No, he wasnt correct. He stated that China had 98% of the minerals and they were going to embargo them.
There are deposits in other places in the world that make his scare tactics moot...
Okay, that’s not quite as weird as it sounds. Rare earth metals are crucial
for a wide range of electronics, from fluorescent bulbs to iPod headphones to
hybrid vehicles. And China
produces 95 percent of the world’s supply. So when
China began sharply restricting exports in 2010 — allegedly to give its own
industries an advantage — the global prices for rare earths skyrocketed. Bad
news.
And as I said before
So what happened here? One key thing to note is that, despite their colorful
name,
rare earth
metals aren’t actually all that rare. At one point or another during the
twentieth century, Brazil, India, the United States and South Africa were all
major producers. It’s just that, in the 1980s, China decided to ramp up
production massively, driving out competitors and cornering the market. (China
managed to do this, in part, by going easy on environmental oversight of
mining, which can be
a
horrifically dirty process.)
