The Law of Unintended Consequences in action, part 12,358: the NYT reports on how the push for “green technology” has led to a surge in demand for a group of metals known as the rare earth elements (a.k.a. lanthanides, a.k.a. “f-block elements”: elements 57-73 in the Periodic Table).
Over 99% of world production of the more critical elements comes from sites in China, which are being operated in extremely environment-unfriendly ways and often run by crime syndicates.
Here in Guyun Village, a small community in southeastern China fringed by lush bamboo groves and banana trees, the environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew.
Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.
On a recent rainy afternoon, Zeng Guohui, a 41-year-old laborer, walked to an abandoned mine where he used to shovel ore, and pointed out still-barren expanses of dirt and mud. The mine exhausted the local deposit of heavy rare earths in three years, but a decade after the mine closed, no one has tried to revive the downstream rice fields.
Small mines producing heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium still operate on nearby hills. “There are constant protests because it damages the farmland — people are always demanding compensation,” Mr. Zeng said.
“In many places, the mining is abused,” said Wang Caifeng, the top rare-earths industry regulator at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China.
“This has caused great harm to the ecology and environment.”
There are 17 rare-earth elements — some of which, despite the name, are not particularly rare — but two heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, are in especially short supply, mainly because they have emerged as the miracle ingredients of green energy products. Tiny quantities of dysprosium can make magnets in electric motors lighter by 90 percent, while terbium can help cut the electricity usage of lights by 80 percent. Dysprosium prices have climbed nearly sevenfold since 2003, to $53 a pound. Terbium prices quadrupled from 2003 to 2008, peaking at $407 a pound, before slumping in the global economic crisis to $205 a pound.
China mines more than 99 percent of the world’s dysprosium and terbium. Most of China’s production comes from about 200 mines here in northern Guangdong and in neighboring Jiangxi Province.[…] Half the heavy rare earth mines have licenses and the other half are illegal, industry executives said. […] A close-knit group of mainland Chinese gangs with a capacity for murder dominates much of the mining and has ties to local officials, said Stephen G. Vickers, the former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who is now the chief executive of International Risk, a global security company.
[…]The biggest user of heavy rare earths in the years ahead could be large wind turbines, which need much lighter magnets for the five-ton generators at the top of ever-taller towers. Vestas, a Danish company that has become the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer, said that prototypes for its next generation used dysprosium, and that the company was studying the sustainability of the supply. Goldwind, the biggest Chinese turbine maker, has switched from conventional magnets to rare-earth magnets.
A cynic would ask: do we have to kill the environment in order to save it?
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
This is hilarious and tragic at the same time. But entirely predictable as well. And it parallels what will happen a thousand-times over if the leftist AGW cultists get their way. The whole goal of the “Climate Crisis” movement is to shift economic power and economic activity from developed countries to less-developed countries. Problem is, Europe and the US already have the strictest pollution controls and emissions standards in the world. And when you “offshore” industries to places like China, Indonesia and India, they will make the same amount of stuff that would have been made in the EU or US, but do so with basically no environmental awareness, spewing pollution everywhere — land, sea, air.
The end result is the same amount of manufacturing is going on, but done so much less efficiently and more polluting.
If you really cared about the environment and global warming, you’d ENCOURAGE more economic activity in those areas like the US that have the best pollution controls already in place. But no. That’s not the goal of the AGW cult. The real goal is to destroy the US and wreak “economic revenge” on the US and Europe, by the rest of the world.