Pollution from factories processing rare earth elements, which are essential for the production of mobile phones and computers, blackens the skyline of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia.
Editor's Note: At Stratfor, we use geopolitics to understand the constraints and advantages that geography confers on a country and the political, technological and economic decisions it compels. The exercise, taken to its logical conclusion, can extend all the way down to an atomic level . This occasional series examines the elements and the power that various combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons can exert on the world around us. In the latest installment, we look at rare earth elements. Tucked into the sixth row of the periodic table, often represented by a single square expanded like a footnote at the bottom of the table, are the 15 lanthanides. When combined with yttrium and scandium, these materials are better known as the rare earth elements.
