The Race for What's Left

It would make a crackerjack James Bond premise: One nation has obtained a virtual monopoly on scarce resources without which the world economy would come to a grinding halt. This totalitarian state, of course, will use this leverage to advance its own nefarious interests. Is it Saudi Arabia and oil or Russia and natural gas? Nope. It’s China and “rare earth elements,” an assortment of obscure materials such as cerium, europium, and neodymium. Every Toyota Prius motor requires two pounds of neodymium, but in 2010 China stopped exporting this array of industrial ingredients to Japan.

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World leaders were suitably aghast. Such materials are critical to the production of many high-tech products, from mobile phones, computers and batteries to solar panels; and China produces 95 percent or more of the global supply. An irony about these elements that are so important to emerging green technologies is that their production is exceedingly hazardous to the environment because they have to be extracted, using acids, from composite ores.

This nonfiction drama is but one example of an intensifying, across-the-board scarcity of the raw materials that make modern civilization hum, according to Michael T. Klare in his latest book: The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. Oil and natural gas lead the parade, followed by copper, zinc, nickel, titanium, and just about any useful item you care to name. There’s less of it, what’s left is harder to get, and nations will be tempted to get their “fair share” by any means necessary. Klare writes that “the era of readily accessible oil and gas has come to an end: from now on, vital energy supplies will have to be drawn from remote and forbidding locations, at a cost far exceeding anything experienced in the past. The world is entering an era of pervasive, unprecedented resource scarcity.”

It is hard to argue with that assessment. Klare sites statistics that indicate our exploitation of earth has only just begun.  From 1950 to 2011, the global Gross Domestic Product shot up 600 percent, and will continue to rise in the decades to come as countries like China and India seek to join the party. Despite baby steps in the direction of renewable energy and efficiencies, GDP growth will be underwritten largely by fossil fuels. The US Department of Energy predicts that the world’s consumption of liquid fuels will rise 31 percent between 2008 and 2035, while natural gas usage will jump 52 percent.

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