Wait til motherjones finds out that their servers are just as dirty as Apple's iPhone. Rare Earths are essential to all electronics, not just smart phones.
> Walk down the aisles of your local Best Buy and you'll be hard-pressed to find a phone, laptop, or TV that doesn't contain at least one of the rare earths. The elements are also key to all kinds of green technology: Neodymium is found in wind turbines; hybrid and electric cars often contain as many as nine different rare earths. Yttrium can form phosphors that make light in LED displays and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Rare earths are also crucial for defense technology—radar and sonar systems, tank engines, smart bombs.
From the second page of the article.
Nobody is denying whether or not they're essential. The issue is that they're produced in poor countries so that the refiners can offload most of the cost of refining rare earth metals in the form of environmental damage.
