Notes

Introduction

1. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
2. United Nations Climate Change, ‘Historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change: 195 Nations Set Path to Keep Temperature Rise Well Below 2 Degrees Celsius’, 13 December 2015.
3. Distilling a tonne of orange blossom petals only produces a kilogram of essential oil.
4. It takes 500 kilograms of coca leaves to produce a kilogram of cocaine.
5. On average, a kilogram of rock contains 120 milligrams of vanadium, 66.5 milligrams of cerium, 19 milligrams of gallium, and 0.8 milligrams of lutecium.
6. He and his colleagues, Jacob A. Marinsky and Lawrence E. Glendenin, produced it at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1945.
7. Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: how lateral power is transforming energy, the economy, and the world, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
8. Since 2013, the Hauts-de-France region has availed itself of Jeremy Rifkin’s advisory services to develop new energy-consumption models based on the crossover of green and digital technologies. See www.businessinsider.fr/us/jeremy-rifkin-interview-2017-6.
9. Renewable energy includes other types of energy, such as hydraulic energy, biofuels, and biomass. Read the ‘Renewable 2016 Global Status Report’, Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, 2016.
10. Christine Parthemore and John Nagl, ‘Fueling the Future Force: preparing the Department of Defense for a post-petroleum era’, Center for a New American Security, September 2010. Also read the article ‘U.S. Military Marches Forward on Green Energy, despite Trump’, Reuters, 1 March 2017. According to the author, ‘the number of [US] military renewable energy projects nearly tripled to 1,390 between 2011 and 2015 … Many of those projects are at U.S. bases, where renewable energy allows the military to maintain its own independent source of power in case of a natural disaster or an attack — or cyber-attack — that disables the public grid.’
11. Instead, armies would rely on small renewable-energy plants that are less vulnerable to enemy attacks. Read Ugo Bardi, Extracted: how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014.
12. See Hervé Juvin, Le mur de l’Ouest n’est pas tombé [The Western Wall Did Not Fall], Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2015.
13. ‘BP Says World’s Oil Consumption Will Peak in Late 2030s’, BBC News, 21 February 2018.
14. The renewable-energy economy will create 28.8 million jobs by 2050 in leading industries worldwide, according to ‘Renewable Energy and Jobs — Annual Review 2018’, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 2017.
15. See the ‘white paper’ by Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel, and Karl-Friedrich Müller-Reißmann, Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran [Energy Transition: growth and wellbeing without crude oil and uranium], S. Fischer Verlag, 1980.
16. The 196 delegations comprised 195 states and the European Union.
17. At no point does the Paris agreement on climate change include the words ‘metals’, ‘minerals’, or ‘commodities’. Similarly, none of the decisions made at the COP 24 in Katowice (Poland) in December 2018 addresses mineral resources. As stated by the press service of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ‘we are not aware of a specific discussion on the question of mineral resources’.
18. Most rare earths cannot be substituted. Refer to the communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions on the 2017 list of Critical Raw Materials for the EU, 13 September 2017, p. 4 and following. Also refer to the substitution indexes EI/SR in the list of critical raw materials for the EU under Annex 1 of the communication.
19. ‘US Admiral Warns: only war can now stop Beijing controlling the South China Sea’, News.com.au, 22 April 2018.
20. ‘2019 Revision of World Population Prospects’, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, United Nations, New York, 2019.
21. Bill Laws, Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History, Firefly Books, 2010.

Chapter One: The rare metals curse

1. Gallium, for example, is a by-product of aluminium. Selenium and tellurium are associated with copper. Indium and germanium are zinc by-products. See Philippe Bihouix and Benoît de Guillebon, Quel futur pour les métaux? Raréfaction des métaux: un nouveau défi pour la société [What Does the Future Hold for Metals? Rarefication of Metals: a new challenge for society], EDP Sciences, 2010, p. 33.
2. Updated in May 2018, the USGS list includes thirty-five mineral commodities such as caesium, chrome, lithium, rubidium, uranium, and strontium. The inventory prepared by the European Commission includes twenty-seven mineral commodities: antimony, baryte, beryllium, bismuth, borate, cobalt, coking coal, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, hafnium, helium, indium, magnesium, natural graphite, natural rubber, niobium, phosphate rock, phosphorus, scandium, silicon metal, tantalum, tungsten, vanadium, platinum group metals, heavy rare-earth elements, and light rare-earth elements. Some of the metals listed, such as silicon, are not considered rare by geologists. The European Commission nevertheless qualifies them as ‘critical’ due to the threat to their supply. Shortages can often result from a lack in mining and refining infrastructure, adding the notion of industrial rarity to that of geological rarity. The scientific community uses the term ‘rare metals’ in reference to these two criteria. Refer to Appendix 13 for the list of metals defined as ‘rare’ by the European Commission.
3. Refer to the criteria set out in Report 782, Key Issues with Strategic Metals: the case of rare earths (submitted 23 August 2011) by Claude Birraux and Christian Kert, deputies of the French Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology Assessment (OPECST). For a US critical mineral classification methodology, refer to the Draft Critical Mineral List — Summary of Methodology and Background Information — U.S. Geological Survey Technical Input Document in Response to Secretarial Order No. 3359, Open-File Report 2018-1021, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey.
4. Harari, Sapiens, op. cit.
5. Such as praseodymium and neodymium.
6. ‘Travel to the Largest and Most Powerful MRI Magnet in the World’, The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), 2 May 2017.
7. These super magnets are produced with the rare-earth minerals neodymium and samarium that are alloyed with other metals, such as iron, boron, and cobalt. Magnets are usually 30 per cent neodymium and 35 per cent samarium. For the sake of clarity, they are more commonly referred to as ‘rare-earth magnets’ by the scientific community.
8. The vehicles of car manufacturers Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, General Motors, PSA, and BMW contain rare-earth magnets. But others have done without, such as US manufacturer Tesla’s squirrel cage induction motorcar and Renault’s rotor-coil engine Zoé. Nevertheless, the two are bigger and heavier than engines with rare-earth magnets. Interview with Philippe Degobert, electrical engineering lecturer at the École nationale supérieure des Arts et des Métiers (ENSAM) and director of Masters in Mobility and Electric Vehicles (MVE), 2017.
9. In 2016, seven of the ten most powerful wind turbines were made using rare-earth metals (the V164 by Vestas, the AD-180 and ADS-135 by Adwen, the SWT 8.0 by Siemens, the 6 MW Haliade by General Electric, the SCD 6.0 by Ming Yang, and the Dong Fang/Hyundai 5.5 MW). German wind-turbine manufacturer Enercon opted for separately excited annular generation, as it claims that it is possible to do without permanent magnets. The magnetic fields needed to generate electricity are created electrically. Interview with Philippe Degobert, electrical engineering lecturer at École nationale supérieure des Arts et des Métiers (ENSAM) and director of Masters in Mobility and Electric Vehicles (MVE), 2017.
10. Especially solar panels made from copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells.
11. According to John Ormerod, an expert in magnets and founder of the consultancy JOC LLC, most electric engines in operation in the world today work by induction and therefore do not use rare-earth magnets. These engines, used mostly in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning devices, are inexpensive but also low-performance. But industrialising high-performance engines will mean having to use rare-earth magnets. This is the case for the engines used in electric vehicles and certain wind turbines. Higher demand for electric cars will in future lead to more rare-earth magnets being used in engines. Interview with John Ormerod, JOC LLC, 2017.
12. Light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.
13. ‘Renewable Energy and Jobs — Annual Review 2018’, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
14. ‘100 Per Cent Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for the 50 United States’, Royal Society of Chemistry, 27 May 2015.
15. ‘Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline’, NPR, 7 February 2019.
16. Gold, copper, lead, silver, tin, mercury, and iron.
17. British Petroleum 2017: Outlook for 2035. ‘Gas is the fastest growing fuel (1.6 per cent p.a.); Oil continues to grow (0.7 per cent p.a.), although its pace of growth is expected to slow gradually; The growth of coal is projected to decline sharply: 0.2 per cent p.a. compared with 2.7 per cent p.a. over the past 20 years — coal consumption is expected to peak in the mid-2020s; Renewable energy is the fastest growing source of energy (7.1 per cent p.a.), with its share in primary energy increasing to 10 per cent by 2035, up from 3 per cent in 2015’ (p. 15).
18. ‘Quand le monde manquera de métaux’ [‘When the World Runs Out of Metals’], Basta Mag, 26 September 2012.
19. Read Frank Marscheider-Weidemann, Sabine Langkau, Torsten Hummen, Lorenz Erdmann, and Luis Tercero Espinoza, ‘Raw Materials for Emerging Technologies 2016’, German Mineral Resources Agency (DERA), Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), March 2016.
20. A rough estimate in the high range.
21. ‘Environmental Disaster Strains China’s Social Fabric’, The Financial Times, 26 April 2006.
22. ‘Toxic Mine Spill Was Only Latest in Long History of Chinese Pollution’, The Guardian, 14 April 2011.
23. ‘Dwindling Supplies of Rare Earth Metals Hinder China’s Shift from Coal’, TrendinTech, 7 September 2016.
24. The first opium war pitched China against the United Kingdom from 1839 to 1842, and was led by France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States. The second opium war would last from 1856 to 1860.
25. The German concessions in Shandong, a province in the north of China, were handed over to Japan.
26. Founded by Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang party was defeated by the communist regime in 1949.
27. Read the speech of Patrice Christmann from the French Geological Survey (BRGM) in the minutes of the public hearing of 6 July 2015 on the implementation of the French Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology Assessment (OPECST) policy for rare-earth metals and strategic and critical raw materials.
28. Interview with Thomas Kruemmer, managing director of Kloeckner Metals, 2016.
29. Interview with consultant Bruno Gensburger, Mutandis consultancy, 2016.
30. ‘China Cuts Smog but Health Damage Already Done: study’, Reuters, 17 April 2018.
31. ‘The Cobalt Pipeline: tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers’ phones and laptops’, The Washington Post, 30 September 2016.
32. See ‘Le chrome (Cr) — éléments de criticité’ [‘Chrome (Cr) — elements of criticality’], French Geological Survey (BRGM), July 2017. The European Commission does not consider chrome a critical metal, unlike the US, which included it in its list, updated in 2018. See Interior Releases 2018’s ‘Final List of 35 Minerals Deemed Critical to U.S. National Security and the Economy’, U.S. Geological Survey, 18 May 2018.
33. ‘Kazakh Ecologists: Syr Darya waters poisonous’, Ferghana News Agency, 9 April 2015.
34. ‘Lithium Squeeze Looms as Top Miner Front-loads, Chile Says’, Mining Weekly, 26 June 2017.
35. ‘Chile’s Supreme Court Casts Shadow over Barrick’s Plans to Restart Pascua-Lama’, Mining.com, 15 March 2017.
36. ‘In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, Local Communities Claim that Lithium Operations Have Contaminated Streams Used for Humans, Livestock and Crop Irrigation’, Friends of the Earth, 2013.
37. ‘The World’s Worst Pollution Problems 2016: the toxics beneath our feet’, Green Cross Switzerland and Pure Earth, 2016.

Chapter Two: The dark side of green and digital technologies

1. The 5th Annual Cleantech & Technology Metals Summit: Invest in the Cleantech Revolution.
2. ‘World Energy Outlook 2019 Factsheet: Power and renewables’, International Energy Agency, 2019.
3. Tourillon reached this estimate using the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Refer to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator online.
4. The sun’s rays generate thermal energy, which heats fluids such as water that can then be used directly (using a solar water heater) or indirectly (steam passing through a generator to produce electricity).
5. Julia Bucknall, ‘Cutting Water Consumption in Concentrated Solar Power Plants’, The Water Blog, 20 May 2013.
6. Kimberly Aguirre, Luke Eisenhardt, Christian Lim, Brittany Nelson, Alex Norring, Peter Slowik, and Nancy Tu, ‘Lifecycle Analysis Comparison of a Battery Electric Vehicle and a Conventional Gasoline Vehicle’, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, June 2012. For more information on the environmental impacts of electric batteries, see J. Sullivan and L. Gaines, ‘A Review of Battery Life-cycle Analysis: state of knowledge and critical needs’, Argonne National Laboratory, 1 October 2010.
7. Read ‘Extraordinary Raw Materials in a Tesla Model S’, Visual Capitalist, 7 March 2016.
8. ‘The 100 kWh battery also increases range substantially to an estimated 315 miles [507 kilometres] on the EPA cycle and 613 km on the NEDC cycle, making it the first to go beyond 300 miles [482 kilometres] and the longest range production electric vehicle by far’; ‘New Tesla Model S Now the Quickest Production Car in the World’, Tesla, 23 August 2016.
9. ‘Musk: Millions of Teslas, 500-mile range coming’, CNBC, 6 November 2015. Musk may have stepped down as one of the CEOs of President Trump’s business advisory group after Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accords, but the reality is that the cost of Musk’s ecological dream is far higher than he and others are willing to admit. Further reading: ‘Cost of Elon Musk’s Dream Much Higher than He and Others Imagine’, RealClearEnergy, 8 June 2017.
10. Interview with John Petersen, 2016. See also ‘How Large Lithium-ion Batteries Slash EV Benefits’, 2016. A collection of Petersen’s articles is available on the Seeking Alpha website.
11. See ‘Les potentiels du vehicle électrique’ [‘The Potentials of the Electric Vehicle’], ADEME, April 2016, and Troy R. Hawkins, Bhawna Singh, Guillaume Majeau-Bettez, and Anders Hammer Strømman, ‘Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17(1): 53–64, 2012.
12. Xinyu Chen, Hongcai Zhang, Zhiwei Xu, Chris P. Nielsen, Michael B. McElroy, and Jiajun Lv, ‘Impacts of Fleet Types and Charging Modes for Electric Vehicles on Emissions under Different Penetrations of Wind Power’, Nature Energy, 30 April 2018. For a more in-depth analysis of the environmental impact of an electric vehicle, refer to my article ‘Do We Really Want Electric Vehicles?’ in the English-language edition of the monthly paper Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.
13. To delve deeper into these questions, read the fascinating article by Jean-Marc Jancovici, ‘Is the Electric Car an Ideal Solution for Tomorrow’s Mobility?’, 1 August 2015, on Jean-Marc Jancovici’s website jancovici.com. See also ‘Do We Really Want Electric Vehicles?’, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2018.
14. Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution, op. cit.
15. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
16. ‘US Car Sharing Service Kept 28 000 Private Cars Off the Road in 3 Years’, The Guardian, 23 July 2016.
17. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business, Knopf, Random House Inc., 2013.
18. Imagine the staggering amounts of digital data this already generates. ‘Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003,’ say Schmidt and Cohen. This outlook has an economic impact: the ‘sixth continent’ that is the internet represents 22.5 per cent of the global economy and is expected to reach 25 per cent by 2020, or $24,000 trillion in revenues. Further reading: Mark Knickrehm, Bruno Berthon and Paul Daugherty, ‘Digital Disruption: the growth multiplier — optimizing digital investments to realize higher productivity and growth’, Accenture Strategy, 2016.
19. Every minute around the world, 2,400 trees are felled, which is the equivalent of a third of the land area of France every year. See ‘Déforestation: 18 millions d’hectares de forêts perdus en 2014’ [‘Deforestation: 18 million hectares of forest lost in 2014’], Le Monde, 3 September 2015. ‘In the tropical domain, net annual loss of forest area from 2000 to 2010 was about 7 million hectares, and net annual increase in agricultural land area was more than 6 million hectares’; 2016 State of the World’s Forests, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2016.
20. Fabrice Flipo, Michelle Dobré, and Marion Michot, La Face cachée du numérique. L’impact environnemental des nouvelles technologies [The Dark Side of Digital: the environmental impact of new technologies], L’Échappée, 2013.
21. Ibid.
22. Coline Tison and Laurent Lichtenstein, Datacenter: hidden pollution, Documentary, Camicas Productions, 2012. See also ‘Email Miles — where does your email really go when you press send?’, The Huffington Post, 18 February 2014.
23. The documentary takes us as far as the coalmines in Appalachia, in West Virginia, where the fossil fuel resources used to run the US power stations are extracted. ‘There’s nothing virtual about our clicks,’ states the documentary. Referring to the illusion of dematerialisation, it poses the question: ‘will our emails ultimately destroy the Appalachia mountains?’
24. Mark P. Mills, ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, and big power — an overview of the electricity used by the global digital ecosystem’, August 2013.
25. ‘How Clean Is Your Cloud?’, Greenpeace, April 2012.
26. ‘Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Striving to Win the Race to Build the Internet in Space’, Washington Post, 15 May 2019.
27. As an example, in 1951, forty-four UNIVAC I computers (Universal Automatic Computer I) — the first US commercial computer — were sold. In 2015, nearly 300 million computers and over 200 million tablets were sold worldwide. Today, over half of the world’s population possesses a mobile phone.
28. ‘It’s less about scarce resources and more about “full dustbins”,’ write experts PierreNoël Giraud and Timothée Ollivier in Économie des matières premières [The Economy of Commodities], La Découverte, coll. Repères, 2015.
29. C.P. Baldé, V. Forti, V. Gray, R. Kuehr, and P. Stegmann, ‘The Global E-waste Monitor – 2017, United Nations University (UNU), International Telecommunication Union (ITU) & International Solid Waste Association (ISWA)’, Bonn/Geneva/Vienna.
30. The tally of electronic waste in 2017 was over 50 million tonnes versus 41 million tonnes in 2014. Further reading: ‘Waste Crime – Waste Risks: gaps in meeting the global waste challenge’, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2015.
31. ‘Recycling Rates of Metals: a status report’, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2011. These figures remain relevant, no subsequent report having been published.
32. Read ‘La guerre des terres rares est déclarée’ [‘The Rare-earth Metals War Is Declared’], Terra Eco, 19 April 2012. In addition, watch our documentary Terres rares, le trésor caché du Japon, Mano a Mano [Rare Earths, Japan’s Hidden Treasure], 2012 (French only). Read also ‘Global E-waste to Hit 49.8M Tons by 2018 — Here’s what Japan is doing to combat it’, Forbes, 23 November 2017.
33. Cerium, for instance — a rare earth used to polish glass — can be replaced with zirconium.
34. New uses have made it possible to reduce the quantity of europium and terbium in fluorescent lamps by 80 per cent, and the quantity of dysprosium used in magnets by 30 per cent. European car manufacturers are even looking for ways to make magnets without the need for rare-earth metals.
35. Interview with Jack Lifton, Technology Metals Research, 2016.
36. Ibid.
37. Surendra M. Gupta, Reverse Supply Chains: issues and analysis, CRC Press, 2013. Read also Rémy Le Moigne’s fascinating ‘L’Économie circulaire: comment la mettre en oeuvre dans l’entreprise grâce à la reverse supply chain?’ [Using the Reverse Supply Chain to Implement the Circular Economy in Business], Dunod, 2014.
38. This is the case for all commodity prices. The end of 2014 marked the end of a super cycle during which commodity prices were at their highest. The commodity markets have since bottomed out.
39. They are: aluminium, cobalt, chrome, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, niobium, nickel, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, silver, tin, titanium, and zinc.
40. Magnesium, molybdenum, and iridium.
41. Ruthenium, cadmium, and tungsten.
42. All these figures can be found in the 2011 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) publication ‘Recycling Rates of Metals: a status report’. The rate of recycling of certain rare metals have decreased even further since 2011, the year in which this report was published. This is due to the drop in metals prices, which had made recycling less financially attractive. The rate of recycling of rhenium is virtually nonexistent since the last recycling company that processes the metal closed its operations in early 2018. Interview with Vincent Donnen, cofounder of Compagnie Des Métaux Rares, 2019.
43. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions on the 2017 list of Critical Raw Materials for the EU.
44. ‘Hitachi Recycling Scarce Rare Earths’, The Japan Times, 10 December 2010.
45. Interview with Christian Thomas, founder of Terra Nova Développement, 2017.
46. Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, adopted in Basel on 22 March 1989.
47. In particular, the convention bans waste containing hexavalent chromium compounds, copper, zinc, cadmium or antimony.
48. ‘EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (SOCTA)’, Europol, 2013.
49. J. Huisman, I. Botezatu, L. Herreras, M. Liddane, J. Hintsa, V. Luda di Cortemiglia, P. Leroy, E. Vermeersch, S. Mohanty, S. van den Brink, B. Ghenciu, J. Kehoe, C.P. Baldé, F. Magalini, and A. Bonzio, ‘Countering WEEE Illegal Trade (CWIT) Summary Report, Market Assessment, Legal Analysis, Crime Analysis and Recommendations Roadmap’, 31 August 2015, Lyon, France.
50. Martin Eugster and Roland Hischier, ‘Key Environmental Impacts of the Chinese EEE-Industry’, Tsinghua University, China, 2007.
51. See ‘Les terres rares: des propriétés extraordinaires sur fond de guerre économique’ [‘Rare-earth Metals: extraordinary properties against a backdrop of economic war’] with Paul Caro, rare-earth metals expert at the Académie des sciences. See also ‘China Tries to Clean Up Toxic Legacy of its Rare Earth Riches’, New York Times, 22 October 2013.
52. ‘Rare Earth and Radioactive Waste: a preliminary waste stream assessment of the Lynas advanced materials plant, Gebeng, Malaysia’, National Toxics Network, April 2012. Likewise, in Malaysia, where our investigation led us in 2011: between the end of the 1970s and 1994, the Japanese multinational corporation Mitsubishi mined and refined rare-earth metals in Bukit Merah, in the north of the country. As explained to us by environmental activist Tan Ka Kheng, ‘Their activities generated tremendously high levels of radiation. This in the nuclear industry is considered medium-activity radioactive waste and must therefore be manoeuvred with the greatest of care. But … they disposed of the waste in old, rusty barrels and used plastic bags as cladding. What a tragedy! Mitsubishi then closed the facility and left! Now we’re left with this waste for 14.4 billion years!’ Bukit Merah is one of the most radioactive sites in Asia. While we were there, $100 million were committed to renovate the site. Watch the author’s and Serge Turquier’s documentary Rare Earths: the dirty war, 2012.
53. ‘The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future’, World Bank Group, June 2017.
54. ‘Electrification Puts the Car Industry at Risk’ Says PSA Boss Tavares at Frankfurt’, The Telegraph, 12 September 2017. Carlos Tavares also stated that ‘All this agitation and chaos will come back to haunt us because we will have made the wrong decisions that are insufficiently considered, lack perspective, and are made based on day-to-day emotions.’ A year later, Yoshihiro Sawa, president of the luxury carmaker Lexus, warned against electric vehicles: ‘EVs currently require a long charging time and batteries that have an environmental impact at manufacture and degrade as they get older. And then, when battery cells need replacing, we have to consider plans for future use and recycling. It’s a much more complex issue than the current rhetoric perhaps suggests. I prefer to approach the future in a more honest way.’ See ‘Lexus Boss on EVs, Autonomy and Radical Design’, Autocar, 11 August 2018.

Chapter Three: Delocalised pollution

1. For further reading, see Philippe Bihouix and Benoît de Guillebon’s Quel futur pour les métaux?, op. cit.
2. See Mineral Resources Online Spatial Data, U.S. Geological Survey.
3. ‘Sustainable management of mineral raw materials’: information report by the Sustainable Development Commission of the French National Assembly, 2011.
4. Ibid.
5. See ‘Rare Earth Mining at Mountain Pass’, Desert Report, March 2011.
6. Interview with Chen Zhanheng, deputy secretary general of the Association of China Rare Earth Industry, 2016.
7. Interview with Eric Noyrez, former CEO of Lynas and current managing director of Serra Verde, 2019.
8. ‘The global economic crisis put the project on hold for over a year. In September 2009, Nicholas Curtis managed to raise enough capital to revive the project, and engineering works began in January 2010. In the end, the Mount Weld mine produced its first gram of rare earths in 2013,’ adds Noyrez.
9. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, the then sales director of US chemicals company Cytec, 2011.
10. Nicolas Hulot later became the environment minister under the Macron presidency.
11. The full history of the group is available on the Solvay website (French only).
12. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, former industrial and raw materials director at Rhône-Poulenc and Rhodia Terres Rares, 2016 and 2017.
13. The shore of Port Neuf lies opposite the Minimes marina, less than 2 kilometres from the Saint Nicolas tower.
14. Interview with Bruno Chareyron, nuclear physics engineer at CRIIRAD, 2016.
15. Alain Roger and François Guéry (dir.), Maîtres et protecteurs de la nature [Masters and Protectors of Nature], Champ Vallon, 1991. According to Régis Poisson, a former engineer at Rhône-Poulenc, one day the local authorities apparently asked: ‘Can’t you take the red out of the plumes to make them look less dirty?’
16. ‘La CRIIRAD crie à la radioactivité dans la baie de La Rochelle’ [‘CRIIRAD Exposes Radioactivity in the Bay of La Rochelle’], Libération, 19–20 March 1988.
17. The problem appears to have lasted until at least 2002, when a new report from the CRIIRAD demonstrated ‘the ongoing contamination of the old outfall pipe’ on the shore of Port Neuf. Refer to CRIIRAD report no. 10–149 V1 1, ‘Mesures radiamétriques sur terrain de l’université de La Rochelle’ [‘Radiometric In-field Measurements by La Rochelle University’], 15 December 2010. According to Bruno Chareyron, ‘The facility had not been dismantled and the immediate environment of the outfall pipe wasn’t even cordoned off. The company had not done everything in its power to limit local residents’ exposure to radiation.’
18. ‘La CRIIRAD crie à la radioactivité dans la baie de La Rochelle’ [‘CRIIRAD Exposes Radioactivity in the Bay of La Rochelle’], op. cit.
19. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, 2016 and 2017.
20. Jean-Yves Le Déaut, ‘Report on Low-level Radioactive Wastes’, Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology Assessment (OPECST), 1992.
21. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, 2016 and 2017.
22. Ibid. I contacted Jean-René Fourtou, but he did not respond to my request for an interview.
23. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, 2016. Jean-Paul Tognet states that the Chinese prices are around 25 per cent lower than those of the competition.
24. Ibid.
25. ‘Toxic Memo’, Harvard Magazine, 5 January 2001.
26. Interview with Patrice Christmann of BRGM, the French Geological Survey, 2013.
27. Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), establishing a European Chemicals Agency.
28. Harvey Black, ‘Chemical Reaction: the U.S. response to REACH’, Environmental Health Perspectives, March 2008.
29. Interview with Christophe-Alexandre Paillard, Deputy Director of the Strategic Affairs Directorate (DAS, French Ministry of Defence), 2013.
30. As rightly put by Louis Maréchal, currently extractives sector policy adviser within the OECD’s Responsible Business Conduct Unit, by transferring the responsibility of production to mining countries we have also relocated the associated societal repercussions: corruption, conflict, governance issues, the black market, human rights violations, and so on. Interview with Louis Maréchal, 2017.
31. Keynote by Gregory Bowes, Chairman of Northern Graphite, 5th Annual Cleantech & Technology Metals Summit: Invest in The Cleantech Revolution, 2016.
32. Interview with Xue Lan, professor of political science at Tsinghua University, 2016.
33. ‘Annual Report Pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 for the Fiscal Year Ended September 29, 2018.’, Apple Inc, 2018. Apple’s 2019 environmental report mentions the presence of metals such as rare earths, cobalt and tungsten in their mobile phones, but omits the conditions under which they are extracted and refined. ‘Environmental Responsibility Report, 2019 Progress Report, Covering Fiscal Year 2018’, Apple Inc, 2019.
34. ‘Environmental Impact Report’, Tesla Motors, Inc., 2019.
35. To give just one example, read ‘Time to Recharge: corporate action and inaction to tackle abuses in the cobalt supply chain’, Amnesty International, 2017.
36. ‘The Fairphone, a No-conflict Smartphone without Planned Obsolescence’, World Forum for a Responsible Economy, 28 July 2017.
37. ‘The “Right to Repair” Movement Wants You to Be Able to Fix Your Own Stuff’, Public Radion International, 24 December 2018.
38. Visit The Restart Project website.
39. ‘Meet the $21 Million Company that Thinks a New iPhone Is a Total Waste of Money’, Inc, April 2017.
40. Under this framework, by 2030 member states are required to reduce their CO2 emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels, and increase the share of renewables energies to 27 per cent of their consumption.
41. ‘U.S. Leads in Greenhouse Gas Reductions, but Some States Are Falling Behind’, Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 27 March 2018.
42. This reality certainly helps to explain a discussion that ‘fell on deaf ears’ between Song Xi Chen, economics professor at Peking University, and a US steel trader from Milwaukee, both travelling on a plane from Chicago to Beijing in 2014. ‘I said to him: “You are responsible for the pollution in China!” To which he replied: “But I don’t own the industry!”’ Interview with Song Xi Chen, 2016.
43. US military spending steadily declined over the 1990s until 11 September 2001. See ‘Trends in U.S. Military Spending’, Council of Foreign Relations, 15 July 2014. This is a trend reflected in France, where the defence budget, calculated in constant euro terms, fell 20 per cent in the space of twenty-five years to €31.4 billion in 2015. See ‘En euros constants, le ministère de la Défense a perdu 20 per cent de son budget en 25 ans’ [‘In Constant Euro Terms, the Ministry of Defense Budget Has Fallen 20 per cent in 25 Years’], Le Monde, 29 April 2015.
44. Interview with Alain Liger, former secretary-general of the Comité pour les métaux stratégiques (COMES – Committee for Strategic Metals), 2016.
45. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, founder of Hallgarten & Company, 2016. According to Ecclestone, the stockpiles were not managed by the US Treasury, but by the Pentagon. By selling them off, the US Army was able to offset the fall in military lending and buy new equipment, such as drones, aircraft, and guided bombs.
46. Interview with Jean-Philippe Roos, then commodity market analyst in the Natexis Asset Management economic research department, 2010. These transactions apparently began even earlier: after signing the treaties resulting from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I and II, the USSR dismantled some of its atomic bombs and sold the uranium to the US. The massive quantity of minerals that suddenly flooded the market also contributed to ‘killing’ the US uranium industry.
47. ‘Braderie forestière au pays de Colbert’ [‘The Sell-off of the Forestry Industry in the Country of Colbert’], Le Monde diplomatique, October 2016.
48. ‘Grasse se remet au parfum’ [‘Grasse Back on the Scent’], M. Le magazine du Monde, 11 July 2016.
49. Thales registration document, 2015.
50. Interview with Alain Liger, 2016.
51. In Portugal, the BRGM geologists discovered the Neves-Corvo copper orebody. In Quebec, their exploration activities enabled the mining of copper and zinc orebodies, the Langlois mine.
52. Interview with Alain Liger, 2016.
53. Ibid.
54. ‘Trends in the Mining and Metals Industry’, ICMM (International Council of Mining & Metals), October 2012.
55. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French White Paper on Defence and National Security 2013, Ministry of Defence, 2013.
56. Upon his retirement in 1984, Alain de Marolles wrote a predictive analysis in which he referred to a ‘third industrial revolution’ in progress, spurred by the electronics industry, the space race biology. He commented on the massive demand for metals generated by these sectors, and predicted that some of these metals — copper, cobalt, manganese, nickel, platinum, and gold — would in the future be mined from the bottom of the sea. See Alain de Gaigneron de Marolles, L’Ultimatum: fin d’un monde ou fin du monde? [Ultimatum: end of one world or end of the world?], Plon, 1984.
57. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016.
58. Interview with Didier Julienne, natural resources strategist, 2016.
59. ‘50 Years Ago: cargo cults of Melanesia’, Scientific American, 1 May 2009.
60. ‘The Surprising Number of American Adults Who Think Chocolate Milk Comes from Brown Cows’, The Washington Post, 15 June 2017.

Chapter Four: The West under embargo

1. Mineral Commodity Summaries, U.S. Geological Survey, 2017.
2. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions on the 2017 list of Critical Raw Materials for the EU.
3. Interview with Felix Preston, energy, environment and resources specialist at Chatham House, 2016. See also Felix Preston, Rob Bailey and Siân Bradley (Chatham House), 2016, and Dr Wei Jigang and Dr Zhao Changwen (DRC), ‘Navigating the New Normal: China and global resource governance’, January 2016.
4. See the information report on the sustainable management of mineral commodities for the French Committee on Sustainable Development and Planning, presented by MPs Christophe Bouillon and Michel Havard, French National Assembly, 2011.
5. ‘La Chine met les matières premières sous pression’ [‘China Puts Raw Materials Under Pressure’], Les Echos, 7 July 2015. See also ‘Metals Shine on China Demand’, China Daily, 19 June 2018.
6. Interview with Andrew Peaple, journalist writing on commodities for the Hong Kong office of The Wall Street Journal, 2016.
7. Geneviève Barman and Nicole Dulioust, ‘Les années françaises de Deng Xiaoping’ [‘Deng Xiaoping’s French Years’], Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 1988, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 17–34.
8. ‘Le singe et la souveraineté des ressources’ [‘The Monkey and the Sovereignty of Resources’], Le Cercle – Les Échos, 12 February 2016.
9. Information report no. 349 (2010-2011) on the security of France’s strategic supplies, prepared for the French Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces by Jacques Blanc, 2011.
10. Generally speaking, Western countries took a position of reliance on major mineral-producing countries. Accordingly, the United States is 100 per cent dependent for seventeen minerals including rubidium, scandium, graphite, indium and thorium. It is 80 per cent dependent for twenty-nine metals and 50 per cent dependent for forty-one metals. See ‘Going Critical: being strategic with our mineral resources’, USGS, 13 December 2013. As for the EU, after a review of fifty-four metals, the findings from Brussels are more or less the same: ‘around 90 per cent of global supply [of EU members] originated from extra-EU sources’. See ‘Report on Critical Raw Materials for the EU’, Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Defining Critical Raw Materials, May 2014.
11. Interview with Dudley Kingsnorth, professor at Curtin University in Australia, 2016.
12. Refer to the figures reported by John Seaman in ‘Rare Earth and Clean Energy: analyzing China’s upper hand’, Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI), September 2010.
13. J. Korinek and J. Kim, ‘Export Restrictions on Strategic Raw Materials and their Impact on Trade’, OECD Trade Policy Papers, no. 95, OECD Publishing, 2010.
14. Refer to complaints DS295, DS395, and DS398 brought to the WTO by the United States, the European Communities, and Mexico with respect to China’s application of export restrictions on various raw materials of which it is the origin. The Chinese rare metals strategy stems from the country’s desire to re-establish its status as a global powerhouse. Propelled by its economy, which has grown over tenfold since the turn of the millennium, China is increasingly flexing its muscles by weighing in more on international affairs. Of note, this diplomatic activism led to the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2014 to counteract the hegemony of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Similarly, Beijing has strengthened its bilateral relations with its regional neighbours. Since the start of the 2000s, China has acquired and built port facilities that extend from its coasts to Port Sudan in east Africa — the ‘string of pearls’ strategy aimed at containing its Indian neighbour. Not to mention the construction of artificial islands in the Spratly Archipelago, a disputed maritime region of the South China Sea known for its gigantic gas reserves. China has no qualms either about taking on Japan, robbing it of its position as the second-biggest global economic power in 2010, making China the economic leader in the region.
15. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, 2016.
16. See also Robert L. Paarlberg, ‘Lessons of the Grain Embargo’, Foreign Affairs, Fall 1980.
17. ‘Russia’s Gas Fight with Ukraine’, BBC, 31 October 2014.
18. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQRjZAvr8HI.
19. Interview with Toru Okabe, professor at the University of Tokyo, 2011.
20. ‘Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan’, The New York Times, 22 September 2010.
21. ‘The Difference Engine: more precious than gold’, The Economist, 17 September 2010.
22. ‘Continental AG, Bosch Push EU to Secure Access to Rare Earths’, Bloomberg, 1 November 2010.
23. Hilary Clinton added that ‘our countries, and others will have to look for additional sources of supply. This served as a wake-up call.’ ‘Clinton Hopes Rare Earth Trade to Continue Unabated’, Reuters, 28 October 2010.
24. Interview with John Seaman, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), 2015.
25. A kilogram of terbium was soon trading at €2,900 — that is, ten times higher than two years before. Source: ‘Rhodia renouvelle ses filons de terres rares’ [‘Rhodia Renews Its Rare Earths Arm’], L’Expansion, 2 November 2011. In mid-2011, a kilogram of dysprosium traded at an astronomic price of nearly $3,000 — that is, 100 times more than in 2003. Source: ‘Les matières premières comme enjeu stratégique majeur: le cas des “terres rares’’’ [‘Commodities as a Major Strategic Challenge: the case of rare earths’], presentation by Christian Hocquard. See http://archives.strategie.gouv.fr/cas/content/23e-rendez-vousde-la-mondialisation-matieres-premieres-metaux-rares-ressources-energetiques.html.
26. ‘Had a $2 cup of coffee undergone the same inflation as europium, today it would be worth $24.55,’ explains the company General Electric to its customers to explain the increases in its tariffs. Source: ‘Rhodia renouvelle ses filons de terres rares’, op. cit.
27. In 2016, Royal Bafokeng Holdings decided to reduce their share to 6.3 per cent in order to diversify their source of revenue. See ‘Why Royal Bafokeng Is Selling Implats’, Moneyweb, 5 April 2016.
28. Thanks to their revenue, the Bafokeng have embarked on a large-scale investment campaign in a variety of sectors, including insurance, telecommunication, sports, and infrastructure. To ‘crown’ it all, they have designed a plan called Vision 2035 — the year in which platinum mining will have peaked. Thereafter, the foundations of an independent and sustainable model for the platinum economy will need to be laid.
29. At a regional level, chiefs from other communities in South Africa and Zambia, and even Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) president Joseph Kabila, came.
30. From 2012, the Mongolian government promulgated a law that drastically restricts foreign investment in sectors — such as mining — that are seen as strategic.
31. ‘Qatar Fund Raises Stake in Xstrata’, The New York Times, 23 August 2012. Xstrata merged with Glencore in 2013.
32. ‘Rising Resource Nationalism Seen as “Fire Burning” for Miners’, Bloomberg, 16 May 2018, and ‘Resource Nationalism on the Rise in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Mining Weekly, 15 June 2018.
33. Interview with Sukhyar Raden, General Director — Mineral & Coal for the Indonesian Ministry of Energy & Mineral Resources, 2015.
34. ‘Export Restrictions in Raw Materials Trade: facts, fallacies and better practices’, OECD, 2014.
35. These claims were in fact supported by Resolution 1803 (XVII) of the United Nations, voted in 1962, which established ‘permanent sovereignty of peoples and nations over their natural wealth and resources’.
36. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016.
37. The protectionism is also essentially the outcome of Western trade practices. China, too, is the target of trade retaliation measures orchestrated by Western states and corporations. Since 2011, protectionist measures against China have tripled, according to the Global Trade Alert (GTA) in its report ‘The Global Trade Disorder’ (2014). The financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers was unquestionably a turning point. States went from their traditional role of safeguarding international trade to becoming one of its harshest critics. In this context, ‘China has to manage a shift in the globalisation paradigm at a time when the former winners thereof — the West — are in the process of becoming the losers’, says Brian Jackson, an analyst at the Beijing bureau of IHS group. This has the World Economic Forum worried. Recognising the multiplication of attacks on the trade in mining resources, the Swiss forum is deeply concerned about scenarios which, in one of its publications, it codes ‘amber’ or even ‘red’. This latest prediction depicts a world in which ‘markets are shaped by state interventionism’, and ‘trade is defined by a complex web of protectionist barriers and preferential agreements’, and by ‘limited cross-border flows of products, labour and capital’. See the report Mining & Metals: scenarios to 2030, World Economic Forum, 2010.
38. Global steel production stood at 1,808 million tonnes in 2014. See ‘Global Crude Steel Output Increases by 4.6 Per Cent in 2018’, World Steel Association, 25 January 2019.
39. To date, China has not signed the Global Reporting Initiative, the purpose of which is to encourage the transparency of governments, particularly with regard to how they manage their resources.
40. ‘Matières premières: le grand retour des stratégies publiques’ [‘Raw Materials: state strategies make a big comeback’], Paris Technology Review, 4 May 2012.
41. For further understanding of the growing role of the financial sector on the commodities market, see the documentary Commodity Traders by Jean-Pierre Boris and Jean Crépu (2014). The following is an extract transcribed from the documentary: ‘March 13th, 2000. The dotcom bubble bursts. The Nasdaq stock market index crashes. Financiers pull out of this market in search of new sources of profit. Two US economists, Gary Gorton and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, take a closer look and publish a report entitled “Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures”. It underscores the high profitability of investing in commodities, which is also a way to diversify share portfolios. The major banks got the message and turned their sights on the commodities market.’
42. There have also been cases of speculation on palladium, cobalt, and molybdenum.
43. ‘Electric Carmakers on Battery Alert after Funds Stockpile Cobalt’, The Financial Times, 23 February 2017. Another example is the massive stockpiling of indium at the end of 2009 via commodity investment vehicles to ‘dry up this small market and massively inflate prices’, say the press. See ‘La Chine restreint ses exportations de matières premières stratégiques’ [‘China Limits Its Strategic Raw-material Exports’], Le Monde, 29 December 2009.

Chapter Five: High-tech hold-up

1. The metals must be smelted in precise amounts. The resulting alloy is then cooled, milled, compacted, pressed using a piston, sintered, and cooled again. For a more technical explanation, read Sandro Buss, ‘Des aimants permanents en terres rares’ [‘Permanent Rare-earth Magnets’], La Revue polytechnique, no. 1745, 13 April 2010.
2. Turning the sparkwheel of the lighter strikes the flint — a blend of rare earth metals called ‘mischmetal’ — producing a spark that lights the gas or the wick. As for camping lanterns, the incandescent light of the flame is produced not by gas but by the rare earth cerium. When heated by the flame, the cerium-impregnated gas mantle emits a bright white light that provides enhanced lighting. Refer to ‘Terres rares: enjeux stratégiques pour le développement durable’ [‘Rare Earths: strategic challenges for sustainable development’], a talk by Patrice Christmann, deputy director of corporate strategy at the French Geological Survey (BRGM), as part of a series of seminars organised by the National Scientific Research Council (CNRS) of France, 17 September 2013.
3. The rare earths covering the inner face of the screen are ‘excited’ by the cathode-ray tube to emit coloured light, and therefore images. Europium reproduces the colour red, and terbium the colour green.
4. These are the samarium-cobalt (Sm-Co) magnets, the chemical formulae of which are SmCo5 and Sm2Co17, and magnets made using the rare earth neodymium, iron and boron (NdFeB), the chemical formula of which is Nd2Fe14B. They were invented by Masato Sagawa of Sumitomo Special Metals in Japan, and John Croat from General Motors in the US.
5. For example, samarium ‘is used mainly to make permanent magnets. A technology used for the new generation of Alstom’s TGVs [high-speed trains], and enabling the production of engines 30 to 40 per cent more compact, and 10 to 20 per cent more powerful.’ See ‘Le CAC 40 accro aux “terres rares”’ [‘The CAC 40’s Addiction to “Rare Earths”’], L’Expansion, 12 November 2012.
6. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016. According to Philippe Degobert, electrical engineering lecturer at the École nationale supérieure des Arts et des Métiers (ENSAM), and director of Masters in Mobility and Electric Vehicles (MVE), the ferrite magnet is seven times weaker than a samarium magnet, and ten times weaker than a neodymium magnet.
7. Interview with Chen Zhanheng, 2016.
8. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, 2016.
9. See Régis Poisson, ‘La guerre des terres rares’ [‘The Rare Earths War’], L’Actualité chimique, no. 369, December 2012.
10. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, 2016 and 2017.
11. Ibid.
12. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, 2016.
13. Régis Poisson, ‘La guerre des terres rares’, op. cit.
14. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, 2016.
15. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, 2016 and 2017.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Interview with Jim Robinson, United Steelworkers (USW), 2011.
19. Interview with Régis Poisson, former engineer at Rhône-Poulenc, 2013.
20. See also Régis Poisson, ‘La guerre des terres rares’, op. cit.
21. Interview with David Merriman, Roskill Consultancy, 2016.
22. According to a French industrialist who preferred to speak anonymously, the purchase price ratio for European producers and Chinese producers can be as high as 1:7 — a price differential that Jean-Paul Tognet finds excessive.
23. Interview with Jean-Yves Dumousseau, 2011.
24. See ‘Baotou Rare Earth High-Tech Industrial Development Zone’, China Daily, 27 October 2015.
25. Since our trip to Baotou, ‘Inner Mongolia will present a broad platform for investment cooperation in fields such as new energies, advanced materials, energy saving, environmental protection, high-end equipment, big data cloud computation, bio technology, traditional Inner Mongolian medicine and “Tourism +”.’ See ‘Central Enterprises Launch a New Wave of Investments in Inner Mongolia, Signing Contracts Worth RMB 402 Million Yuan at an Informal Meeting’, PR Newswire, 1 March 2017. The city of Baotou is still pursuing its ambitions by developing an industrial area of 470 square kilometres dedicated to rare earths. See ‘Huge Rare Earth Industrial Park Coming to Inner Mongolia’, China Daily, 29 August 2017.
26. Interview with Dudley Kingsnorth, 2016.
27. Industrial robots are in fact the cornerstone of tomorrow’s smart and ultra-connected ‘4.0 factories’, where Germany has the lead. In 2015, the German machine tool industry generated over €15 billion, exported three-quarters of its production and had a headcount of nearly 70,000 employees. It is a pillar of the national economy. See ‘German Machine Tool Industry Expects Moderate Growth in 2016’, Verein deutscher Werkzeugmaschinenfabriken, 2016.
28. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, 2016.
29. For a more detailed explanation, see the French Geological Survey’s public report: ‘Panorama du marché du tungstène’ [‘View of the Tungsten Market’], BRGM, July 2012.
30. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, 2016.
31. The Mittelstand may have won the battle, but they did not win the war. China has a keen interest in some of Germany’s star industrial robots, such as KUKA. See ‘Allemagne: le “Mittelstand” face à l’offensive chinoise’ [‘Germany: the Mittelstand faces the Chinese offensive’], Le Monde, 4 June 2016.
32. Graphene’s applications are astounding: bendy mobile phones, see-through laptops, ultra-powerful nanoprocessors, or nanochips that can be inserted into the human body to detect cancers, and so on.
33. ‘U.S. Brings WTO Challenge against China over Copper, Graphite, Other Minerals’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2016.
34. ‘United States Expands Its Challenge to China’s Export Restraints on Key Raw Materials’, Office of the United States Trade Representative, July 2016.
35. Interview with Daisy Chen, journalist at the Beijing bureau of Metal Pages, 2016. The case is ongoing and can be consulted on the WTO website (DS558: China — Additional Duties on Certain Products from the United States).
36. Interview with Chris Ecclestone, 2016.
37. Interview with Thomas Kruemmer, 2016.
38. And why not do an inventory of ‘critical super-magnets’ that could potentially be in short supply? It’s a legitimate question since China, as part of its strategy to attract industries that use rare earths, threatened Denmark, a major producer of wind turbines, to suspend its rare-earth magnet exports, according to Chris Ecclestone.
39. Interview with Didier Julienne, 2016.
40. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016.
41. Interview with Alain Liger, 2016.
42. ‘Tin: the secret to improving lithium-ion battery life’, Forbes, 23 May 2012.
43. Interview with Agung Nugroho Soeratno, head of communication at PT Timah, 2014.
44. Interview with Peter Kettle, analyst at the International Tin Research Institute, in the UK, 2016.
45. ‘Shanghai to Match London Metals as China Seeks Commodities Sway’, Bloomberg News, 26 March 2015. Futures are one of the financial instruments traded on the derivatives market. To offset price instability, buyers and sellers agree on the future sale of goods based on a price set in advance.
46. ‘China ShFE Plans Commodities Platform to Set Physical Prices’, Reuters, 15 May 2018.
47. ‘Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Introduces Futures Tin Contract’, The Star, 29 September 2016.
48. There is no guarantee that such a policy had any bearing on global prices in the short term. Peter Kettle nevertheless maintains that ‘there are clear opportunities for local brokers who benefit from financial transactions executed locally that would otherwise have taken place in the UK’. As such, stock exchanges like these actually strengthen the status of Asian cities as financial hubs.
49. Nickel and bauxite. See ‘Indonesia Eases Ban on Mineral Exports’, The Financial Times, 13 January 2017.
50. Hervé Kempf, Fin de l’Occident, naissance du monde [End of the West, Birth of the World], Seuil, 2013.
51. From a speech given at a conference organised by Cyclope Circle in Paris 2016.
52. See the African Union’s February 2009 ‘Africa Mining Vision’ report.
53. Refer to the World Bank Report ‘Increasing Local Procurement by the Mining Industry in West Africa’, January 2012.

Chapter Six: The day China overtook the West

1. Claude Chancel and Libin Liu Le Grix, Le Grand Livre de la Chine [The Big Book of China], Eyrolles, 2013.
2. James McGregor, APCO senior counsellor, describes China’s National Medium- and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (MLP) as the ‘grand blueprint of science and technology development’ to bring about the ‘great renaissance of the Chinese nation’. James McGregor, China’s Drive for ‘Indigenous Innovation’ — A Web of Industrial Policies, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 27 July 2010.
3. These industries are energy conservation and environmental protection, next-generation IT, biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, new energy, new materials, and clean-energy vehicles. See ‘China’s 12th Five-Year Plan: how it actually works and what’s in store for the next five years’, APCO Worldwide, 10 December 2010.
4. Refer to the summary of the 13th Five-Year Plan in ‘Prosperity for the masses by 2020 – China’s 13th Five-Year Plan and its business implications’, PwC China, Hong Kong and Macau, 2015.
5. Interview with Xue Lan, 2016.
6. I have borrowed this breakdown from Malo Carton and Samy Jazaerli’s book, Et la Chine s’est éveillée. La montée en gamme de l’industrie chinoise [And Then China Stirred: Chinese industry moves upmarket], Presses de l’École des mines, 2015.
7. Interview with Ding Yifan, researcher at the Institute of World Development, 2016.
8. The National Medium- and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (2006–2020), The State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2006.
9. James McGregor, ‘China’s Drive for “Indigenous Innovation” — A Web of Industrial Policies’, op. cit.
10. Ibid.
11. See Jean-Louis Beffa, Les Clés de la puissance [The Keys to Power], Seuil, 2015.
12. The full name is ‘1986 National High Technology Research and Development Program’. The first two numbers of Program 863 refer to the year the program was started, and the third number to the month (March).
13. These industries are information technology, biology, aerospace, automation, energy, materials, and oceanography.
14. ‘2019 Global R&D Funding Forecast’, R&D Magazine, Winter 2019.
15. Interview with Bo Chen, professor at the Shanghai Free Trade Zone research institute, 2016.
16. ‘China “Employs 2 Million to Police Internet”’, CNN, 7 October 2013.
17. For a critique of the innovation ecosystem in the Chinese mineral resources sector, see the report by Nicholas Arndt (Institute of Earth Sciences), Thierry Augé (French Geological Survey) and Michel Cuney (Geo-Resources Laboratory of Université de Lorraine), ‘Les Ressources minerals en Chine’ [‘Mineral Resources in China’], July 2014.
18. Interview with Bruno Gensburger, 2016. One French expert I spoke to who preferred not to be quoted said he heard the following remark from the lips of the Chinese director of an electronics group in reference to his staff: ‘They don’t have ideas because they are obedient. And if they’re not obedient, I hit them.’
19. Bernard Apremont, ‘L’économie de l’URSS dans ses rapports avec la Chine et les démocraties Populaires’ [‘The Economy of the USSR in Its Relations with China and Popular Democracies’], Politique étrangère, 1956, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 601–13.
20. James McGregor, ‘China’s Drive for “Indigenous Innovation” — A Web of Industrial Policies’, op. cit.
21. Interview with Julien Girault, journalist at the Agence France-Press Beijing desk, 2016.
22. Interview with Ding Yifan, 2016.
23. ‘China Will Attempt 30-plus Launches in 2019, Including Crucial Long March 5 Missions’, SpaceNews, 29 January 2019.
24. Interview with Xue Lan, 2016. This progress heralded the growth in developing countries’ contribution to the production of skills vis-à-vis the duopoly held by the US and Europe. A new ‘duel of intelligence’ (to use the expression coined by Claude Chancel and Libin Liu Le Grix in Le Grand Livre de la Chine, op. cit.) that Irina Bokova, the then director-general of UNESCO, highlighted in the 2015 UNESCO report on science. In it, she stated that ‘the North–South divide in research and innovation is narrowing, as a large number of countries are incorporating science, technology and innovation in their national development agendas.’ See ‘UNESCO Science Report: Towards 2030’, 2015. Five years earlier, Bokova also stated: ‘The bipolar world in which science and technology (S&T) were dominated by the Triad made up of the European Union, Japan and the USA is gradually giving way to a multi-polar world, with an increasing number of public and private research hubs spreading across North and South.’ See ‘Research and Development: USA, Europe and Japan increasingly challenged by emerging countries, says a UNESCO report’, Unescopress, 10 November 2010.
25. ‘China Continues to Dominate Worldwide Patent Applications’, Engineering & Technology, 4 December 2018. And in 2018, the ‘Science & Engineering Indicators’ report of the US National Science Foundation also found that with 426,000 publications, China has become the world’s biggest producer of scientific papers. See ‘Science & Engineering Indicators 2018 Report’, National Science Board, 2018. See also ‘China Declared World’s Largest Producer of Scientific Articles’, Scientific American, 23 January 2018.
26. See Jean-Louis Beffa, Les Clés de la puissance, op. cit.
27. See the June 2019 ‘Top 500 List’ online. In 2018, Beijing was again overtaken by two new US super computers.
28. ‘La Chine devient la première puissance informatique au monde’ [‘China Becomes the World’s Leader in IT’], Le Figaro, 21 June 2016.
29. ‘Clean Energy Investment Exceeded $300 Billion Once Again in 2018’, Bloomberg, 16 January 2019. China plans to increase this investment to $360 billion in 2020: ‘China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020’, The New York Times, 5 January 2017.
30. ‘Énergies renouvelables: 2015, année record pour les Investissements’ [‘Renewable Energies: 2015, a record year for investment’], Les Échos, 18 April 2016.
31. ‘Obama Says China Rare-earths Case Is Warning for WTO Violators’, Bloomberg, 13 March 2012.
32. ‘Voiture électrique: quand la Chine nous électrocutera’ [‘Electric Cars: the day China electrocutes us’], Caradisiac.com, 16 October 2017. As stated by PSA CEO Carlos Tavares at the Frankfurt International Motor Show in September 2017: ‘For a century, the Chinese chased after the internal combustion engine by paying royalties to the West. Now that they have found the point of disruption, they are taking the lead in electric cars which for the next century is the symmetry of their experience of the last.’
33. See ‘Red China’s Green Crisis’, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2017.
34. These are the key takeaways of the research by Karl Gerald Van den Boogaart from the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology. His work was presented at the Denver SME Critical Minerals Conference in 2014 and quoted by Dudley Kingsnorth at the 5th Annual Cleantech and Technology Metals Summit in Toronto in April 2016.
35. Dudley Kingsnorth, professor at Curtin University, Western Australia.
36. A highly approximate estimation values the production market at $1,800 billion in 2015.
37. Interview with Peter Dent of the Electron Energy Corporation, 2011.
38. Interview with Dudley Kingsnorth, 2016.
39. Ibid.
40. ‘Donald Trump Hails New Era of US Energy “dominance’’’, The Financial Times, 30 June 2017.
41. These political choices are nevertheless based on the false assumption according to which the US alone can direct new energy balances in one direction rather than another, whereas the Chinese now hold the cards. In addition, by refusing to tackle Beijing head-on, Washington has already admitted defeat.
42. Arnaud Montebourg, ‘L’Europe ne peut plus être à ce point désinvolte sur la mondialisation’ [‘Europe Cannot Continue to Be so Lackadaisical about Globalisation’], Le Monde, 26 October 2016.
43. Interview with Didier Julienne, 2015.
44. Interview with Gary Hubard, United Steelworkers, 2011.
45. The share decreased from 16.4 per cent to 12.4 per cent. Refer to the ‘Industry in France’ infographic on www.gouvernement.fr, 2 April 2015. Note, however, the strong figures from the French industrial sector in 2017. See ‘La France recrée enfin des usines’ [‘France Is Finally Recreating Factories’], Le Monde, 29 September 2017.
46. ‘Industry (Including Construction), Value Added (Per Cent of GDP)’, The World Bank, 2019.
47. Jean-François Dufour, Made by China: les secrets d’une conquête industrielle [Made in China: the secrets of an industrial conquest], Dunod, 2012.
48. Brahma Chellaney, ‘The Challenge from Authoritarian Capitalism to Liberal Democracy’, China-US Focus, 6 October 2016.
49. The expression was suggested by Joshua Cooper Ramo in a 2004 academic paper of the Foreign Policy Centre entitled ‘The Beijing Consensus’.
50. Zhao Tingyang, The Tianxia System: an introduction to the philosophy of a world institution, Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2005.
51. Interview with Chen Zhanheng, 2016.

Chapter Seven: The race for precision-guided missiles

1. In nuclear power plants, samarium-149 is used to absorb neutrons and thus reduce the reactivity (the rate of fission) of nuclear fuel. Contrary to the fiction, it is not a rare earth in itself, but an isotope of samarium.
2. Numerous reports look into the importance of rare earths in the US defence industries, such as Valerie Bailey Grasso’s report ‘Rare Earth Elements in National Defense: background, oversight issues, and options for Congress’, Congressional Research Service, 23 December 2013.
3. Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Le Commencement d’un monde. Vers une modernité Métisse [The Beginning of a World: towards hybrid modernity], Seuil, 2008.
4. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016.
5. Interview with David Merriman, 2016. David Merriman had less to say on the nature of these rare earths. Jean-Paul Tognet believes that the rare earth in question is scandium.
6. ‘One Budget Line Congress Can Agree On: spending billions on the US military’, The Conversation, 14 August 2019.
7. For the full story on the delocalisation of Magnequench, read Charles W. Freeman III, ‘Remember the Magnequench: an object lesson in globalization’, The Washington Quarterly, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2009, pp. 61–76.
8. ‘Chinese Defence Spending to Grow 7.5 Per Cent in 2019 as Beijing Seeks “World-class” Military’, Japan Times, 5 March 2019.
9. See Thierry Sanjuan, ‘L’Armée populaire de libération: miroir des trajectoires modernes de la Chine’ [‘The People’s Liberation Army: mirror on the modern trajectories of China’], Hérodote, no. 116, 2005.
10. Mycenaean Greece owed its prosperity to its military superiority over its enemies — particularly the Trojans — which it acquired from such weapons.
11. The Incas’ and other Andean cultures’ mastery of copper and bronze was no match for the Conquistadors’ mastery of iron. This contributed to the swift conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See Eric Chaline, 50 Minerals that Changed the Course of History, Firefly Books, 2012.
12. Nabeel Mancheri, Lalitha Sundaresan, and S. Chandrashekar, ‘Dominating the World: China and the rare earth industry’, National Institute of Advanced Studies, 2013.
13. ‘Panama Papers: from the Guatemalan Drug Queen to the “most dangerous mobster in the world”’, The Irish Times, 9 May 2016.
14. The Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
15. ‘China’s First Family Comes Under Growing Scrutiny’, The New York Times, 2 June 1995.
16. The ‘four commandments’ governing the policy are: ‘Combine the military and civil’, ‘Combine peace and war’, ‘Give priority to military products’ and ‘Let the civil support the military’. Together, they form sixteen ideograms, hence the name ‘sixteen characters’.
17. ‘China’s Spies “Very Aggressive” Threat to U.S.’, The Washington Times, 6 March 2007.
18. Interview with Hugo Meijer, currently a researcher at L’Institut de recherche stratégique de l’École militaire (IRSEM), 2016.
19. Interview with Steve Constantinides, Arnold Magnetic Technologies, 2016.
20. Ibid.
21. Scott Wheeler, ‘Trading with the Enemy: how Clinton administration armed communist China’, American Investigator (Free Republic), 13 January 2000.
22. ‘Illegal Fundraiser for the Clintons Made Secret Tape because He Feared Being ASSASSINATED over What He Knew – and Used It to Reveal Democrats’ Bid to Silence Him’, The Daily Mail, 23 February 2017.
23. ‘Democrats Return Illegal Contribution; Politics: South Korean subsidiary’s $250,000 donation violated ban on money from foreign nationals’, The Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1996.
24. ‘Chinese Embassy Role in Contributions Probed’, The Washington Post, 13 February 1997.
25. See the report ‘The Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy: achieving US national security objectives in a changing environment’, US Department of Defense, 2015.
26. ‘Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2018’, Sipri, April 2019.
27. ‘US Admiral Warns: only war can now stop Beijing controlling the South China Sea’, op. cit.
28. ‘Full Transcript: acting FBI director McCabe and others testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee’, The Washington Post, 11 May 2017.
29. ‘Presidential Executive Order on Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States’, The White House, 21 July 2017.
30. ‘It’s Not Buy America: admin aide on Trump’s sweeping industrial base study’, Breaking Defense, 25 July 2017.
31. ‘U.S. Launches National Security Probe into Aluminum Imports’, Reuters, 27 April 2017.
32. ‘Interior Releases 2018’s Final List of 35 Minerals Deemed Critical to U.S. National Security and the Economy’, USGS, May 2018.
33. ‘Murkowski, Manchin, Colleagues Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Strengthen America’s Mineral Security’, U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, 3 May 2019. Refer also to the Rare Earth Element Advanced Coal Technologies Act (REEACT), championed by Lisa Murkowski, aimed at developing coal-based rare-earth extraction technology: ‘Manchin, Capito & Murkowski Reintroduce Rare Earth Element Advanced Coal Technologies Act’, U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, 5 April 2019.
34. Interview with Ed Richardson, US Magnetic Materials Association, 2017.
35. ‘Xi’s Visit Boosts China’s Critical Rare-earth Sector’, Global Times, 5 May 2019
36. ‘Commentary: U.S. risks losing rare earth supply in trade war’, Xinhua, 29 May 2019.
37. ‘U.S. to Ensure Rare-Earth Supply Amid Trade War with China’, Bloomberg, 4 June 2019.
38. ‘Rare Earth Elements – the vitamins of modern history’, HIS Markit, 25 October 2019.
39. ‘The U.S. Rare Earths Saga Continues …’, Investor Intel, 22 July 2019.
40. ‘Lynas and Blue Line MoU for Rare Earths Separation’, Mining Magazine, 5 June 2019.
41. This law was broadened in 2009 to include electromagnets.
42. ‘Defense Science Board Task Force on High Performance Microchip Supply’, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2005.
43. ‘Exclusive: U.S. waived laws to keep F-35 on track with China-made parts’, Reuters, 3 January 2014.

Chapter Eight: Mining goes global

1. These essential minerals included aluminium, lead, iron, copper, nickel, chrome, and zinc. Source: United States Geological Survey Data Series 140.
2. Alain Liger, Secretary General of the French Strategic Metals Committee (COMES), ‘Transition énergétique: attention, métaux stratégiques!’ [‘The Energy Transition: it’s about strategic metals!’], The French High Council for Economy, Industry, Energy and Technology, 7 December 2015.
3. Since the production of steel and copper — two major base-metal products — was stable between 1970 and 2000, there was no real concern about the possibility of a mineral shortage. It was only in 2005 that industrial players and the press began to talk about scarcity after the sudden emergence of China on the raw materials market, which put immense strain on supplies.
4. ‘Ressources minérales et énergie: rapport du groupe Sol et sous-sol de l’Alliance’ [‘Mineral Resources and Energy: report from the Alliance’s ground and underground group’], Alliance nationale de coordination de la recherche scientifique (ANCRE), June 2015. For further reading, also refer to Olivier Vidal’s book Mineral Resources and Energy: future stakes in energy transition, ISTE Press Ltd, 2018.
5. Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé, and Nicholas Arndt, ‘Metals for a Low-Carbon Society’, Nature Geoscience, vol. 6, November 2013.
6. Ibid.
7. ‘The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future’, The World Bank Group, June 2017. See also ‘Métaux: les besoins colossaux de la transition énergétique’ [‘Metals: the colossal needs of the energy transition’], Les Échos, 20 July 2017.
8. ‘How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?’, Population Reference Bureau, 2011.
9. Interview with Olivier Vidal, 2017.
10. Interview with Alain Liger, 2016.
11. These fifteen metals are antimony, tin, lead, gold, zinc, strontium, silver, nickel, tungsten, bismuth, copper, boron, fluorite, manganese, and selenium. The five additional metals are rhenium, cobalt, iron ore, molybdenum, and rutile. See ‘De surprenantes matières critiques’ [‘Surprising Critical Materials’], L’Usine nouvelle, 10 July 2017.
12. ‘Critical Metals in the Path towards the Decarbonisation of the EU Energy Sector’, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, 2013.
13. Interview with John Petersen, 2017.
14. ‘Dwindling Supplies of Rare Earth Metals Hinder China’s Shift from Coal’, TrendinTech, 7 September 2016.
15. An eventuality not ruled out by Vivian Wu, who saw it as a ‘fine’ idea for China to keep all its rare-earth resources to itself.
16. Interview with Jack Lifton, 2016. Read also the speech by Christian Hocquard of the French Geological Survey included in a report released on 6 July 2015 on the implementation of a rare earths and strategic and critical raw materials by the Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Assessment (OPECST).
17. Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel, Librairie Stock, Delamain et Boutelleau, 1931.
18. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: a report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind, Universe Books, 1972.
19. Talk by Vincent Laflèche, the then Chairman of the French Geological Survey, Cercle Cyclope, 2016.
20. ‘China to Become Net Importer of Some Rare Earths’, Mining.com, 2 January 2017.
21. Interview with John Petersen, 2017.
22. Ugo Bardi, Extracted: how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014.
23. Ibid.
24. So says Christian Thomas, company founder of the metals recycling company Terra Nova.
25. Ester van der Voet, Reijo Salminen, Matthew Eckelman, Gavin Mudd, Terry Norgate, Roland Hisschier, Job Spijker, Martina Vijver, Olle Selinus, Leo Posthuma, Dick de Zwart, Dik van de Meent, Markus Reuter, Ladji Tikana, Sonia Valdivia, Patrick Wäger, Michael Zwicky Hauschild, and Arjan de Koning, ‘Environmental Risks and Challenges of Anthropogenic Metals Flows and Cycles: a report of the working group on the global metal flows to the International Resource Panel’, Kenya, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2013.
26. Bardi, Extracted, op. cit.
27. Interviews with Jean-Paul Tognet, 2016 and 2017.
28. Bardi, Extracted, op. cit.
29. Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the birth of modern geology, HarperCollins, 2001.
30. ‘Hands Off Brazil’s Niobium: Bolsonaro sees China as threat to utopian vision’, Reuters, 25 October 2018.
31. ‘Australia’s 15 Projects Aim to Break China Rare Earths Dominance’, Financial Times, 3 September 2019
32. ‘Bill Gates and Fellow Billionaires Invest in AI Mapping Technology to Search for Ethical Cobalt’, Small Caps, 6 March 2019.
33. ‘Japan to Import Rare Earth from India’, Reuters, 28 August 2014.
34. ‘Merkel Signs Export Deal with Mongolia’, The Local, 13 October 2011.
35. ‘North Korea Could Rival China on Rare Earths Reserves’, RT, 9 January 2012.
36. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was signed with Canada in February 2017 and aims to facilitate investment by European businesses in the Canadian mining sector.
37. ‘President Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland: 5 questions, answered’, BBC, 16 August 2019.
38. Interview with Didier Julienne, 2016.
39. ‘Métaux: les besoins colossaux de la transition énergétique’ [‘Metals: the colossal needs of the energy transition’], op. cit.
40. ‘Switch to Renewables Won’t End the Geopolitics of Energy’, Bloomberg, 21 August 2017. The author of the article is also co-authored a report with Meghan O’Sullivan, Indra Overland, and David Sandalow, ‘The Geopolitics of Renewable Energy’, Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, June 2017.
41. Interview with Vivian Wu, 2011.
42. ‘Luanda Names Rare Earths a Priority in Bid to Entice Beijing’, Africa Mining Intelligence, 20 December 2016.
43. ‘Angola’s Chinese-built Rail Link and the Scramble to Access the Region’s Resources’, Africa China Reporting, 26 February 2014.
44. The day after the embargo, a kilogram of terbium sold for €2,900. Now it is worth little more than €500. After trading at over €2,800, a kilogram of dysprosium now trades ten times lower. Source: mineralprices.com.
45. Interview with Christopher Ecclestone, 2016.
46. ‘California Rare Earths Miner Races to Restart Refining after China Doubles Tariffs in Trade War’, The Japan News, 26 August 2019.
47. Ibid.
48. ‘Exclusive: Evidence of Chinese interests driving effort to block Stans Energy in Kyrgyzstan’, InvestorIntel, 18 April 2013.
49. ‘Mountain Pass Sells for $20.5 Million’, Mining.com, 16 June 2017.

Chapter Nine: The last of the backwaters

1. ‘Montebourg veut que la France retrouve sa bonne mine’ [‘France Wants to Make a Mining Comeback’], AFP, 22 February 2014. The statement was made during the minister’s visit to the gypsum quarries of Montmorency, north of Paris in 2014.
2. ‘Montebourg dote l’Etat d’un bras armé dans le secteur des mines’ [‘Montebourg’s Secret Weapon for France’s Mining Sector’], Les Echos, 21 February 2014.
3. ‘Macron enterre la Compagnie des mines de France chère à Montebourg’ [‘Macron Shelves Montebourg’s Beloved National Company of French Mines’], Challenges, 9 February 2016.
4. ‘Emmanuel Macron préside l’installation du groupe de travail chargé de définir la “mine responsable” du xxie siècle’ [‘Emmanuel Macron Presides over the Installation of a Working Group Tasked with the Definition of “Responsible Mining”’], Press Release from the French Ministry of the Economy and Finance, 1 April 2015.
5. ‘Emmanuel Macron engage la démarche “mine responsible”’ [‘Emmanuel Macron Launches the “Responsible Mining Initiative” in the Twenty-first Century’], Minéral Info, 28 March 2015.
6. ‘Une réforme du code minier pour enterrer le gaz de schist’ [‘Mining Code Reform to Bury Shale Gas’], Le Monde, 17 January 2017.
7. ‘Creuser et forer, pour quoi faire? Réalités et fausses vérités du renouveau extractif en France’ [‘Digging and Drilling: what for? Realities and false truths about the revival of mining in France’], Les Amis de la Terre France, December 2016.
8. Ibid.
9. In France, there are believed to be as many 3,500 former mines that are still polluted with heavy metals. See ‘Mines: l’héritage empoisonné’ [‘The Poisoned Legacy of Mining’], France Culture, 5 May 2017.
10. ‘When a River Runs Orange’, The New York Times, 20 August 2015.
11. Ibid.
12. ‘Mining Report Finds 60,000 Abandoned Sites, Lack of Rehabilitation and Unreliable Data’, ABC, 16 February 2017.
13. ‘Abandoned Mines and the Water Environment’, Environment Agency, August 2008.
14. ‘La ruée sur les métaux’ [‘The Metals Gold Rush’], Le Monde, 13 September 2016.
15. Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth) encourages recycling rare metals rather than moving back to mining. As attractive as this is, and given the meteoric growth in renewable energy, I do not believe their suggestion will put a dent in the growth of the mining sector.
16. ‘Emmanuel Macron préside l’installation du groupe de travail chargé de définir la “mine responsable” du xxie siècle’ [‘Emmanuel Macron Presides over the Installation of a Working Group Tasked with the Definition of “Responsible Mining” in the Twenty-first Century’], op. cit.
17. ‘US GAO Warns It May Take 15 Years to Rebuild U.S. Rare Earths Supply Chain’, MineWeb, 15 April 2010.
18. ‘Nos déchets nucléaires sont cachés en Sibérie’ [‘Our Nuclear Waste Is Hidden in Siberia’], Libération, 12 October 2009.
19. The two monarchs returned to Paris in July 2019 on the invitation of President Macron. See ‘Contrat de convergence de Wallis et Futuna: déplacement royal à Paris’ [‘Convergence Agreement of Wallis and Futuna: royal visit to Paris’], France Info, 6 July 2019.
20. There are in fact three kings (and three kingdoms) in Wallis and Futuna: two kings in Futuna and one king in Wallis. Following a royal dispute in 2017, only one of the two kings in Wallis is recognised in Paris.
21. The kings of Futuna are believed to be paid a much lower amount.
22. Interview with Pierre Simunek, former secretary-general of the prefecture of Wallis and Futuna, 2016.
23. Ibid.
24. French White Paper: Defence and National Security 2013, Ministère de la Défense, 2013.
25. Interview with Pierre Simunek, 2016.
26. ‘The Tremendous Potential of Deep-sea Mud as a Source of Rare-earth Elements’, Scientific Reports, 10 April 2018.
27. ‘It’s Only a Matter of Time before Deep-sea Mining Comes to Canada. We’re not ready’, The Narwal, 26 March 2019.
28. Interview with Pierre Cochonat, currently a consultant in marine geosciences, 2013.
29. ‘Countries with the Largest Exclusive Economic Zones’, World Atlas, 29 June 2018.
30. ‘Commission on Limits of Continental Shelf Meeting at Headquarters, 11 July–26 August’, Background release, United Nations (UN), 11 July 2016.
31. Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, Ocean’s Monopoly, produced by Werwiewas, 2015.
32. H.R.2262 — US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, 114th Congress (2015–2016).
33. Refer to websites of Space Resources Australia, Platinoid Mines Corporation and Asteroid Mining Corporation.
34. NewSpace entrepreneurs include Elon Musk of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, or Greg Wyler, the director of One Web
35. Interviews with Olivier Sanguy, editor in chief of the website Enjoy Space, and MarieAnge Sanguy, editor in chief of the journal Espace & Exploration, 2016.
36. Read the fascinating article written by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet, ‘Mines dans l’espace, la nouvelle frontière’ [‘Mines in Space: the new frontier’], Les Échos, 8 October 2017.
37. Luxembourg is hardly a novice, as it already headquarters the world’s leading satellite operator SES Group.

Epilogue

1. Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: how science will shape human destiny and our daily lives by the year 2100, Allen Lane, 2011. See also ‘China to Build World’s First Solar Power Station in Space in Next Five Years’, Newsweek, 4 November 2019.
2. ‘Photovoltaïque: les promesses des pérovskites’ [‘Photovoltaics: the promises of perovskites’], Le Monde, 15 June 2017.
3. See Pierre-Noël Giraud and Timothée Ollivier, Économie des matières premières [The Economics of Raw Materials], op. cit.
4. See Philippe Bihouix, L’Âge des low technology: vers une civilisation techniquement soutenable [The Age of Low Technology: towards a sustainable technical civilisation], Seuil, 2014.
5. Translator’s note: Originally a French term (décroissance), ‘degrowth’, refers to the downscaling of production and consumption (energy and resources), and to decoupling growth from improvement.
6. Interview with Christian Thomas, 2017.