When I was a kid a friend gave me a Chinese finger trap – a woven bamboo tube that got wider when compressed and narrower when stretched. These characteristics made it very easy for you to get your fingers into the trap, but very hard to get them out – similar to what we now face with the Chinese domination of rare earth minerals. You may not know it, but over the last few years we have been subsidizing the growth of a Chinese monopoly over our economy, one hybrid car at a time. Underneath the hood of your typical hybrid car is a battery and permanent magnets manufactured using materials known as Rare Earth Elements, also referred to simply as “rare earths.” Rare earths are made up of 17 elements, including several that are critical in the building of hybrid cars. There is only one problem: 97% of the world’s production is currently in the People’s Republic of China, along with most of the known accessible reserves. In that light, now consider the absolutely disastrous logic behind our hybrid policies – so bad only the US government could even conceive it – and then you tell me how...
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