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Red Alert: How China's Growing Prosperity Threatens the American Way of Life, Stephen Leeb & Gregory Dorsey, 2011, ISBN 9780446576239 America is in a race with China that will go a long way toward determining our future quality of life. Few Americans know that this race is underway. World supplies are growing very tight of certain key minerals (sometimes called strategic minerals) that are absolutely vital for the smooth running of a 21st century economy. Names like neodymium, europium, indium and niobium may sound very boring, but you can't run a high-tech economy without them. China has spent years, and a lot of money around the world, getting its hands on every bit of such materials that it can find. China is doing it not just to keep their economy growing, but because, one day, the supply will run out, and they want to be in the driver's seat. For a number of other, equally important, minerals, of which America imports all of its supply, the world's biggest supplier is China. The American attitude is that technology will save the day. How is that going to happen if China decides that some vital mineral will be much less available? Estimates put the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at nearly $3 trillion. Even a portion of that money would have been much better spent on renewable energy, especially solar energy. China is the world leader in making solar panels, and their lead widens every day. How can America have any hope of catching up when federal investments are in the hundreds of millions of dollars (at the most), and China's investments are in the billions of dollars? Everyone has seen pictures of acres and acres of electronic equipment dumped all over China. The methods to extract the metals inside may be low-tech and toxic, but even a small amount of gold, for instance, per monitor, multiplied by millions of monitors, is a substantial amount of gold that China can use elsewhere. America can not depend on new sources of oil to power its economy, because the authors assert that "peak oil" has arrived. It is the point at which the era of "easy" oil extraction has ended, and any new discoveries will be harder and harder to extract ("Drill, baby, drill" is simplistic, at best). This is a fascinating and very important book. It is very much worth reading for all Americans, and especially for all members of Congress. Paul Lappen is a freelance book reviewer whose blog, Dead Trees Review, emphasizes small press and self-published books.
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