China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
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Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#2The eternal problem of externalities. They ought to be priced into the cost of the rare earths, but doing so means you lose out to your less scrupulous competitors.
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#3Interesting, although I wish more thought is put into the cost model upfront for any kind of mining that harms the environment prior to these excavations. By taking under consideration the cleanup process at the beginning, it eliminates the need to fight for funding after the mining is done. Although in communist countries all the government cares is to rip the benefits and not worry about the after effects.
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#4In the forth quarter of 2018, 46.89 million iPhones were sold worldwide. That's just the iPhones. Wouldn't it be great if products from Apple were easier to repair or upgrade instead of encouraging consumers to buy the latest model? It would also make it easier to recycle. How much mining would that prevent?
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#5Perhaps it’s churlish to mention, but...
China was happy to ignore environmental standards in order to corner the market in rare earth minerals. American miners couldn’t compete because they were already “internalizing” the environmental costs, and were priced out of the market.
Once China had put everyone else out of business (and blocked foreign businesses from mining inside China), it started not only reducing output to increase prices, but also started to very slowly apply environmental standards it previously ignored.
The Chinese government also showed how willing they were to now use this almost complete monopoly for political purposes in 2010.
And now in 2019 they’re calling for consumers and global companies to contribute to the costs of “internalizing” the pollution?
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#6The eternal problem of externalities. They ought to be priced into the cost of the rare earths, but doing so means you lose out to your less scrupulous competitors.
Capitalism 101, get rich by plundering the earth (and leave someone else to clean up the mess). Mining is a truly nasty business, and not just environmentally.
No small problem is that of assigning value to a clean environment, or to sustainable practises. ETS anyone?
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#7The eternal problem of externalities. They ought to be priced into the cost of the rare earths, but doing so means you lose out to your less scrupulous competitors.
What I really wanna see is both negative and positive externalities.
It feels like we are always only including negative externalities when we talk about things we don't like and positive when it's things we do like.
We should always look at both sides.
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#8The eternal problem of externalities. They ought to be priced into the cost of the rare earths, but doing so means you lose out to your less scrupulous competitors.
Capitalism 101, get rich by plundering the earth (and leave someone else to clean up the mess). Mining is a truly nasty business, and not just environmentally. No small problem is that of assigning value to a clean environment, or to sustainable practises. ETS anyone?
You are most likely using products based on mining to write that comment.
Doesn't that make you complicit if we are to follow your hard stance here?
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#9In the forth quarter of 2018, 46.89 million iPhones were sold worldwide. That's just the iPhones. Wouldn't it be great if products from Apple were easier to repair or upgrade instead of encouraging consumers to buy the latest model? It would also make it easier to recycle. How much mining would that prevent?
Yes, it would be great.
On the other hand Apple is already a lot better than the average Android phone when it comes to the availability of software updates, especially security updates by the vendor.
However, we still have a long way to go. It looks like mobile phones will last longer now that we are seeing diminishing returns from the yearly updates.
Perhaps vendors can be forced to release the software as open source when they no longer support it with security updates?
Re: China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining
#10The eternal problem of externalities. They ought to be priced into the cost of the rare earths, but doing so means you lose out to your less scrupulous competitors.
Pricing externalities has become such a common comment.
Does anyone know good examples (family led also, but successful mostly) of pricing externalities?
I mean the alternative is regulation and/or legislation. Those work pretty well when a reasonable (ie production still happens) of harmful processes/methods. Eg banning CFCs in certain products. I know of examples where these were deployed.
Tldr: what is the best, big example of a real, functional price system for "externalities?"
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but it feels like this line of thinking is similar to state "retraining" to deal with unemployment due to economic changes. Very popular rhetorically, but very few encouraging examples.