Letter to the editor: Mining brings freedom for America

By Randy Dutton Montesano Wash.

Editor,
A battle is raging of which few are aware. Progressives, in their naivete, are ensuring America will lose it. For years now progressives have been blocking carbon based energy development while promoting alternative energy. A world powered by wind, wave, solar, and advanced electronics they told us will make America energy self-reliant, and no longer a pawn of the Middle East. All the while, these progressives and similarly minded courts blocked US based mining of minerals, and both conservative and progressive politicians have so indebted America we’re losing control over our own assets. This now has set the stage for a major conflict.
China, flush with American cash from our spending spree and continued borrowing, now controls about 97 percent of the world’s rare earth metals. What China doesn’t control from domestic production, they’ve bought up in other countries, including America, and now China is cutting exports.
What are rare earth metals, and who cares you ask? Well these 17 elements are essential ingredients for many of the high tech components necessary for consumer electronics, lighter weight permanent magnets as used in electrical generation, weapons systems, aircraft, and some rechargeable batteries such as used in electric vehicles. If you have a Blackberry, LED TV, or cell phone, rare earth metals are contained within.
It is believed that soon after 2012 China will consume all the available production of rare earth metals thus making virtually none available for foreign based manufacturing – meaning, American commercial and military productions may be out of this key ingredient. Once again America is held hostage to a resource supplier, this time China.
How often have you heard that mining and oil drilling are bad and that we can develop alternatives that will drive our economy and make our lives better? What future do you think exists for our children when we have no fossil fuels to rely upon because we refused to invest in their extraction, and the alternative energy we were told would save us, becomes too expensive to mass produce?
What will we do when the only wind turbine supplier is China, and our money has devalued to the point we can’t buy any? Our likely future results from politicians who don’t understand science or economics. What is certain is that they understand lobbyists and political dealing. Their financial futures likely already are secure, but the same cannot be said for our children. The only chance we have is for the public to wake up and understand that our future is in American self-reliance – not government control.
We must accept that survival means being producers, from the raw materials, to advanced components, to finished products. We must stop relying upon a dysfunctional government and career politicians to bail us or anyone else out with our own money.