World News

39019 readers

2309 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Insight: World battles to loosen China's grip on vital rare earths for clean energy transition (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 16 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Daily reminder. Monocrystalline PV, LFP or sodium batteries, and the dominant onshore wind generator types involve 0 rare earths. Offshore wind doesn't technically need them but they are used in most installations for now.

EVs can be made without permanent magnets if you don't insist on every soccer mother car out-accelerating an early 2000s ferrari and don't insist on perfectly silent motors (rather than merely much quieter than ICEs). EVs are also not the only form of non-fossil fuel transport.

Ban them, put a price on carbon and the green transition will happen faster. It's not a necessary component.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The world's two biggest rare earths companies outside of China are facing challenges turning rock from their mines into the building blocks for magnets used across the global economy, from Apple's (AAPL.O) iPhone to Tesla's (TSLA.O) Model 3 to Lockheed Martin's (LMT.N) F-35 fighter jet.

Recent struggles by MP (MP.N), Lynas (LYC.AX) and other companies to refine their own rare earths highlight the difficult task the rest of the world faces to break China's stranglehold on the key group of 17 metals needed for the clean energy transition, interviews with more than a dozen consultants, executives, investors and industry analysts showed.

Technical complexities, partnership strains and pollution concerns are hampering companies' ability to wrest market share away from China, which according to the International Energy Agency controls 87% of global rare earths refining capacity.

To extract neodymium and praseodymium to build EV magnets, for example, MP must first remove the less-desirable lanthanum and cerium that compose about 83% of its California deposit in a process that relies on an intricate cocktail of acids, bases and other chemicals that are tailored to the mine's geology.

In 2019, the pair agreed to build refining facilities near San Antonio, Texas and discussed with Trump administration officials their plans to be "the only large scale producer of separated (rare earth elements) in the world outside of China," according to emails obtained by Reuters.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are we really going to trust a LLM to summarize news for us accurately on Lemmy? I thought we were better than this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, you don't have to, you can read it yourself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I understand that, but people are going to trust this bot. And it's in tons of threads now. I think it is a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Well, I'm obviously biased because I'm the author of the bot, but I think it's useful. Let's leave it up to moderators - they can either reach me and I'll add an exception to their community or they can simply ban the bot from their community.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Technical complexities, partnership strains and pollution concerns are hampering companies' ability to wrest market share away from China"

This is a main reason China has a large market share in the first place. There are a number of rare earth deposits around the world but clean extraction and refining is expensive. China has been willing to go the cheap and dirty route. So everyone let china sell it to the rest of the world cheaper than local deposits could be exploited due to environmental regulations.

There are only three options:

Buy from China. Which may no longer be possible.

Local extraction but more expensive. With supply issues as production ramps up.

Local extraction but the environmental regulations get tossed aside due to National Security. Still likely to be more expensive than china and slow to scale, plus the added joy of pollution.