Michael Silver is the CEO of American Elements
2012 marks the second year American Elements has published its annual Endangered Elements List (EEL12): a list of elements which by their scarcity and technological importance threaten America’s long-term prospects. America is about to face a crisis that will determine whether it will hold its place as the largest economy and most powerful nation in the world.
Today it is a constant refrain that the way out of our present fiscal difficulties is for America to get back in the business of making things. Manufacturing generates the needed jobs and resulting prosperity that have pulled us out of each recession for the last 150 years.
American innovation, particularly in the area of green technology, it is said will foster whole new industries, jobs and economic growth at the beginning of the 21st century similar to the impact made at the beginning of the 20th century by the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell (telephones), Thomas Edison (electricity) and Henry Ford (cars).
While much of this is true, innovation is in fact only the starting point. To manufacture the products flowing from great ideas, a nation must also have access to the critical materials on which the discoveries are based. Each of the elements on the periodic table has its own somewhat alchemistic properties. These properties underlie every great invention. Bell and Edison were successful because they could rely on the copper of the southwest needed to build the telephone lines and power lines their inventions required. Ford could reach to the iron of the Appalachians for the key components of the steel to build his cars and Texas for the fuel to power them.
The coming green technology innovations of the 21st century, such as solar panels, electric motors, fuel cells and wind turbines, will also require large amounts of various elements. However, the elements of the 21st century are very different from the ones that mattered in the 20th century. Copper, iron, nickel and tin have given way to somewhat exotic sounding elements a lot further down the Periodic Table; materials that all Americans need to quickly get familiar with because at present we produce almost NONE of them. Additionally, we have made virtually no effort to deal with this strategic gap in our ability to manufacture the things we invent; either domestically or in our foreign policy towards mineral-rich nations.
The primary purpose of American Elements’ annual Endangered Elements List (EEL) is to bring attention to this crisis and to educate Americans as to (1) which elements are critical, (2) what makes them essential and endangered and (3) what other nations, particularly China, are doing to assure they can produce what they (or we) invent. The 5 elements that made the list this year are:
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