Leonard Lopate: You said that the California place --

Lisa Margonelli: Mountain Pass.

Leonard Lopate: Mountain Pass -- has kind of cleaned up the area.  There was a series of radioactive waste leaks at the Mountain Pass a decade ago, wasn't there?

Lisa Margonelli: There was, there was.

Leonard Lopate:  So is this dangerous?  Do the Chinese mines have any environmental safeguards?

Lisa Margonelli:  Well, um, I haven't seen them.  I think we can assume that they are not paying -- Mountain Pass is going to pay $2.4 million a year for ongoing environmental things, and they've spent more than twenty million dollars in kind of clean up and containment issues on the site.  And I think we can assume that they're not doing that in China.  But I have not personally been to the, you know, neodymium producers there.

Hearing that last part reminded me of a siegel's diary Making the Green Economy Dirty.

Leonard Lopate:  Now last week in New Jersey, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar got a lot of attention for saying that wind-mills off the eastern seaboard could eventually generate enough electricity to replace nearly all the coal-fired power-plants in this country.  And I'm assuming that those wind-farms would require even more neodymium.  We're giving China an awful lot of power with this, aren't we?

Lisa Margonelli:  Well, we would be, if we don't develop things ourselves or if we don't anticipate where this is going.  I think that our, you know, our framework in the U.S. is really around oil, and as people sort of come to a realization that we don't have much power in the oil market, ... we tend to think, Okay, if it's not oil, it's going to be okay.  And when we look at new sources of energy or new ways of designing cars, our concern about supply chains only reaches to the fuel or to the things we know.  We don't really think about, Wow, what's in the batteries?  what's in the motors?  what are all the other supply chains that are attached to this new technology?  And we're not really thinking that through.

Leonard Lopate:  But the Chinese seem to be.

Lisa Margonelli:  Yes, and in fact they have been thinking it through since the late 80's.  Deng Xiaoping famously compared China's wealth in rare earth minerals to the Middle East's wealth in oil.

Leonard Lopate:  Well, they also expanded control of their mining operations in Africa, looking for things like cobalt and lithium.  Those minerals are also important to green technologies, aren't they?  

Lisa Margonelli: Um-hum, yup.  They're very important, and um, China has also been very aggressive about developing a battery industry and bringing that cobalt from Africa to China for processing.  And so definitely China is really taking a long-term strategic look at this, and the U.S. is kind of coming late to the party in terms of really thinking about this in a strategic way.

You know, one thing when I was in China talking to people who design cars there and who were thinking about green industry, they said, "Well, you know, 12% of the world owns cars, and 88% of the world doesn't own cars.  And that's where the real market is.  We can't sell more cars to people in the U.S., we need to sell them to this 88%. And the thing that's limiting from buying cars is pollution.  So if you can eliminate the pollution at the tail-pipe through alternative fuels, then you have access to this massive, massive market."

And that was kind of the way they were looking at i -- this was back in 2004 -- this really kind of long-range, strategic concept that you know is really just beginning to dawn on us in the U.S.  But at the same time in the U.S. we can't -- ...  We need to think about this in a more sophisticated way. ... We need to be thinking about these cars in a way that we can actually have control over where some of the resources come from.

Leonard Lopate:  But you're also saying that in creating these environmental products, we are also doing some damage to the environment, because mining neodymium does have its downside.  Does the environmentalist community, is it aware of that or are they very much in support of using more neodymium?

Lisa Margonelli:  Um, I haven't seen much amongst the environmentalist community, much concern about neodymium.  There's some concern about cobalt because of the human rights issues in Africa.  Neodymium, though, was something that was a big deal tens years ago when the spills happened at Mountain Pass.  But when I called around amongst the local environmentalist community, people said, "Oh, that place!  You know, we haven't heard anything from them for a long time."  And so I think that this is this issue that's just coming into people's consciousness.  And to my knowledge, there isn't a big reaction against it yet.

But I think it also points to the fact that we're going to have to make trade-offs in moving away from oil.  It's not going to be a simple green future with daisies on the side of the road.  We're going to have to decide, Okay, we're going to have to drill somewhere, or we're going to have to mine this.  Or --

Leonard Lopate:  Or we're going to have to cause troubles when we make ethanol, which has its other environmental negative effects.