~snip
I became interested in this topic because of the current happenings in my area. We started seeing an increase in the population of foreigners (mainly Asians) around our community. Most of them are engaging in illegal mining of materials that we don't know. Some of them were arrested and we later discovered that they were mining some rare earth metals.
Moving to another country to extract rare materials without permission already tells that there are flaws in the system.
Some parts of the Asian and Western world has always find interest in other people's rare earth metals, especially in those third world countries. What if someone was actually paid?. It happens a lot in so many third world countries. These foreigners makes a deal with either the government or anyone in charge, in exchange for their earth metals.
Majority of these third world countries don't even utilize these rare metals, which automatically gives advantage to the Asian and western world that knows how to utilize them well. The thing is, all focused has been channeled to Crude. Only a few knows how important these rare earth metals are, and they tend to dominate in that area.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements, including 15 silvery-white metals called lanthanides, or lanthanoids, plus scandium and yttrium.
This reminds me of the good of days in Chemistry class.
I only learnt 30 out of the 100+ elements in the periodic table because they were often used in calculations. Rare elements were a bit far, so I showed less interest, and I think scandium is the only transition element that also happens to be a rare earth metal, but never heard of yttrium before.