Cerium, praseodymium, scandium – silvery, malleable, flammable, exhilaratingly versatile. Listening again to Julie Klinger, writer of Uncommon Earth Frontiers, in dialog with Misha Glenny, on the Vienna Humanities Pageant 2024, one can’t assist however really feel the joys of uncommon earths for his or her affect on renewables. These supplies are abundantly current in every day life: powering all the things from telephones and vaping pens to wind generators and electrical automobiles enabling the inexperienced transition.
The industries behind mining and processing these metals operated quietly for a very long time. That’s, till Japanese coastguards arrested a Chinese language fisherman in September 2010 after a collision in disputed waters, an space claimed by each nations. When battle ensued, the Chinese language authorities abruptly lower off its exports of uncommon earths and uncooked supplies to Japan. The end result was at least a world shock, because the prizes of uncommon earths soared. The transfer demonstrated China’s dominance, at that time controlling over 70% of the world’s uncommon earth extraction and processing, elevating alarm bells for governments and corporations everywhere in the world.
Immediately, the scramble for uncommon earth components shouldn’t be merely competitors between international superpowers for uncooked supplies to fulfill power transition targets. It is usually closely related to navy developments worldwide, as uncommon earths are more and more built-in into trendy weapon know-how. In response to Klinger, that is the place the West’s true vulnerability lies, giving the US as instance: ‘one of the conclusions in the recent Department of Defence report, which projected out the material needs for a hypothetical war with China by 2027, was that it wouldn’t be possible, as a result of a lot of the essential parts for defence applied sciences come from China.’ Her audacious comment uncovers how deep the uncommon earth business cuts into the way forward for all know-how, and the way present Western makes an attempt to scale back dependency are merely scratching the floor.
Lithium. Picture by James St. John, through Wikimedia commons.
In the meantime in Europe
The EU’s preliminary response to the scramble was formally itemizing these uncooked supplies crucial to the inexperienced transition in 2011. In 2024, the listing fashioned the idea of the Vital Uncooked Supplies Act, promising to scale back dependency on China by ‘diversifying the supply’. However how’s that going?
One of many EU’s largest hurdles within the quest for extra supplies – one might say considerably lavishly – is democracy. Uncommon earth mining is a grimy enterprise and native communities worry air pollution and environmental destruction. Opposition to mining is due to this fact constructing throughout Europe. And understandably so: ‘if 2%’ … of a mined space … ‘contains rare earth elements, that’s thought-about a extremely whole lot,’ says Klinger. ‘When dug up, everything else, whatever it may be, whether it’s gold or silver or phosphate or uranium or thorium or arsenic, is left above floor. … Take into consideration that: in a very good situation, 98% of the stuff that’s dug up is left behind as waste.’ In China, regardless of the processing and seize of those components, many years of chemical build-up has made its means into the waterways, leading to long-term impacts on kids’s cognitive improvement and animal life.
Predrag Momčilovic writes on one in all Europe’s largest mining resistances: protests towards Rio Tinto’s venture to open lithium mines in Serbia. The plans, which had seemingly been shelved, got here again in full drive when Aleksandar Vučić was re-elected president in 2022. A few of Serbia’s foremost potential prospects for the venture are Olaf Scholz’s authorities and the EU. Whereas Vučic and his right-wing authorities are repeatedly criticized for dismantling Serbian democracy, Germany and the EU proceed with the deliberate collaboration.
In response to Momčilovic, one impact of those double requirements might be the continued decline in Serbian citizen help for becoming a member of the EU. Serbians worry that the nation shall be ‘a sacrificial zone for the European green transition’, because the essential environmental affect hasn’t been considerably thought-about. ‘It appears geopolitics has once again prevailed over ideals, and the priority is to secure Serbia’s lithium earlier than China or Russia,’ writes Momčilovic.
Industrial nationalism
Momčilovic’s essay defines how the scramble raises a battle of curiosity within the EU. Europe’s reliance on uncommon earth provides from China is creating worry of one more power dependency scenario, which, regardless of planning efforts, hasn’t shrunk but. The truth that the EU has managed to scale back its dependence on Russian fuel to some extent ought to maybe point out a chance right here, too. Nonetheless, the necessity for European mining agreements will probably be unpopular and little doubt press on the EU’s democratic ideas.
Inside this battle of values, a kind of ‘industrial nationalism’ is being fashioned, which legitimizes protectionism towards superpowers reminiscent of China and Russia. The mine is being introduced as probably the most politically viable image for this motion, because the extraction of the uncooked materials is the obvious step in the direction of desired independence. What isn’t being talked about, nevertheless, is how Europe would nonetheless be virtually totally depending on China for its processing wants.
The EU has been caught brief in making an attempt to grab energy over a commodity whose processing know-how was decided many years in the past. And in that somewhat futile wrestle, the probabilities for different options have additionally disappeared. Analysis into uncommon earths has been chronically under-prioritized. And nobody has to date provide you with an efficient means to recycle lithium-ion batteries. Someplace alongside the road, the precise goal of mining these supplies – the hope of a fossil fuel-free and inexperienced future – has been buried.
