This headline + article at Treehugger caught my eye. Thought it was brilliant and started to read, only to learn that I has misinterpreted the whole thing. When I got to this bit I realized me and Treehugger were on different wave lengths:
"The main thrust of the article is that rare earths are only known to exist in a few places in the world: Mostly China, Australia and North America, with much smaller reserves known to exist in India, Brazil, Malaysia and South Africa."
Silly me. Here I was thinking that the only place this rare stuff exists is on Earth – the planet. Not earth, as in the ground. And that we actually have a Rare Earth Dependence, meaning a dependence on the planet itself.
That was what caught my interest in the first place. The genius of saying that we don't have a fossil fuel dependence – we have a rare Earth dependence.
So much for that.
/jan