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We Don’t Mine Enough Rare Earth Metals to Replace Fossil Fuels With Renewable Energy

We Don’t Mine Enough Rare Earth Metals to Replace Fossil Fuels With Renewable Energy

Rare earth metals are used in solar panels and wind turbines—as well as electric cars and consumer electronics. We don’t recycle them, and there’s not enough to meet growing demand.

Image: Shutterstock

A new scientific study supported by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure warns that the renewable energy industry could be about to face a fundamental obstacle: shortages in the supply of rare metals.

To meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, renewable energy production has to scale up fast. This means that global production of several rare earth minerals used in solar panels and wind turbines—especially neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium, and praseodymium—must grow twelvefold by 2050.

1544640003589-Fig1-1
Fig 1. Graph depicting global critical metal demand for wind and solar panels, between 2020 and 2050, compared with the 2017 level of annual metal production (2017 = 1).

But according to the new study by Dutch energy systems company Metabolic, the “current global supply of several critical metals is insufficient to transition to a renewable energy system.”

The study focuses on demand for rare metals in the Netherlands and extrapolates this to develop a picture of how global trends are likely to develop.

“If the rest of the world would develop renewable electricity capacity at a comparable pace with the Netherlands, a considerable shortage would arise,” the study finds. This doesn’t include other applications of rare earth metals in other electronics industries (rare earth metals are widely used in smartphones, for example). “When other applications (such as electric vehicles) are also taken into consideration, the required amount of certain metals would further increase.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brexit: stage one in Europe’s slow-burn energy collapse

Brexit: stage one in Europe’s slow-burn energy collapse

The Brexit fiasco and French riots are accelerating symptoms of Europe’s earth system crisis

Riots in Paris (source: Irish Times)

Everyone’s talking about Brexit. Some about the French riots. But no one’s talking about why they are happening, and what they really mean. They might think they are, but they are usually missing the point.

On 6th May 2010, the Conservative Party took the reins of power for the first time since 1992, propped up with some help from the Liberal Democrats. Hours before the election result, I warned in a blog post that whichever government was elected, it would be the first step in a dramatic shift toward the far-right that would likely sweep across the Western world within 10 years.

“The new government, beholden to conventional wisdom, will be unable or unwilling to get to grips with the root structural causes of the current convergence of crises facing this country, and the world,” I wrote, describing the failure of all three political parties to understand why the heyday of economic growth was unlikely to return.

“This suggests that in 5–10 years, the entire mainstream party-political system in this country, and many Western countries, will be completely discredited as crises continue to escalate while mainstream policy solutions serve largely to contribute to them, not ameliorate them. The collapse of the mainstream party-political system across the liberal democratic heartlands could pave the way for the increasing legitimization of far-right politics by the end of this decade…”

My prediction was astonishingly prescient. The global shift to the far-right began within exactly five years of my forecast, and has continued to accelerate before the decade is even out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US military document reveals how the West opposed a democratic Syria

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Bashar al-Assad propaganda.

US military documents from 2011 and 2016 reveal that although officials wanted a Syrian regime change in theory, they thought it was highly unlikely to actually happen — and hoped that if President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, he would not be replaced by an opposition-led Syrian democracy but, rather, the same Alawite-Baathist ruling structure would continue. The end result was to be the decimation of the democratic opposition, the consolidation of Islamist forces and regime preservation.

‘The US has given up on the overthrow of Assad in Syria’, wroteRobert Fisk this summer. Indeed, as the Russian-backed Syrian army prepared to execute its final offensive on Idlib, western governments appeared to signal their acceptance of a bloody victory for Assad, despite the ritual denunciations.

But at the last minute, Russia and Turkey agreed a truce to ward off a Russian-led attack for at least a month, and establish a buffer zone to protect 3 million civilians. The deal will involve hashing out how to remove extremist rebels from the buffer zone, and Turkey has announced it will send more troops into Idlib.

As the Idlib offensive loomed, the West, curiously, did little of substance in any particular direction. According to two newly uncovered US military documents, western reticence might be because that the US was never really committed to overthrowing Assad, due to a self-serving strategy that has been wildly misunderstood.

The documents suggest that both early on and toward the later phase of the conflict, senior US military officials had not given any credence to the democratic aspirations of Syrian protestors, but had merely sought to use them as a tool to sideline expanding Iranian influence. Toppling the regime was dismissed as a highly improbable scenario, with officials indicating they believed the survival of an authoritarian Baathist governing structure — with or without Assad — was inevitable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The next financial crash is imminent, and China’s resource crisis could be the trigger

The next financial crash is imminent, and China’s resource crisis could be the trigger

Over three decades, the value of energy China extracts from its domestic oil, gas and coal supplies has plummeted by half

Source: naturepost

China’s economic slowdown could be a key trigger of the coming global financial crisis, but one of its core drivers — China’s dwindling supplies of cheap domestic energy — is little understood by mainstream economists.


All eyes are on China as the world braces itself for what a growing number of financial analysts warn could be another global economic recession.

In a BBC interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney described China as “one of the bigger risks” to global financial stability.

The Chinese “financial sector has developed very rapidly, and it has many of the same assumptions that were made in the run-up to the last financial crisis,” he warned:

“Could something like this happen again?… Could there be a trigger for a crisis — if we’re complacent, of course it could.”

Since 2007, China’s debts have quadrupled. According to the IMF, its total debt is now about 234 percent of gross GDP, which could rise to 300 percent by 2022. British financial journalist Harvey Jones catalogues a range of observations from several economists essentially warning that official data might not reflect how bad China’s economy is actually decelerating.

The great hope is that all this is merely a temporary blip as China transitions from a focus on manufacturing and exports toward domestic consumption and services.

Meanwhile, China’s annual rate of growth continues to decline. The British Foreign Office (FCO) has been monitoring China’s economic woes closely, and in a recent spate of monthly briefings this year has charted what appears to be its inevitable decline.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise

Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise

A climate change-fueled switch away from fossil fuels means the worldwide economy will fundamentally need to change.

Image: Shutterstock

Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.

Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all.

Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says.

Energy shift

Those are the stark implications of a new scientific background paper prepared by a team of Finnish biophysicists. The team from the BIOS Research Unit in Finland were asked to provide research that would feed into the drafting of the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), which will be released in 2019.

For the “first time in human history,” the paper says, capitalist economies are “shifting to energy sources that are less energy efficient.” This applies to all forms of energy. Producing usable energy (“exergy”) to keep powering “both basic and non-basic human activities” in industrial civilisation “will require more, not less, effort.”

“Economies have used up the capacity of planetary ecosystems to handle the waste generated by energy and material use”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global heatwave is symptom of early stage cycle of civilisational collapse

Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet

Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet

Humanity needs new tools to overcome the global crisis of collective insanity

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfundedinvestigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

The world faces an unprecedented convergence of crises. The ecological crisis, which points to a near uninhabitable planet by end of century if business-as-usual continues, is perhaps its most apocalyptic dimension. But the ecological crisis is intimately bound up with the business-as-usual political, economic, and cultural structures of industrial civilization-as-we-know it.

The crisis

Last year, I reported on an analysis by British investment firm Scroders, which concluded that at our current rate of burning fossil fuels, global average temperatures would rise by as much as 7.8C by 2100. The catastrophic collapse of GDP at this point, by more than 50%, would be the least of our problems. Also unleashed would be uncontrollable amplifying feedback processes that would lead to the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the oceans; catastrophic sea-level rise swamping major cities from London to New York; the collapse of the Amazon rainforest; and the loss of Arctic permafrost; to name just a few.

The ecological crisis is, then, bound up with both our civilization’s addiction to oil, gas and coal; and its addiction to endless economic growth. The imperative to continuously grow our economies has pushed forward an escalating hunger for hydrocarbons as the fuel for that growth. And yet, with every year, we encounter increasing evidence that we are depleting the planet’s natural resources at unsustainable levels — beyond the planet’s capacity to renew itself.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Information overload, sustainability, and the emerging organization

Information overload, sustainability, and the emerging organization

Nafeez Ahmed, an exceptional journalist who writes at the intersection of resources and society, understands the complexity of the ecological predicament we humans face. In a piece he wrote last year, Ahmed asserted that our current arrangements are approaching a convulsive crisis point. One reason for this is as follows:

[T]he system faces a crisis of information overload, and an inability to meaningfully process the information available into actionable knowledge that can advance an adaptive response.

If he’s right, is there anything we can do? The short answer is maybe. The great human ecologist William Catton pointed out in his 2009 book Bottleneck that the mass media has become a conduit for propagating bad or at least inconclusive information. In short, the feedback we humans need in order to run our society in a sustainable way is dangerously lacking.

But what if we could reorganize society to better handle the information available and act on that information quickly, decisively and appropriately? Management consultant and author John Hagel may be able to shed some light on this. (Regular readers will recall that I was channeling Hagel in last week’s piece.)

Part of the reason we as a society have been having difficulty making sense of the vast amount of information we are getting is that most organizations are not very good at doing this.

Yet, technology now more than ever affords us the opportunity for what Hagel calls scalable collaboration and learning involving very large groups of people. Those companies and organizations that are mastering this opportunity can react with lightning speed and precision—all the while keeping an eye on the moving target that is our rapidly changing world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Former OPCW official: no conclusive proof of Russian complicity in Salisbury attack

Former OPCW official: no conclusive proof of Russian complicity in Salisbury attack

But Russia’s denial of past ‘Novichok’ programmes is misleading

  • Nerve agent found in Salisbury does not conclusively prove Russian complicity
  • Russia’s denial of a Novichok programme is true but misleading — a secret nerve agent programme to create Novichok-type agents was run under a different name
  • Western states have extensively researched and synthesized the Novichok class of agents
  • Novichok was most recently synthesized by Iran, details of which were provided to the OPCW
  • Russian Novichok stockpiles were destroyed in the 1990s, but it is theoretically possible that some capability still exists, though no evidence for this is available

The US and its European allies have coordinated the largest collective expulsion of Russian diplomats in history. Russia has promised to retaliate in kind. Yet despite the sense of certainty around Russian culpability in the Salisbury incident, questions remain around the state of the available evidence.

As contradictory narratives proliferate amidst conflicting Western and Russian government statements and media reports, a clearer picture of the secret history of the nerve agent used in the Salisbury poisonings is emerging.

In an exclusive interview with INSURGE, a former senior official at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from 1993 to 2006, Dr Ralf Trapp, said that at this stage there is no conclusive evidence that Russia was the source of the nerve agent used in Salisbury. He pointed to compelling evidence that Russia did run a secret research programme to create Novichok-type nerve agents — and strongly criticised Russia’s denials of that programme. While justifying grounds for suspicion, there is as yet no decisive proof that Russia retained such a Novichok programme or capability today, he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The UK government is manufacturing its nerve agent case for ‘action’ on Russia

The UK government is manufacturing its nerve agent case for ‘action’ on Russia

Official claim that ‘Novichok’ points solely to Russia discredited 

Military personnel investigate the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfundedinvestigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

On Monday, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that former Russian spy, Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia, were poisoned with “a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia” known as ‘Novichok’.

The chemical agent was identified by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down. May referred to the British government’s “knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so” as a basis to conclude that Russia’s culpability in the attack “is highly likely.”

On these grounds, she claimed that only two scenarios are possible:

“Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”

The British government’s line has been chorused uncritically by the entire global press corps, with little scrutiny of its plausibility.

But there is a problem: far from offering a clear-cut evidence-trail to Vladimir Putin’s chemical warfare labs, the use of Novichok in the nerve gas attack on UK soil points to a wider set of potential suspects, of which Russia is in fact the least likely.

Russia did actually destroy its nerve agent capabilities according to the OPCW

Yet a concerted effort is being made to turn facts on their head.

No clearer sign of this can be found than in the statement by Ambassador Peter Wilson, UK Permanent Representative to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in which he claimed that Russia has “failed for many years” to fully disclose its chemical weapons programme.

Wilson was parroting a claim made a year earlier by the US State Departmentthat Russia had not made a complete declaration of its chemical weapons stockpile: “The United States cannot certify that Russia has met its obligations under the Convention.”

Yet these claims are contradicted by the OPCW itself, which in September 2017 declared that the independent global agency had rigorously verified the completed destruction of Russia’s entire chemical weapons programme, including of course its nerve agent production capabilities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Army document: US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3

Army document: US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3

Senior DIA, Air Force and Army officials admit that NATO expansionism and US covert interference in Russian internal politics may trigger “next global conflict”

French soldiers unload tanks from a train in northern Poland for a NATO military exercise (Source: LA Times)

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfundedinvestigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

A US Army document concedes the real interests driving US military strategy toward Russia: dominating oil pipeline routes, accessing the vast natural resources of Central Asia, and enforcing the expansion of American capitalism worldwide.


The Russians are coming. They hacked our elections. They are lurking behind numerous alternative political movements and news outlets. Such is the overwhelming chorus from traditional reporting on Russia, which sees the United States as being under threat from fanatical Russian expansionism — expansionism which has gone so far as to interfere dramatically in the 2016 Presidential elections.

Russia is certainly an authoritarian regime with its own regional imperial ambitions. President Vladimir Putin and his cronies are responsible for massive deaths and human rights violations against populations at home and abroad (the latter in war theaters like Syria and elsewhere). Putin has strengthened a system of oligarchical state-dominated predatory capitalism which has widened extreme inequality and concentrated elite wealth. And we will no doubt learn more about what shenanigans Russia did, or did not, get up to in relation to US elections.

For the most part, these are not especially dangerous things to report on from the comfort of the West. Somewhat lacking from conventional reporting, on the other hand, is serious reflection on whether US policies toward Russia have contributed directly to the deterioration of US-Russia relations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

City of London financiers contemplate “imminent” 2018 US stock market crash of up to “50%”

City of London financiers contemplate “imminent” 2018 US stock market crash of up to “50%”

Coming dramatic decline of US stock prices would trigger global recession, finds grim forecast to be explored at roundtable hosted by British financial services think-tank

A new analysis published on the website of a London-based think-tank, funded by the world’s biggest banking and financial services institutions, warns that the US stock market is on the brink of an imminent crash that could trigger another global recession.

The document by a senior US economist and former Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England is published on the website of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI), which runs around 100 roundtable events a year involving financial services insiders from the UK and beyond.

The document forecasts that in 2018, US stock prices are likely to plummet by as much as “forty to fifty percent” — compared to the less than five percent plunge in early February. The document was published weeks before the recent stock market volatility.

The warning of a forty to fifty percent drop points to the prospect of a global financial crash worse than the 2008 banking collapse.

It comes at a time when the Federal Reserve, Bank of England and other authorities are looking to tighten up their cheap money policies, as economic growth is at its highest levels since the 2008 slump.

The new analysis is an ‘open letter’ by US economist Robert Aliber, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a world renowned authority in identifying the source of shocks behind over forty banking crises that have occurred since the 1970s.

The ‘open letter’, dated January 21st 2018, is published on CSFI’s website at this link http://www.csfi.org/s/QUARTERLYJAN12018.docx, and mentioned in an announcement of a forthcoming breakfast conversation with Professor Aliber in late February.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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BP solar chief forecasts global clean energy renaissance

BP solar chief forecasts global clean energy renaissance

A new paradigm of ‘planetary ecology’ might emerge after 2050

Published as part of the launch of the new beta platform for INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform for people and planet

A new book put together by the Chairman of the philanthropic arm of Europe’s largest solar company, Lightsource BP, throws light on how the world will be permanently transformed by an energy revolution in coming decades.

The study’s key finding is that the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies could usher in a new electricity paradigm associated with a more advanced clean, industrial economy. The core ingredients for this paradigm will take off rapidly after 2050, it says.

On the other hand, the study warns that renewable energy, if implemented within the same ‘old’ geopolitical paradigm of the fossil fuel era, might not avoid a further deterioration of environmental stability and international security.

The new book is edited by Vicente Lopez Ibor Mayor, former Chairman of Lightsource Renewable Energy, which merged with the leading British oil firm, BP, at the end of last year.

BP invested $200m in the merger, equivalent to a 43 percent stake in what is now Lightsource BP. Under the deal, Mayor became Chairman of the Lightsource Foundation, Lightsource BP’s charitable division.

Ibor Mayor’s book, Clean Energy Law and Regulation: Climate Change, Energy Union and International Governance, also published at the end of last year, brings together expert contributions from senior EU officials, energy analysts, diplomats, legal scholars and technology experts. Their contributions scope how energy regulation is rapidly changing to keep up with the emergence of a new electricity and energy paradigm driven by the rise of renewables.

This new renewables-driven paradigm, Mayor concludes, will emerge inevitably in the latter half of the twenty-first century — but its nature, positive or negative, is not set in stone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Facebook will infiltrate national elections and rule the world in less than 10 years — unless we stop it

How Facebook will infiltrate national elections and rule the world in less than 10 years — unless we stop it

What do NATO, private military contractors, giant arms manufacturers, wine merchants, the NSA, Trump, British property tycoons, Russian oligarchs, and Big Oil have in common? The world’s largest social network

Source: Geek.com

Published to launch the new beta platform for INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform for Open Inquiry and coordinated action in service of people and planet. Become an owner of the media revolution.

Imagine a world in which everybody gave away their freedom, willingly, in return for being able to belong to a toxic network which, rather than enriching their lives, profited from eroding civil discourse, polarizing communities, and manipulating their minds.

Wouldn’t you wonder what was wrong with these people?

You would. And yet that is the world you are about to inhabit, right now. Unless you do something about it.


This story is a call to action. A call on citizens, technologists, philanthropists, journalists and beyond to take action to disrupt our current path to a dystopian, monocultural future. As such, it experiments with a new form of journalistic narrative called Open Inquiry, that aims to balance out the investigation of power with a recognition of solutions and alternatives.


Facebook is on track to become more powerful than the National Security Agency — so says a senior advisor to the US military intelligence community who predicted the rise of artificial intelligence and robot warfare. In less than a decade, Facebook’s growth will mean it potentially has the ability to monitor almost everyone on the planet. This will make the firm more powerful than any other government contractor in the world.

This prospect has dangerous ramifications for democracy. Increasing evidence reveals that Facebook’s most lucrative business model is to outsource itself as a conduit for psychological warfare to any third party that wants to influence the beliefs and behaviors of citizens.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Collapse of Media and What You Can Do About It

The Collapse of Media and What You Can Do About It

Photo by Poster Boy | CC BY 2.0

When a system enters into the final stage of its deterioration – whether that is an institutional system, a state, an empire, or the human body – all the important information flows that support coherent communication breakdown. In this final stage, if this situation is not corrected the system will collapse and die.

It has become obvious to nearly everyone that we have reached this stage on the planet and in our democratic institutions. We see how the absolute dysfunction of the global information architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — is generating widespread apathy, despair, insanity and madness at a scale that is terrifying.

And we are right to be terrified, because this situation is paralyzing us from taking the action required to solve global and local challenges. While liberals fight conservatives and conservatives fight liberals we lose precious time.

While progressives fight government, the corporations and the super-rich we drown in despair. While philanthropists, fueled by their own certainty and wealth, fight for justice or equality or for some poor hamlet in Africa we become apathetic and distracted from the real source of the problem. And while the president fights everyone and everyone fights the president, the collective goes mad.

In the background, however, the game of hoarding resources and not redistributing them accelerates; absorbing the sum total of our collective actions and commitments into a singular unacceptable future. There is only one way to avoid this fate; uncover the source of the disease and cure it by mobilizing solutions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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