physics was all done in Berlin.
And it was those physicists who figured out how to engage in the synthetic production of polyurethane and synthetic rubber.
And they also, by the way, developed synthetic biological and chemical weapons systems such as mustard gas and so on, other things that are derived, like VX nerve gas, which is essentially derived with some help from carbon chains, you know, some other molecular synthesis. you know, some other molecular synthesis.
In any case, the Germans led the way on that.
And so there was, toward the end of World War II, there was a synthetic alternative to rubber.
Thank you.
It wasn't quite as good, but the Germans were able to use it to replace their rubber supply.
Well, I ask you this question.
Is there a synthetic alternative to iridium or yttrium or gallium or arsenic, for that matter, or any of these other...
And the answer is no, because elements are elements.
Elements don't have replacements.
Whereas rubber, it's a very big molecule.
You can have replacements for large molecules.
You can synthesize molecules.
For example, vitamin C is a large chain of nothing but hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.
Same thing with cannabinoids and THC. Many drugs and even hormones such as progesterone are very similar to cannabinoids.
They're all made of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.
But iridium is made of just iridium.
Gold is made of gold, nothing else.
That's why they're called elements.
So don't confuse elements with molecules.
Elements have no replacements.
Elements require elements.
If you have something that needs magnesium in it, for example, to make it, you have to have magnesium.
You can't synthesize magnesium.
You can only find it.
If you need something that's made out of aluminum, you have to find aluminum.
You have to find, you know, atomic mass 27.
That's aluminum, AL. This is why outer space is so valuable to nations because that's where there are more minerals to be found on comets and asteroids on the moon and other planets.
The moon is in fact, it's got all kinds of minerals and elements and some of those elements will be rare.
There's gold in the stars, literally.
Gold and heavier elements like lead and beyond, tungsten and so on, are actually made by exploding stars.
So when stars go into a supernova explosion, it's the atomic fusion that leads to the creation of heavier elements.
The lighter elements like carbon and, of course, helium and oxygen and lithium and so on, the lighter elements have been around a long time in our universe, but it's the combination of those lighter elements that has, over time, through Fusion explosion processes created the heavier elements that are now used in advanced electronics processing that enable the military weapons of the modern age.
Maybe this was a little more of a science history than you wanted to hear, but I thought I would share this explanation with you so that you understand what's at stake in this trade war with rare earth minerals.
There is no replacement for them.
So, if China makes good on its threat to get prepared, To have no iPhones.
That's right, because they use the rare elements too.
Get ready to have a shortage of motherboards and computer memory chips.
Anything that's electronic, practically, will be impacted by this in a big way.
Battery systems.
Lithium-ion batteries.
By the way, we just published a story on this.
There's been a breakthrough.
One team is working on a magnesium alternative to lithium.
Magnesium is much more abundant than lithium, by the way.
So magnesium batteries might be in your future, especially if lithium supplies become difficult to acquire.
But China doesn't have the world monopoly on lithium, by the way, which is a good thing.
But they do have a dominance over other rare earth minerals that will be difficult to replace.
So, I just want you to be aware of this, this trade war.
It's a war about actual things, actual matter.
Atomic elements drive the geopolitics of our global economy and national defense systems.
This is applied science, really.
And these are elements that the companies in China are digging out of the ground.
By the way, every element is available in ocean water.
Every element in some amount.
So if you can process enough ocean water, if you had free energy, for example, you could pull gold out of the ocean.
It's just not worth doing so unless you have energy for free, by the way, because there's not a lot of gold in ocean water.
It's there, but it's like less than parts per trillion.
In fact, again, every element is in ocean water.
The ocean has everything in it.
Anyway, something to think about.
Stay informed.
This is Mike Adams here, naturalnews.com.
I also publish science.news if you want to check that out.
Thank you for listening and be safe.
Take care.
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