Hello readers! I'm completely spiraling these days, I imagine you might be as well.
I'm going back to the "every link has a header" format that I tried in the very first links roundup because I've found myself referring back to articles or notes from previous weeks and I realized it's probably a pain in the neck to cross-reference a dense bullet-pointed list. Also, it breaks up the email a little bit more so people can give it a skim-read more quickly? If you have strong preferences let me know.
In addition to the links roundup, I'm trying to decide if I should actually send out a review of an abysmally bad book on strategic metals (The Rare Metals War) that I read this past week–part of me does not want to give it any more undeserved attention and part of me wants to uh release all my vitriol about it. I’m also currently reading a pretty good if not political-economy oriented rocks book (The Book of Unconformities) and right before the shitty book I read a novel that has a subplot about rare earths (Waste Tide) so it might make more sense to put those books in conversation than just complain about the really shitty one.
Also: movie night?
Subscriber question: would you be interested in an online watch party of a minerals-adjacent movie (or movies, we can do this as a series if it goes well)? Part of this is I just low-key want to re-watch Pacific Rim 2 (which has a major plot point around rare earth elements and is dumb as hell), but also like maybe this would be fun for people to join? This would either be on one of the various known streaming platforms (which I've never used if anyone has recs) or uh, using a kind of shitty web app my partner made for group pirated movie watching and a Discord channel. Let me know if that sounds like fun. If you'd rather we watch like, real movies that actually offer meaningful information we can do that too, but first let me have my weirdly soothing in troubled times garbage action movie.
Bolivia update–it's still not about lithium, but everyone wants it to be
I'm guessing you caught the good news from Bolivia this week (fuck, that was only on Monday?), but in case you didn't: Luis Arce, Evo Morales' former economic minister, overwhelming won the presidency in national elections held nearly a year after a hideous far-right coup. Honestly, one of the few pieces of good news this year!
Kate Aronoff's coverage in *The New Republic* of the election disputed the lithium conspiracy theories but also presented Arce's election as a promising sign for lithium policies, though the piece doesn't really get into the weeds of what that policy is. Arce worked with UK firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence to develop his "lithium first industrial strategy"; most of what's published in English is uh, extremely thin like this press release from Benchmark. But there's at least some industry voices who seem to be pretty cool with Arce, which 1) once again makes it seem like the coup wasn't really about lithium, 2) maybe suggests YLB under Arce will be more willing to effectively collaborate with multinational firms for development. The election doesn't change the fact Bolivia's lithium is still hard to mine, so making the country a game-changing actor in the lithium industry isn't going to happen quickly. Ultimately, I'm more inclined to view the MAS win as a good sign for democracy and indigenous peoples of Bolivia than a lithium bellwether.
The #CongoIsBleeding hashtag
It's unclear to me what made the #CongoIsBleeding hashtag (often accompanied with #NoCongoNoPhone) take off recently–renewed global attention to African continent news thanks to the Nigerian #endSARS protests seems likely, maybe the announcement of a new iPhone was a hook (though they've been going out of their way to emphasize how not-reliant on DRC they want to be), or maybe it was boosted because the NGO Friends of the Congo's annual Congo Week took place this past week (least likely despite Friends of the Congo generally doing good work; the hashtag seems to date further back and has recently picked up more steam). The biggest circulation of late seems to be via otherwise #endSARS-oriented accounts or accounts promoting pan-African struggle and also bots, but I did see posts that look like they were made by actual Congolese people. Which makes me unsure if I should talk about all the stuff that weirded me out about the hashtag. I don't really want to shit on efforts to get the English-speaking world to learn a little about what's going on and has been going on in DRC, especially if it is actually coming from people in DRC.
But like many social media campaigns, it offers a very simplified and limited narrative that makes me uneasy. The rhetoric of a lot of these tweets was largely indistinguishable from the kind of language used in early-2000s western NGO campaigns–which, again, tended to oversimplify a very messy and historically situated conflict to "women are getting raped and children die in mines so u can have phone"–i.e., it leverages consumer guilt which suggest the "solution" is consumer action. *insert sad trombones of neoliberalism here*
But it's not clear that the hashtag even wants consumer action. Maybe it just wants…awareness? The absence of any particular call to action at least meant that this rhetoric isn't going to produce dubiously useful legislation like Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank law, but I worry sometimes that the calcifying of this particular narrative around "conflict minerals" entrenches complacency and despair around this stuff. If you'd like to read an English-language deeper dive into mineral exploitation in DRC or just like, DRC history in general this week, I'd recommend Michael Nest's Coltan, or Colin Kinniburgh's essay in Dissent from 2014, or follow up on some of the content from Friends of the Congo's Congo Week.
Using neodymium on the ocean floor to study ancient current patterns
More of a "hey, this is cool research/maybe I am just corny" note than an extraction story, but I think it's extremely cool that scientists study trace elements on the ocean floor to understand ocean current history. This article from Northwestern is about neodymium in particular because that's what this I think Northwestern PhD student recently published a paper about, but there's research about all sorts of other trace elements! In a time that often feels dominated by results via blunt force and broad gesture, it's sort of encouraging to remember there are people devoting themselves to the study of tiny particles at the bottom of the sea to better understand the story of the planet.
More microbe-REE extraction research
A Cornell press release on an ARPA-E (the Department of Energy equivalent of DARPA)-funded project at the university caught my attention mainly because of the microbe they're using. The project is described as "engineering a microbe (Gluconobacter oxydans) to dissolve monazite"–meaning they'll be doing some synthetic biology to tweak an existing microbe. I don't know a ton about Gluconobacter oxydans but the first place I learned about it was reading about research into using it to leach rare earths from industrial waste (specifically, fracking fluids–yep, REEs are crucial to that too makes u think huh). The microbe produces gluconic acid, which is used in a bunch of industrial applications, and it's actually the acid that can leach lanthanides. I'm guessing the synthetic biology part would either relate to speeding up the production of gluconic acid, like making the microbe metabolize sugars faster maybe? I am not an expert on this stuff. Anyway, it's cool work and it's neat to see people working on this stuff building off of one another's ideas.
I regret to inform you that the China REE discourse continues to be not great
This one's from the Financial Times, and the main thing that made it notable for this week's newsletter is its lede:
In 2019, a sentence in a Chinese government-funded report made clear Beijing’s strategic advantage behind capturing the supply chains of critical minerals. If the US-China trade war intensified, the report noted “China will not rule out using rare earth exports as leverage to deal with the situation”.
The authors actually use a citation of a citation here, referencing a Wall Street Journal article about a report by an American consultancy that cites a paper that, if my dodgy Google Translate understanding is correct, received funding from the "Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Education Department Project." I'm not saying that quote isn't significant or uninteresting and yes, I would love to read the actual paper, but I think that the authors wanted "Chinese government-funded report" to suggest that the paper was basically a policy statement directly from Xi Jinping himself, cloaked in the bureaucracy of a secret (i.e., not in English so how could we pOSsiBly know about it??) report.
(Also, again based on a quick Google Translate read of the original paper a) the "China will not rule out using rare earth exports..." line is taken from the first line of the abstract and b) it doesn't seem like the paper actually advocates for this particular approach? Any readers of Chinese who feel like giving this a skim, happy to send the original paper PDF.)
Beyond that quote there isn't much more new material, basically more calls for finding alternative minerals and diversifying the supply chain. No real mention of the devastating environmental impacts of rare earth mining in China (or how such impacts in the US led to investment in and outsourcing of such mining to China in the 1980s/1990s). The authors are both members of the Energy Security Leadership Council and have uh, taken a winding road to apparently becoming rare earth experts (one "oversaw the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan" on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the other "was Director of International Capital Markets at Drexel Burnham Lambert").
The same day this op-ed came out, Nikkei Asia reported on the Chinese legislature passing a export control law that might be applicable to rare earths. It seems more like a response to the United States WeChat/TikTok garbage so I'm not inclined to jump to panic here, but also I don't fully know what else might be going on because I'm parsing this through English-language reports and wonky automated translations. I worry sometimes that I come across like a tankie or something when I remain skeptical of the western "oh no the rare earths in China!!" narrative–it's not that I think the Chinese government is above withholding resources or that they're doing a rad job of sustainably mining (they most certainly are not doing that). It's more that these national security framings of the state of rare earth mining are based around the question of how to maintain a particular capitalist status quo. It's just such a boring, fear-centered, Tom Clancy-novel-fantasizing way to operate.
Thanks for reading! Try to stay alive and show up for whatever still gives you hope. Things are really, really bad.