Description
We have quietly entered a new era, the Rare Metal Age. Th e products we use every day, from smartphones to cars, require a great number of hard- to- come-by metals, combined in increasingly complicated amalgamations. Th is book shows where the ingredients that underpin our society come from, how they get to us, and how they impact the environment. I wrote this book in the hope that you, the reader, will consider the scope of our dependence on these metals and will recognize that our technology, as well as our economic and climate security, comes at a cost. How we plan to pay will affect our future in ways many of us have not previously understood.
To develop this understanding, I’ve tracked the trail of these rare metals from mine to gadget and from gadget to recycled afterlife. I chatted with Japanese salarymen in smokefilled, back- alley restaurants in Tokyo; feasted on lamb and beer with Chinese officials in Mongolian- style yurts; waded in the muck with miners off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia; and visited factories in a formerly secret Soviet town that once refined uranium for nuclear weapons. Yet, although I traveled to some of the most rugged spots on the planet, my formal research started at a far more genteel place: Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2010
At the time, I was a foreign researcher with the Council on Foreign Relations working from an internal cubicle on the ministry’s eleventh fl oor. While my perch lacked a view, I had a ringside seat to one of the greatest Asian resource battles of the past generation. China cut off exports to Japan of a set of rare metals, called rare earth elements, during a territorial skirmish in the East China Sea. As I witnessed Japan’s rapid capitulation to many of China’s demands, I saw a new geopo litical trump card. The battle over resources, which started when the fi rst person learned how to coax metal from stone, had expanded into a larger battle— a war over the periodic table.
My interest in rare metals was initially geopo litical. I spent years examining the nexus of natural resources and geopolitics at an energy trading com pany, a Wall Street fi rm, and the natural resource division of the White House Office of Management and Bud get. I also managed a nonprofit focused on water in Africa. But I looked at commodities consumed in large quantities, and I learned that the small rare metal world is far more complex and removed from the scrutiny of commodities like oil, gas, and coal.