>>518607484
>Their dominance is only possible because they use the cheapest dirtiest methods and don't care if entire provinces become toxic wastelands
In part, correct; and that's rather self-explanatory. The other part, without which the aforementioned part would be immaterial, is the selling-out of the West to the globe's lowest bidding thirdies -- China being the erstwhile league leader (poojeets are now making a run for the cup). Mutts had all the REE industry they would ever have needed to maintain the hegemony -- in fact, pioneering the extraction and processing thereof -- and then, literally, handed it in a wok to the chinks.

Of course, this is true to mutt form, and may have even been what they wanted in order to later stoke war (think: WWII oil embargoes on Japan)... Albeit, like with the Internet being let loose, it's unlikely that the mutt calculus, if it even existed, foresaw the resource being as important as it has turned out to be, and it directly dictating whether it could even play it war card when the time came...

>your "experts" are not that smart