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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (164794)	12/3/2020 7:22:52 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218913

re "Let 100 rare earths flowers bloom" Another element to fret about, cobalt... How America got outmaneuvered in a critical mining race politico.com 12/02/2020 04:30 AM EST As U.S. policymakers grapple with China’s dominance in producing the materials needed for so-called clean energy and other cutting-edge technology, the case of cobalt serves as a warning. China’s state-directed industrial policy has outmaneuvered America’s laissez-faire approach to securing access around the world to a metal that’s taking on growing economic and strategic importance. Its success is sparking a debate over whether Washington needs to intervene to encourage more mining at home. Used for millennia to make rich blue pigment for ceramics, cobalt now plays an important role in lithium-ion batteries — conducting heat to prevent them from catching fire in smart phones and electric vehicles. Cobalt’s other commercial, industrial and military applications, from jet engines to magnets, spurred the U.S. government in 2018 to deem it a commodity of “strategic and critical” importance to U.S. security. Yet today’s global cobalt supply chains are dominated by China — the result of two decades of Beijing’s relentless efforts to dominate what it assesses as likely to be key industries of the future, according to interviews for a new episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast being released Wednesday. “This is a strategic thinking on their part — that ‘these are materials that are strategic for our needs and we're going to make sure that we have access to them,’” Nedal Nassar, chief of the Materials Flow Analysis Section at the National Minerals Information Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, told the podcast.