China shoots itself in the foot by trying to corner rare-earth market
Green-tech firms are trying to produce batteries that do not need raw materials in short supply
Apparently, somewhere in the universe, a little Japanese electric-battery-making-firm's stock recently soared, and I was surprised to find out about this from my mum's next-door neighbour in a small Maryland city called Greenbelt.
This neighbour was one of the early adopters of electric vehicles and is part of a group lobbying the local government to roll out incentives to widen the ownership base of these cleaner cars.
The concept is exciting, and China will likely be out of the loop on the discovery process
There are surely countless like-minded devotees in little towns all around the world watching the electric-car space with similar enthusiasm.
If its claims are true, the company, Power Japan Plus, has created a technology that allows batteries to charge more quickly and last much longer, which means fewer charges and ameliorates "range anxiety" and thus widens the potential demand for electric cars.
But there is another, interesting story about the cutthroat global race for green technologies.
Power Japan Plus's electric-car battery does not use any conductive metals, including rare-earth metals, common to traditional lithium ion batteries. Its "dual carbon" technology is based on cotton fibre - the material Thomas Edison used to make carbon fibres in his light bulbs.