Clean Energy's Dirty Little Secret - The Atlantic (May 2009)

Over the next 30 years, Molycorp is permitted to make its pit 300 feet deeper, which could increase the world’s supply of rare earths by 10 percent or more a year. But the consequences of the nascent green nationalism behind the mine’s revival—a weird amalgam of environmentalism, economics, and national security—will likely be less predictable. Consider the views of the industry analyst Jack Lifton—by no stretch your standard environmental activist (“I don’t give a rat’s ass about global warming”). To protect U.S. industry from supply shocks, he has called on the government to mandate the recycling of strategic minerals. A “bottle bill” for cars, long dismissed as an environmentalist’s dream, is just one possible outcome. Another could be a backlash of resource nationalism in supplier nations like China. As green nationalism’s potent mix of idealism and fear changes the kinds of cars we drive, it also promises to change the course of globalization.

Obama Science Advisor Repeats “Geoengineering” Talking Point

One of President Obama’s top science advisors spoke again of the need to consider “geoengineering” the planet in the name of preventing global warming at a speech at MIT yesterday, despite publicly reversing his initial support of such measures last week.

John Holdren, the director of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Monday that, “Large-scale geoengineering projects designed to cool the Earth could conceivably be done,” reports CNet News.

It seems that this is another case of someone in the Obama administration telling the public one thing and elitist insiders another.