Greenies Grow Suspicious of Idaho Cobalt Mine

Get our free mobile app

Rare earth metals get the name for good reason.  The supply is limited.  During prep time for my radio show, I pulled up a link from a website called Visual Capitalist.  It produces graphs to explain mining.  The volume of iron ore pulled from the ground dwarfs all other production.  The ancient world was built with rocks and wood.  The modern world with steel, wood, and plastic.  Iron ore gets shipped to steel plants and last year accounted for 93 percent of all mining worldwide.  This means a little under seven percent was left for industrial metals and a fraction of one percent for technology and precious metals.  The latter end up in smartphones and batteries for electric cars.  You can see where this is going.

When it comes to the tech or rare earths as they are called, Cobalt makes up less than 12 percent of what is mined.

This was why a Cobalt mine was revived in Idaho.  Another 100 could open across the American west (highly unlikely) and we aren’t going to match the desires of environmentalists and the dreams of the evangelists of green energy.

Many on the environmental front are conflicted.  They promote an end to internal combustion engines and what they call fossil fuels.  Then they fret about mining.  Maybe they should have given this more thought before they pursued the destruction of the world economy.

We simply don’t have the metals and we certainly don’t have the technology to provide electricity for the green economy.  Unless the greenies are willing to accept nuclear power generation.