China’s growing dominance of the battery and rare earth minerals production and supply chain has been an ongoing threat to Europe, as it significantly contributes to China’s electric vehicle sector and makes the continent, and indeed other parts of the world, heavily dependent upon China for these metals and minerals.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which prompted a whole raft of EU sanctions on Russian oil and gas, made policymakers realise just how dependent the EU has been on Moscow for energy and sent them scrambling to find more diverse suppliers.
As such, the European Commission is now hoping to avoid a similar situation with lithium and other rare earth minerals, which are vital for the green transition. Reviving the European mining sector, therefore, has now become more important than ever.
That all sounds great, but it’s hard to mine the stuff we do no not have. We can either extract from less rich souces at a price at least one order of magnitude more expensive and subsidize that, or buy it cheap from elsewhere. There’s an argument to be made for keeping a small local production going to prevent the worst case, but it’ll be expensive nonetheless and won’t significantly reduce the reliance on ressource-rich countries.
There’s plenty of lithium. It’s just that the biggest deposits are under extremely fertile land, and the citizens of those countries don’t care about destroying their food supply so Germans can make cheaper cars.
Portugal is fighting against opening mines.
Serbia got Rio Tinto to fuck off through protest and copius death threats. Now China and EU are trying to get in.
Germany, Austria, and Finland all have plans for “eco friendly” mines, while the poorer countries have to fight against turning their land into a toxic cesspit. France is just repurposing their already existing pit.
Imagine doing this to your farmland