That is kind of vague. Do you have a cite for that? This NY Times articles says the unusual characteristic of the Chinese Rare Earth deposits is the absence of Thorium, not unique Rare Earths in the deposits.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/business/global/30rare.html
Have not read past post #4 in this thread as I write this, so apologies if this has been covered here, but:
Agnostic Pagan, is what you wrote the reason that sometimes you’ll see viral Glen Beck videos in which he explains that Hershey’s bars will soon be $11/bar?
I have no idea what Glenn Beck claims are, but $11 seems high. $2-3 dollars is more likely over the next decade (ignoring inflation). The main problem is twofold: first, cocoa has a very limited growth region and supply may not be able to meet demand; second, over 1/3 of global cocoa production takes place in Cote D’Ivoire which has seriously problems using child labor.
The current crisis there has driven prices up to $3600/tonne. Instituting fair labor practices and sustainable agricultural practices may drive that up to $5,000/tonne (and that is a low estimate) over the current decade - if consumption levels remained constant.
On the plus side, Indonesia wants to become the main producer, and could easily do so. Also yield per hectare is very low, >.5 tonnes and modernizing practices could increase that to 2 tonnes or higher. The trick there is to keep increased labor costs in line with increased yield. So supply has a good chance of keeping up with demand over the next decade. After that, I can’t say. There are many competing uses for the available land. Growing chocolate may not be the best use.
The bit about caviar is incorrect though. I had not realized how expensive caviar was - the cheap stuff goes for about $250/kg. Currently Hershey bars go for about $15-20/kg. I could easily see that double at the least, but not increase ten-fold.
Australia is doing and has done desal plants, they incredibly expensive and use a ton of energy. They can only be done with a guaranteed market and the government that has privatized most things will not do it to water.
I did some research about ‘peak helium’ a while back. It did not take long to reach the conclusion that it is nothing to really worry about.
The basics are that helium production is a byproduct of natural gas extraction (it faffs about inside alongside the natural gas due to radioactive devay blah blah blah). Proven natural gas reserves are immense, while unproven reserves are really, really immense (we don’t look very hard, because of how much we have). Only a small amount of the proven reserves are surveyed or collecting the helium because, you guessed it, there isn’t the demand. Hence, our proven reserves are small, because we don’t need to bother to find more.
This report regarding the decision to sell the US strategic reserve explores this in more detail.
I’m not sure what Cisco’s point is. He seems to be arguing that the $10.mth water bill for Las Vegas is enough to pay for the entire Iraq war. :dubious:
Nothing to add – I just think its funny to be liquidating a gas. Can they just stockpile the liquid, then they can just gasify it later on?
He’s saying that two years of water bills in Vegas could pay for one day of the Iraq war.
In any case, it’s obviously a misunderstanding. He thought you were saying that desalination plants for 2 million people could be built for $300 million, because while you were referring to an expensive world war, he thought you meant the cost of the Iraq war. He said “Blake’s figures” as an explanation for his cost estimates, a simple understanding.
The cracked article quotes a nobel lauriette as saying a balloon’s worth of helium would be worth $100 if the market was setting the prices. Is that even within two orders of magnitude of being right?
I just want to chime in that the “child slaves in Cote D’Ivoire” thing is absolutely real and not some exaggeration. I met a kid in Mali who ran away from the cocoa farms…really clever kid, who didn’t like being a slave. Anyway, this isn’t some hand-wringing “save the rainforest” BS. The chocolate we eat is often made by child slaves.
Learn something new every day. I honestly thought, for some reason, that:
a) the cocoa used to make chocolate came largely from Central and South America. Especially South America … I thought the coca plant, cacao, and cocoa were all agriculturally similar to one another, and that each were grown in abundance in the Carribean South American nations.
b) modern-day cocoa production was as modern and industrialized a process as corn or wheat farming. Plant seed, water, fertilize, wait, harvest beans (probably by some handy-dandy machine). Repeat.
…
So … cocoa really can’t be grown profitably in the New World? The famous Aztec chocolate drink, was that made of something different? Not true-blue cocoa as grown in Africa?
EDIT: turns out that the cocoa plant and the cacao plant are indeed the same thing. The coca plant doesn’t seem to be related.
Well, probably because that means the price would be between 1 dollar and 10,000 dollars. And I think there is a chance it might cost as much as dollar and I can’t imagine it would be 10,000.
But as for it being in the ballpark of 100 dollars? I have my doubts. “Mining” it outa the air is going to being expensive, but I doubt THAT expensive. Thats my WAG without running the calcs. You can estimate the amount of energy to get it out. You can estimate the efficiency of the process. And you know about what the electricty to do it will cost
He’s probably thinking something should be really valuable NOW because later it will be when its rare. And I suspect he is only thinking about sources like natural gas that will eventually run out and not considering that we probably have an unlimited but more expensive source from the air.
Also, consider that for many uses of helium, you really arent USING it like say burning wood or eating food. You need it THERE, wherever there is, for whatever reason you need it there, but most of it will stay there (besides slow leaks and accidents and such).
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I don’t know if there actually was a peak-whale-oil crisis but you’re making a false assumption even if there was: we survived a crisis, therefore, all crises are survivable. I’m sure you can see the logical fallacy there.
[/QUOTE]
It would only be a false assumption if it took some sort of magical or unknown technology to fix. However, technology already exists that can ‘solve’ every crisis in the linked article. And Peak Oil. And the lithium problem. While it may and probably will cost more (especially in the short term), that isn’t in and of itself a barrier.
I never said that all crises are survivable simply because humanity has overcome various crises in the past. THAT would certainly be a logical fallacy. We could, for instance, be hit with a giant rock 10x larger than the one that did in the dinosaurs. If so, all the technology in the world probably won’t save us, and certainly one couldn’t assume it would simply because we’ve overcome things in the past. We could get hit with a burst of radiation tomorrow from a supernova lightyears away that would fry the planet and render it uninhabitable, or a wandering black hole could move into our solar system, or rabid space monkeys could attack bent on killing all of humanity and stealing our bananas. However, of the things under discussion, none of them take any sort of supernatural or unknown technology to fix…and most of them aren’t really major issues in any case. Most of them are, in fact, classic examples of market distortions, and probably will be solved through simple market dynamics. It might COST more, but then if that’s the natural price for a commodity then that’s the natural price. If the price goes too high then alternatives will be found, or we’ll do without.
Perhaps we are, but I’ve seen no indications this is so. In fact, it seems to me that the rate of technological growth, when measured across the board, is actually increasing, and that increases in a given field are having the effect of increases in other fields. Sure, it’s possible that we are on the verge of civilization collapse and are simply to close to see it coming. None of the ‘problems’ listed thus far (including the infamous Peak Oil™ one), however, seem to be beyond our means to ‘fix’…nor does our current civilization seem to bear much resemblance to how or why civilizations of the past collapsed.
And, happily, no one is being complacent and sitting around assuming that, say, the oil crisis will simply fix itself. Companies are spending billions in research to try and determine what will be the next big thing. Not for the love of humanity and care for their fellow man, but because the company or companies who figures out what we’ll be switching to (even if it’s just a piece of the overall solution) will be richer than the gods. It will be worth literally trillions if such a solution gets adopted on a world wide scale.
If the other things on the list become a real problem, and there are shortages or the real possibility of shortages and yet there is a large enough market for it, I have zero doubts that effort will be put into finding solutions to that as well. I happen to know that there is a lot of genetic research going on into the agave plant, for instance, to try and make it easier to grow, harvest and manage. I don’t know for a fact, but would be shocked if no one were doing similar research on chocolate. As has been mentioned, helium COULD be harvested more than it’s currently being harvested if it was worth more to companies to do it. Lithium, which wasn’t on the list, is available in sea water, and there are other sources that are currently not being tapped because it’s not economical to do so. Water could be important, but there are plenty of sources of fresh water that could be shunted to those who need it. It’s not a matter of running out of fresh water, after all, but that fresh water is scarce in some places, while being plentiful in others. It might cost a lot of money to, say, divert large amounts of the annual flood waters from the Mississippi to states where fresh water is scarce, or put in desalinization plants in others, but we COULD do it, if it became necessary. Or, we could simply start to abandon large cities in Arizona, Nevada and California as people shift to other places due to price. After all, isn’t that what happened in Detroit? It went from being a city of several million to being a city of a few hundred thousand. Nothing to say that couldn’t happen in other cities if the conditions become unsustainable for millions of people.
-XT
This is no excuse to be wasteful, though. A lot of houses are built with crappy weatherproofing and stuff simply because heating has been so cheap for the most part. It was cheaper to just pay for extra heating/cooling than invest in a better house that used fewer of those resources. But then - that sort of behavior leads to a situation where those resources become scarcer and more expensive, and now not only are you paying as much/more for your mistake, but you’re depleting the world’s resources to do so.
So, yeah, maybe down the road we’ll make do with helium that costs 50x as much or oil that costs 5x as much (just throwing out examples), but we’d still all be better off if we used them intelligently and conserved.
I’m not saying you’re making the case otherwise - I’m just saying there’s legitimate reason to be concerned about depleting resources, especially unnecesarily (like helium balloons).
I definitely agree that it’s no excuse to be wasteful. I think that a lot of the waste, however, comes from distortions in the market. The price of refined fuels is cheap in the US, so we are more wasteful of it. The price of chocolate is cheap, so we over-consume. The price of helium is cheap, so we use it wastefully. The real price of water is not reflected in it’s actual costs, because a lot of that cost is buried in higher taxes for increasingly elaborate short term water projects.
Unfortunately, if you distort the price of something such that it’s cheap, people won’t have a full appreciation of the product or resource and will use it in a wasteful or over-use oriented way. It’s basic human nature.
-XT
Keep in mind that the person paying for the insulation, usually isn’t the person paying the heating bill. Even if extra insulation will pay for itself in a few years, it doesn’t save the home builder any money, unless the owner is building his own home.
Theoretically, an ideal market should take care of that by home-buyers placing a greater value on well-insulated homes, and therefore being willing to pay more for them, so home-builders would insulate them well so as to be able to sell them for a better price. To the extent that that doesn’t happen, it’s evidence of the market not being ideal.
There is already a cheap artificial alternative. It isn’t quite as good, but we aren’t going to run out of maple flavour.
Also, that article talks about migration, and loss of the resource in the U.S. If you forget that Canada is still north of you, and cold, and has maple trees, yep, you might think you have a pressing issue. (Yes, of course I realize migration can’t go on forever and you need to stop the warming trend before the only spot to grow sugar maples is in the ocean at the geographic north pole.) But, if you feel a need to produce maple sugar in the NE U.S. you could always cool them with liquid helium… 
Will the eco-whackies let us re-open those mines? They won’t let us pump oil, mine coal or build nuclear power plants. There’s some prime farm land in California that’s been put out of production because some eco-whackies diverted their water to save an insignificant species of small fish which might have been endangered. Reopening those mines may meet some very stiff and highly irrational political opposition.
Um, what? You do realize that there are, in fact, coal mines, oil wells, and nuclear power plants in the US. If your statement were true, it would logically follow that we would have none of those things.
:rolleyes: Yes, we do currently have these things. In the future, look for words like “all,” “most,” “many,” “some” or “none.” If these words are entirely absent, most likely the poster did not mean for his statements to be all-inclusive. However, the eco-whackies won’t let us develop new supplies and sources of energy now, and the United States has enough resources to become energy independent if only these nutjobs would get out of the way. My point to JoelUpChurch was that the irrational anti-industry movement/cult which has kept us from making rational policies about energy for decades is likely to do the same when it comes to extracting minerals.