More from Heatmap: "Wildfire smoke is making air pollution in the United States a lot worse, as anyone in New York City last week can attest. Yet the regulatory tools that have done so much to reduce emissions from cars and smokestacks may actually be getting in the way of effectively managing forests in order to prevent massive, out of control fires. The increasing importance of wildfire smoke, and the structural policy changes required to fight it — from overhauling forestry practices to worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — may require a rethinking of how public policy is supposed to protect people from pollution. Catalytic converters in cars have visibly cleared the air even in the most traffic-jammed cities; getting rid of lead in gasoline has made children smarter; efforts to fight acid rain were so successful that the paucity of it is now seen as a reason to ignore current environmental problems. But all these efforts were aimed at limiting emissions from particular sources, like factories and vehicles, not fires that consume tens of thousands of acres across a mixture of federally managed and privately held land."
A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare earth industry
More from Grist: "In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 400-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70 year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015."
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