A few weeks ago, Chine stopped shipping rare earth metals to Japan because of something to do with Japan arresting a Chinese person and not returning him or something like that. But now, it seems like China may or may not have embargoed us: http://gizmodo.com/5669143/china-wont-s ... ecessities.

The article mentions that China has the capacity to mine this stuff, which lead me to wonder, why don't we develop this? One argument against electric cars and wind turbines is that the rare earth metals in them are all made in China, shifting our dependence from China (consumer goods) and the Middle East (oil) to just China (everything!) Why not just develop the mining capacity to get this stuff on our own turf? Yeah it's expensive, but it creates jobs and national security.

Or, if we don't want to harm our ecosystems in the mining process, we could give more money to NASA so they can start mining asteroids and build a space elevator to bring all the material down.

The problem isn't not having the industry here, it's not having the metal ores here - China has a huge chunk of the world's supply of rare earth metal ores. You can't just create the capacity without the starting materials, irregardless of ecosystem concerns.

Asteroid mining, on the other hand...

Good news (at least for Japan), Vietnam is now trading with Japan for those rare earth metals that China refuses to sell. Yay for Vietnam!

That hullaballoo seems to have come and gone, and I wonder whether it will show up again - fundamentally, who has the metals hasn't changed all that much, and China (I suspect) will increasingly want to safeguard its advantage.