Posts Tagged ‘disruption’
“The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”*…
Often called “the seeds of technology,” rare earths are a group 17 metallic elements (the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium) with unique magnetic, optical, and catalytic properties vital for electronics, defense, chemical processing, petroleum refining, and green energy.
China’s dominance over rare earth elements creates an unprecedented vulnerability in global supply chains that extends far beyond the relatively modest $6 billion market size. The risk of disruption in supply of rare earths has become a critical concern as the nation controls 69% of worldwide mining operations, 92% of refining capacity, and a staggering 98% of permanent magnet production, according to Goldman Sachs analysis from October 2025.
This concentration represents one of the most significant single points of failure in modern industrial infrastructure. Furthermore, the rare earth reserves distribution globally shows heavy concentration in geologically limited regions, making supply diversification extremely challenging.
The economic implications of this dominance become clear when considering potential disruption scenarios. Goldman Sachs warns that even a 10% disruption in industries reliant on rare earth elements could trigger $150 billion in lost economic output, alongside inflationary pressures cascading through multiple sectors. Despite rare earth markets being 33 times smaller than copper markets, their strategic importance creates disproportionate systemic risk…
– “China’s Rare Earth Dominance Creates Global Supply Disruption Risks” [source of the image above, and worth reading in full]
Farrell Gregory explains why they figure so prominently in so much discussion of the global economy and of U.S.- China relations and what we might expect…
Over the course of the last year, we’ve seen China suspend rare earth exports twice, generating a short-lived round of public interest and short-lived “expertise” in America. Each crisis followed a similar progression: an aggrieved China introduces export licensing, effectively suspending US access to certain rare earth elements and downstream products. The American public is subjected to alternating shouts of panic and confident assertions that ‘rare’ is a misnomer and the necessary elements are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust. After a period of confrontation, and likely following concessions on both sides, access is reestablished before too much harm is done.
Examining the differences in each crisis is less important than establishing what is quickly becoming a pattern: China is increasingly willing and able to use its dominance in rare earths as leverage against the U.S. It’s worth noting what a change this is from even five years ago: during the entirety of the 2019-2020 U.S.-China trade war, Beijing never introduced export controls for rare earths, despite making threats to do so. Now China assesses its position differently — they’ve accumulated leverage and they’re willing to use it with increasing frequency.
This frequency might be in part because China’s dominant position in rare earths is a time bomb for both sides. The PRC likely wants to use its REE dominance to extract further concessions before the U.S. manages to defuse this dominance with some combination of reshoring and tech advances.
I think it’s a matter of when — not whether — China decides to activate its standing export control infrastructure. They’ve built up leverage, and over time, that leverage will dissipate. In the near-term future, throttling rare earth and magnet exports is still an effective threat to employ in trade disputes with the U.S. In the medium term, successful reshoring and reliance-decreasing efforts will diminish what concessions China can extract from the U.S.
So, expect the rare earth crisis cycle to play out again. When it does, here are a few clarifications on rare earths that may prove helpful for avoiding the most common misperceptions…
Read on: “China’s Rare Earths Chokehold: A Primer,” from @chinatalk.skystack.xyz.
See also: “Rare Earths,” from @profgalloway.com.
And also this: “China Is Overplaying Its Rare-Earth Hand in Japan” from @bloomberg.com (gift article).
* attributed to Deng Xiaoping
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As we ponder paucity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that the British East India Company [see here and here] established the Assam Tea Company and began the commercial production of tea (grown from slips furtively exported from China) in the region. Beginning in the 1850s, the tea industry rapidly expanded, consuming vast tracts of land for tea plantations. By the turn of the century, Assam became the leading tea-producing region in the world. That growth and innovations in tea preparation caused the price of tea to drop and demand to grow. Soon, London became the center of the international tea trade.
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken”*…
The estimable Jonathan Watts on the (painfully) pivotal year just ended…
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”…
The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
…
His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels…
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.
…
Aquino [Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre] said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similarly devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record record” was a taste of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] in the global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in recent US history, which happened in August. For those who prefer to calculate catastrophe in economic terms, the US broke its annual record of billion-dollar disasters by August, by which time there had already been 23.
…
…as science has proved beyond any doubt, global temperatures would continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests.
In the years ahead, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would first become the new norm, and then be looked back on as one of the cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the climate system…
Bracing, but critically important– eminently worth reading in full: “World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say,” from @jonathanwatts in @guardian.
* Leo Tolstoy
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As we face facts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that Congress authorized the formation of the U.S. weather service (later named the Weather Bureau; later still, the National Weather Service), and placed it under the direction of the Army Signal Corps. Cleveland Abbe, who had started the first private weather reporting and warning service (in Cincinnati) and had been issuing weather reports or bulletins since 1869, was the only person in the country at the time who was experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them. He became the weather service’s inaugural chief scientist– effectively its founding head– in January, 1871. The first U.S. meteorologist, he is known as the “father of the U.S. Weather Bureau,” where he systemized observation, trained personnel, and established scientific methods. He went on to become one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society.
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”*…
Some observations are best considered “interesting, if true”; some, a la Karl Popper, “true, until false”… Consider this very recent paper in Nature…
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants.’ Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.
The full paper: “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time” @Nature
One notes that the quote above– from Lord Kelvin, at the turn of the twentieth century– immediately preceded a couple of decades in which physics was radically redefined and advanced by Planck, Einstein, Bohr, et al. (In fairness to Kelvin, consider this suggestion that his point was more subtle.) As we look forward, we might ponder the ways in which the reorganization of disciplines, the rise of research in other cultures (less constrained by the mores of “conventional” research), the use of AI, and/or some as yet unknown dynamic could challenge the phenomenon– “a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge”– to which the authors attribute diminishing disruption.
[Source of the image above]
* Lord Kelvin, in an address to the the Royal Institution in April of 1900
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As we ponder progress, we might send advanced birthday greetings to Wilhelm Wien; he was born on this date in 1864. A physicist, his work helped move past Kelvin’s log-jam. In 1893, he used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien’s displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody (a surface that absorbs all radiant energy falling on it) at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature. His colleague Max Planck colaborated with Wien, then extended the thinking in what we now know as Planck’s law, which led to the development of quantum theory.
Wien received the 1911 Nobel Prize for his work on heat radiation.
Just before Kelvin’s speech (in 1898) Wien identified a positive particle equal in mass to the hydrogen atom– what we now know as a proton. Wien, in the techniques he used, laid the foundation of mass spectrometry.
“Disruptive movement must come from within”*…
Disruption can be the engine of deep and rapid change to industries, political systems, or indeed societies. As COVID reminds us, some of those disruptions are involunatry. But many aren’t. Indeed, on the back of champions like Clayton Christensen and his promotion of “disruptive innovation,” disruption has become a go-to strategy– if not the go-to strategy– for entrepreneurs (and some intrapreneurs) around the world. And it has begun to define the strategies of social and political actors/movements as well.
Disruption can be a powerful approach to solving problems that have been allowed to fester (e.g., in-grown, oligarchical markets; climate change.) But Santiago Zabala warns us that as disruption has become more dominant, it risks losing any purpose beyond simply “winning” the game (the market, the election) in question…
… “disruption,” according to its Latin origin, signifies “rupture,” tearing apart, and violently dissolving continuity. As a metonym for progress, since the nineties it has spread the illusion that innovation is always an improvement regardless of its social consequences. Its association with Silicon Valley and business culture in general has led us to disregard the reckless adverse effects of progress without responsibility. In fact, this indifference is vital to understanding the meaning of disruption and our fascination with a notion that is constantly deployed to exploit our hope that innovation will save us. “Disruption,” as Bernard Stiegler noted, “radicalizes the reversal of all values,” whether technological, political, or religious.
Like other concepts whose meanings are eroded by overuse, such as nihilism, postmodernism, and populism, disruption requires a philosophical elucidation. In recent decades, technological disruptions were heralded as collective life-shaping events, but is necessary to question this disruption is seen as a value worth pursuing even though its worship is tearing apart the possibilities for a sustainable future…
Disruptive innovation, as [historian Jill] Lepore illustrates, holds out the hope of salvation from the very damnation it encourages because the idea of progress has been stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. The West in the eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; in the nineteenth, evolution; and in the twentieth, growth and innovation. And the problem today is that the idea of disruption dominates the rhetoric of not only Silicon Valley but also other industries and contemporary societies all over the world. Disruption has taken over as a common language in which to project not just success but also a future of unforeclosed possibilities. This success is premised on technology’s capacity to continuously offer cheaper alternatives to established products—and on the promise that innovation is always an improvement, regardless of its consequences.
Disruptive innovation in journalism, education, and medicine has emerged as an all-purpose replacement of traditional methods with new ways that value novelty and speed. This valuation of progress without quality has allowed these pillars of democratic nations to be further subverted by capital, prey to market drives that ignore the value of the product for the value to shareholders. The belief that companies and industries that failed were somehow destined to fail is at the heart not only of Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation but also of a neoliberal age that holds that government should play no role in restraining corporate behavior. Giving corporate behavior a free pass has facilitated the application of disruption’s indifference to arenas that affect society, politics, and culture. Numerous conferences, centers, summits, and labs established even in just the most recent decade demonstrate that “disruptive” has become an admiring adjective, a positive valence, even a brand.
In order to resist disruption it is not enough to demonstrate that its benefits are based on shaky evidence. This has been the approach taken by Lepore (“Christensen’s sources are often dubious and his logic questionable”), Michael Porter (“disruptive technologies that are successful in displacing established leaders are extremely rare”) and Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh (“only seven of the 77 business case studies covered by Christensen’s fit his own criteria of what constitutes disruptive innovation”), among other scholars. While these analyses are useful to debunk the illusion that innovation is always an improvement, they do not modify the widespread enthusiasm for it. “Exaggerated claims for disruption,” as Mark C. Taylor points out, “usually result from a failure of memory, which is symptomatic of a preoccupation with the present in a culture addicted to speed.”
This addiction can be overcome by thinking through longer stretches of time…
… and the social and cultural hopes and values that should guide us. Disruption can be a force for altogether positive and overdue kinds of change… but only if its aims are higher than simply the bottom line.
A critical look at what we talk about when we talk about “disruption”: “Disruption: Neither Innovative nor Valuable,” in @LAReviewofBooks.
See also: “‘Disruption’ Is a Two-Way Street.”
* Leo Tolstoy
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As we contemplate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that a disruptive force was named and energized: Adolf Hitler delivered “the Hofbrauhaus speech,” in which he gave a crowd of nearly 2,000 members of the German Workers’ Party a twenty-five point platform and a new name– the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” or Nazi, Party.
Hitler was, at the time, the head of publicity and propaganda; the next year, he became the Party’s head. The event was sufficiently momentous that the Nazi Party celebrated it founding at the Hofbrauhaus each year thereafter.
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