Western governments need to enforce strong regulation that ensures responsible mining and holds accountable all companies involved in extracting and sourcing minerals.
Western governments have finally realized that the energy transition is happening—and that the resources needed are mostly in Chinese hands. Transition minerals, by some dubbed the “new oil,” are the key ingredients for renewables technologies like EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines that make the transition happen.
A large share of those minerals are extracted in the Global South, but China controls their value chains to a large degree. China processes over 90 percent of rare earth elements, almost 100 percent of graphite, over 75 percent of cobalt and over 60 percent of lithium.
China also produces around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and makes between 60-80 percent of the world’s electric vehicles, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries.Hardly a week goes by these days without Western governments announcing a new partnership or strategy to gain the upper hand in the minerals scramble.
It’s difficult to imagine that just a few years ago an American company sold off one of the world’s biggest cobalt mines to a Chinese company. Resource nationalism has replaced the Western vision of a globalized free market for raw materials.
For the rest of this article: https://fpif.org/broken-promises-western-hypocrisy-in-the-global-minerals-scramble/