I disagree strongly. "Probably" going to be important? The article makes it very clear that rare earth minerals are absolutely essential to the clean technologies that will drive the post oil future. While the United States has ignored creating a strategy on developing future technologies and its major corporations have colluded to kill green tech, the forward thinking Chinese government has aggressively positioned themselves to being central to any development of electric cars and any other tech that is strongly reliant on batteries.

That may well be true, but the article isn't very convincing from any angle. There's no technical or economic analysis of other ways to make magnets (say, emerging technologies vs. more expensive, low-tech technologies). No in-depth data from geological studies about the quantity of rare-earth deposits in other countries, and how easily they could be exploited. No evidence that the Chinese government is actually making an active effort to corner the market on rare-earth elements (low labour costs have made it a leader in many low-value areas, too).

And, nobody is totally certain that battery-driven cars are necessarily the way forward. A decade ago, when fuel cells where the hot story, maybe this article would have been talking about China cornering the market on platinum for catalysts.