David Victor Comments on the Global Oil Market
The Oil and the Glory: The Weekly Wrap - March 16, 2012
03/16/2012
Steve LeVine,
Foreign Policy
The trouble with cerium, and the murky world of rare earth elements: The opaque rare-earths wars are upon us again, now made part of U.S. presidential politics. They go back to 2010, when a Chinese tuna fisherman named Zhang Qixiong became an international celebrity by ramming a Japanese naval cutter, and improbably triggering an international crisis over the availability of so-called rare-earth metals. These are the 17 elements that we care about because they make possible our wind turbines and electric cars, not to mention our iPhones and flat-screen TVs. China, which mines some 97 percent of the global supply, cut off rare-earth shipments to Japan in response to the trawler incident, and for awhile seemed to do so for much of the rest of the world, too. Since then, mines have been under development in other countries, such as Molycorp. in California and Lynas in western Australia (pictured above, Lynas builds a rare earths processing plant in Malaysia).
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David G. Victor is a professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and director of the School’s new Laboratory on International Law and Regulation. His research focuses on how the design of regulatory law affects issues such as environmental pollution and the operation of major energy markets. He is the author of Global Warming Gridlock, which explains why the world has not made much diplomatic progress on the problem of climate change while also exploring new strategies that would be more effective.
