Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins Greenland election

Re:Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins... by makomk on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @09:24AM (#26724538)

So basically, it's a fairly typical rare earth mine. As far as I can tell pretty much all of them involve relatively low yields and result in the concentration of radioactive elements like thorium. The article you link to mentions a mine in Malaysia which was (I think) the only major rare earth mine outside China for a while until it closed over radiation fears - and it's not that China doesn't have these problems, it's that no-one can convince the government to shut down mines over it. So the end result of this thinking is that critical stuff like electric cars, wind turbines, etc is completely dependent on a totalitarian country making sabre-rattling threats towards its neighbours, carrying out increasingly aggressive ethnic cleansing campaigns, which has a history of using its control over the supply of rare earth minerals for political ends.

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Re:Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins... by nicklecompte on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @11:21AM (#26726202)

I mean... Greenland Minerals question is an Australian-Chinese enterprise, so I am not sure what the point of your comment is! Agreeing to develop the mine in Greenland doesn’t even meaningfully address your (myopic) worldview about stopping Chinese domination of rare earth supplies. Unless you think the intervention of unscrupulous Australian capitalists is a meaningful check on the Chinese government.

A major reason why the mine is being opposed is that a lackadaisical approach to toxic / radioactive waste is not in fact endemic to rare earth mining. It is seemingly endemic in multinational state-corporate enterprises (on which Greenlanders will have very little influence, cf the Malaysian government’s experience with that mine, which was also owned/administered by an Australian company).

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Re:Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins... by zepto on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @11:47AM (#26726603)

> Agreeing to develop the mine in Greenland doesn’t even meaningfully address your (myopic) worldview about stopping Chinese domination of rare earth supplies.

I agree with everything in your comment, except for where you say that the parent’s idea is myopic.

Why do you think that?

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Re:Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins... by nicklecompte on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @12:15PM (#26727035)

I meant that it’s a serious geopolitical problem but that the parent was suggesting it is a paramount concern, and that stopping said domination is worth any cost. The parent says this:

> the end result of this thinking is that critical stuff like electric cars, wind turbines, etc is completely dependent on a totalitarian country

while ignoring that the end result of their thinking is a race-to-the-bottom of nations poisoning their own people to combat China. It’s why I think they are being myopic - they are taking environmental devastation as a given and arguing that China must be stopped at all costs. (Not to mention the conflation of “resources not physically in China” with “non-Chinese resources” which, as stated above, is not actually true here).

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