Hello rocks readers! Have been dissociating and entering fugue states a lot this week, unable to pin down which of the several existential crises of the moment is most urgent. It's pretty bad! The dog helps, sometimes.
A small, non-urgent heads up that I'm looking into moving this newsletter off of Substack–Ghost seems like the most appealing option? Though it involves more overhead for me, I figure if I have to keep operating in the online patronage model of freelancing the more I can personally maintain my means of production the better off I'll be should major business pivots or pricing changes or platform controversies occur. Also the pivot to emphasizing marquee names and clearly only caring about resourcing those names on Substack is gross and makes me feel gross.
This probably won't happen for another couple of months and in theory should not interrupt subscriptions or payments as I'd just be moving you to a different CMS that also connects with Stripe under the hood, but uh moving to a self-hosted, open source service is likely to have some road bumps. Will update as things become more concrete.
Technically speaking, SoftBank I guess has or will have a major share in America's only rare earth mine when it goes public?
This is kind of complicated and finance-y, so I'm not putting one link in the header here. MP Materials, the company that currently owns the storied Mountain Pass mine in southern California, announced back in July that it was planning to go public through a merger with Fortress Value Acquisition Corp, a "special purpose acquisition company" (SPAC) created by Fortress Investment Group. A SPAC basically is a company made for the purpose of taking another company public? It sounds dumb but it means that right now people can buy shares of FVAC on the New York Stock Exchange and when the "merger" with MP Materials goes through, they'll have stocks in MP Materials and they'll maybe be rich or something because they got in on the ground floor (though the current owners of the mine and Fortress will also have a lot of shares–and yes, presumably Shenghe Resources Holding Co Ltd will retain its 9% stake in MP following the merger). There was supposed to be a shareholder vote concerning the merger on Friday, November 13. No press on the outcomes of that, but that's actually how it ended up in my Google Alerts.
Fortress Investment Group, the owner of FVAC, began as a private equity firm in 1998 and became the first publicly traded one on the NYSE in 2007. It was badly hit by the financial crisis but seem to have bounced back by 2014. In 2017, they were acquired by SoftBank. Over the post-crash and post-SoftBank years they've gained some public scrutiny for things like their growing influence on municipal governments through their holdings and for uh, buying Theranos' patents in fire sale in 2018 then using them to troll firms developing coronavirus tests earlier this year. They also showed up in the NYT Trump tax returns story!
It's not a huge leap for SoftBank to take an interest in mining tied to renewable energy and/or tech–they invested in that later-doomed Canadian lithium project, remember? But given how much attention most of their actions tend to receive, it's a little surprising that this wasn't bigger news. The fact it ran through a shell company and basically a hedge fund probably adds to that. In terms of some grand "what it means" to have SoftBank kinda sorta have a big role in US REE mining, I think it's more useful to read it in terms of broader finance interests in future energy tech than like another fractal in China-Japan REE politics, but partly I think this because spinning up that latter narrative feels too easy? IDK.
The World Economic Forum would like you to "engage" on the "opportunity" of deep sea mining and all of those words said out loud together summons a deadly ancient curse
"Manufacturers have much to lose if they pass up the current opportunity for engagement" is the opening subheader in the WEF's briefing paper, released in conjunction with the announcement of their new "Deep-Sea Minerals Dialogue", which I think just means the WEF will convene a lot of rich people to talk about how they think this kind of mining should be regulated with like, some environmentalists in the room?
The air of finality in this initiative's framing–"minerals from the deep sea could enter supply chains within a decade"–is frustrating and telling. You'd think if anyone could pull levers of power to stop deep sea mining outright it would be the people involved with the fucking World Economic Forum, but instead they're trying to build some middle ground for stakeholders to establish "responsible" extraction (another eyebrow-raising line in the same paragraph: "They have done so – in the context of mining on land – for many years.").
Corporate reparations in the Congo or the lack thereof
The Financial Times published a thorough essay reflecting on the role of corporate mining interests in the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the possibilities and challenges of obtaining financial reparations from them (will send u a PDF if you hit the paywall). It traces the history of Umicore, today a "materials technology" company from its origins in Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), a company created by King Leopold II to extract copper, cobalt, tin, and eventually all sorts of other minerals from the Congo (we can thank them for the uranium used in the first atomic bombs!). The firm's role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba is a little murky–they were certainly the economic force contributing to destabilizing the newly-independent Congo, but whether they specifically knew or collaborated with American and Belgian operatives to bring about Lumumba's murder is not as certain. In addition to the attention to the UMHK story, it's a good reminder of just how much of Belgian industry emerged from the colonial project of extracting value from the Congo (including the foundation of the Belgian airline industry?) and how the twentieth century model of flipping and merging corporations gives a lot of companies a kind of plausible deniability when discussions of reparations comes up.
The only conventional uranium mill in America is now processing rare earth ore
Utah's White Mesa Mill makes fuel rods for nuclear power plants (and, occasionally, vanadium). In April they announced their intention to enter REE processing; on November 3 they announced success in their pilot program. (Weirdly overlooked, what else could have been happening on that day LOL.) The press release only describes the ore produced as "monazite sands from a North American source"–not sure why the cagey phrasing, as the KUER story notes that Energy Fuels, the company that runs the mill, had informed the Utah DEQ that they planned to import monazite sands from Georgia.
The mill has been a subject of scrutiny from environmental groups and members of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in the nearby White Mesa community since its operating permit was renewed in 2017, specifically over the mill's threat to local groundwater and air quality and its apparent pivot to radioactive waste storage. Pursuing rare earth processing is just another way to keep the mill open, they argue, and are probably right. It’s pretty bad!
"The lithium dream is not dead. In fact, it’s bigger than ever."
For those maybe disappointed by that TNR piece on Bolivia's election of Luis Arce from the other week, this story from Maddie Stone will delight you with its level of detail and acknowledgment that Arce's vision for lithium development does in fact have a more neoliberal bent than Morales'. Bolivia is in a weak bargaining position when it comes to working with international partners on lithium projects since lithium prices remain low in our pandemic-stalled industrial economy. But good to watch, and good to assess pragmatically.
Thanks for reading, and take care.