 Okay. Well, welcome to today's grand strategy seminar hosted by the Center for Grand Strategy and the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War. And it's my great pleasure to, well, first of all, I should just say who I am. Those of you don't know me. I'm Professor Joe Milo, Professor of International History in the Department of War Studies. And I'm also director for the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War. And it's our enormous pleasure to be hosting Dr. Julie Plinger here today. Julie holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She's currently assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware and associate director of the minerals, materials and society program. And I guess, Julie, you've just moved because I had you at Boston and then you. So congratulations on, I guess, what's on a fairly new appointment. Thank you. Yeah, just before the pandemic is when I arrived. So you look forward to meeting your colleagues and finding your office. Indeed, yes. And Julie's focus in her research is on the dynamics of global resource frontiers with a particular focus on social and environmental sustainability. I highly recommend her award winning book Rare Earth Frontiers from terrestrial terrestrial subsoils to lunar landscapes published by Columbia University Press, and it's widely available as a ebook and a lovely paperback and having read most of it I have to say it's a beautifully crafted piece and I can see why it won an award. She's here today to talk about contemporary global earth politics persistent myths, policy challenges, and possible pathways and just just before I turn over to Julie to begin her presentation and say that Julie, if you feel free along the way to add your questions to the Q&A function or to the chat, I'll be monitoring both. And Julie's kindly agreed to speak for about 40 minutes, and then we'll turn over to question and answer will be recording the presentation but we will not be recording the question and answer session so, you know, so just so that you're aware. With that, I'm going to turn everything over to Julie and invite her to begin her presentation. Thank you so much Joe and thank you to the School of Security Count studies and Kings College London for for having me in the midst of the pandemic and at the end of the term with zoom fatigue running high I am encouraged by the fact that, as we've all gathered here to talk and think about rare earth politics and to look squarely at the challenges that we're facing and also think about possible pathways forward. So with that, I'll share my screen and we will dive right in. So today, as promised, we're talking about the persistent myths policy challenges and possible pathways forward. This is less of a scholarly talk although I'm happy to get into theory and methods and big ideas and all of this in the Q&A, and more of a discussion of what I see as the real challenges to formulating sensible policy and politics around these critical resources. So the clip notes of my book, it's based on five years of in depth research and field work in the US, China, Brazil, and Germany. I was able to do the in depth research in China that I did because I had linguistic and cultural fluency from living in different parts of China for about five years prior and during to the research. One of the key findings is that resource extraction as we have done it is inseparable from the politics of sacrifice of landscapes of livelihoods. But we can change this and this contention is the basis of my policy work to support sustainable rare earth sourcing in the US and internationally. To research this book I conducted field work either in or about the various sites that you see here. Regrettably, I did not have a chance to travel to the moon to investigate the rare earth situation there. But yes, as you can see my research, while global in scope, those of you who are savvy to the contemporary geographies of rare earth prospecting and extraction will note some conspicuous absences here. But the beautiful thing about research is that it is endless and ongoing. Within China, my primary side of analysis is that stripey bit there which indicates battle municipality in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, located in Northern China. And I was really interested in not not just following the grand international strategies and actors and policy pronouncements but also connecting big ideas and global political and economic currents to the people who are actually responsible for getting the elements to us from far corners of the world right humble hardworking everyday people who are absolutely crucial to sustaining modern life as we know it from the global bare earth frontier. I should also note that photos of people from the mining site in China either do not include faces or come from other sources. Not taking pictures of people was one of several necessary measures that I took to ensure local context that I was not, in fact, a journalist. So one had to behave in a way that people do not associate with journalists which is not taking very many pictures. One of the key salient factors that people might know about China and global rare earth politics is that China lost a WTO appeals and removed all export quotas you know as of January 1 of 2014 and then later removed further export quotas in 2016. They've been at the direction of the central government China's rare earth industry has been consolidating. And that includes closing down private minds which I'll talk about in a moment and its significance. But let's dive in now to its persistent myths. There's about seven that I'd like to cover today. And some of these will be familiar to you others maybe not. Let's see. So the first one and this bears repeating until the myth is thoroughly dispelled from from our imaginaries and our discourse at rare the first reference to this misnomer I actually found the earliest reference that I found was in 1907. But this idea that rare earths are rare it fuels some dangerous assumptions dangerous assumptions such as you know China minds the most rare earth elements because China has the most right which can set us up to think about vulnerabilities or imagine vulnerabilities that we actually don't have. And if we believe that rare earths are rare, then that allows us to make all sorts of assumptions right if they're scarce that means they'll be subject then to war or conflict. And of course, the myth of scarcity, then makes a sleep to the conclusion that they can only be obtained a great cost. So great sacrifices are justifiable. Now this is a really potent trope and pop culture commentary and some policy and over the past I've read plus that I've been researching rare earth elements I've seen in some circles, much to my dismay a very fluid boundary between the fact of what these elements are, and the myths and stories that we tell ourselves about so rare, but extraordinarily important elements so this is a screenshot of course from avatar 2009, which they're holding a rock that looks an awful lot like a very useful type of rare earth element. So if we believe that rare earth elements are rare, then how do we get them the assumption that is that we have to go to great lengths you know do we mind the moon. Do we dig up the Amazon. Do we charge into a war torn region such as Southern Afghanistan. Do we take as the founder of Blackwater advocated to the Trump administration and in an op ed in the Washington Street Journal. What is the most India company approach to Afghanistan and privatize the war and fuel it by rare earth mining, do we dig up biodiversity hotspots in tropical Africa, or dig under the Greenland ice sheet or scrape up the ocean floor right if they're rare these are our choices, but based on this map from the USGS and bear in mind that USGS publications are credible but also conservative meaning that they only report what is officially reported to them, nevertheless we see that there are hundreds of known deposits documented by the USGS. So rare earth elements really are not rare. Alright so having settled that let's move on to the second myth. Right so if rare earth elements are not rare and this is one of the motivating questions for my book, why is it that the geography of their production is so strange concentrated in a few far flung regions throughout the world. And the second myth here is that red tape and environmental regulation ruined the rare earth industry in the West and handed it to China. So the assumption here is that if only we had less regulation the West would not have lost its rare earth industry, but actually global economic deregulation and disinvestment were decisive factors in shifting industrial and innovative capacity to China. So it's possible to look at a chart like this this is a particularly visually pleasing one I found from the visual capitalist but there are many charts that show the precipitous rise of China's dominance in rare earth production, and then there's the peak in the early 2000s, and then we're starting to see now diversification as other actors re-enter the game. Alright, now it's possible to look at this and to imagine all sorts of things, conspiracy on the part of China, too much red tape by a bunch of tree huggers in the West or what have you. So this actually tell us what it actually takes to build a global monopoly over rare earth mining and processing. So, in my archival research in China I looked at I looked deeply into this question. So shortly after the founding of the PRC on October 1 1949. So Mao and Stalin had a shared agenda to convert the windswept steps of Inner Mongolia into an military industrial heartland that could provision both republics and the struggles against Western capitalism and Japanese imperialism. So this served the interests of Stalin as he reimagined the abundant iron and quote unquote non ferris metals, which is a euphemism for rare earths as well as radioactive materials in by an oboe. So Mao Zedong had two primary interests here to definitively incorporate the region of Inner Mongolia into the territory of the PRC, and to use the raw materials there to build a new nation. So the strategy from the get go from the founding of the PRC was a sort of vertical integration the creation of an industrial heartland. The Sino-Soviet cooperation projects that laid the foundations for China's contemporary industrial geography. Bouto was the premier model project and people in Bouto are still proud of this. They reference it today there's monuments all over the city as well. Locals are proud of this right so China's dominance first and foremost is an outcome of planning investment and international cooperation. And that is what laid the foundation for what came later when Reagan Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping respectively initiated their economic deregulation strategies. Right so the tenants of deregulation in the West that made it easier for capital and industry to move overseas intersected really nicely with Deng Xiaoping's open up and reform. The latter two decades of the 20th century, and this produced a new global economic reality that took shape through the 80s and 90s and into the president, or into the present rather. So deregulating industry in the West, and also in China by building having first built the solid industrial foundation and further than de-collectivizing the communes and introducing 400 million newly disempowered companies into the global workforce, China became a very attractive place for heavy industry. And so this forced countries, companies and other countries to choose whether to transfer their industries to disinvest or disinvest in competitive R&D, or to remove regulations or incentives or cleaner productions at home in order to compete with this new economic reality that was taking place out of China. Right so within China, the largest site by far, as I noted in rare earth mining is the biennium super complex. So what we have here as a satellite image of the mine, it measures about six miles or 12 some kilometers from end to end. This is the source now about half of all rare earth elements consumed worldwide so transitioning from a rather humble mining complex in 1959 to the global rare earth capital at the turn of the millennium was not an accident and it wasn't a one sided thing it wasn't a matter of mining or conspiracy on the part of China, no words in a matter simply of too much or too little regulation in the West but rather a convergence of these two in a way that I think was actually quite difficult to predict or foresee. The key point here is this is that as as Western countries were opting out of rare earth mining and processing, China was opting in so scaling up R&D as other countries were scaling down. Now let's look at the third myth. So rare earth mining and processing is necessarily environmentally destructive. So, certainly if you visit rare earth mining sites around China, and particularly if you did so when when I started doing it a little over a decade ago. It would be entirely reasonable to conclude that these things can only be had at great social and environmental cost, but if we assume that rare earth mining is necessarily destructive then we also assume that someone somewhere has to bear the burden, and social and environmental safeguards are unrealistic, but actually and more precisely and I'm even further convinced of this based on my review of the Chinese scientific literature and conversations with with engineers and technicians and regulators within China that actually it's a practice of mining with minimal regard for environmental protection or occupational health and safety that is actually destructive so not the mining itself it's not that that we lack the know how in China or overseas for how to do this more sustainably it's not the mining that that has not been priority. And this has come in China with a pretty serious cost so here you're looking at a satellite image of Bouto city, which is this model Sino-Soviet industrial heartland, where most of the rare earth materials that are now sourced to rare earths company are actually processed and you can see here heavily contaminated soil surrounding this sort of open tailings pond that has no liner nothing to stop the pollution from seeping into the soil and groundwater. All of this is at a slightly higher elevation and separated by very sandy soils from the Yellow River and so over the past several decades and this has been documented. Mainly by Chinese scientists but also by environmental journalists working together with citizens organizations, the steady creep of pollution through the soil to the Yellow River and of course this is the primary agricultural area that supports the city and also several peasant communities as well as an agricultural area. I'm going to show a couple of images of human and animal suffering on the next slide so if you don't want to see that feel free to avert your eyes I'll let you know when it's past. So here, the primary ailments that emerge are not actually due to exposure to rare earth elements themselves but exposure to other things that are brought up with the oars and the raw materials that are just present in the geology of this particular area happen to be fluoride and arsenic and so prolonged exposure to fluoride and arsenic lead to ailments such as skeletal fluorosis where the long bones become brittle but they also continue to grow. And while your soft tissues do not and so it can result in a debilitating and very painful condition in livestock this manifests as long tooth disease where the animals teeth continue to grow but they become brittle and eventually they can't eat and starve to death and acute chronic arsenic toxicity manifests and a number of forms but most conspicuously in lesions on skin and teeth. And so there's also research carried out by public health researchers in China that documents the high incidences of birth defects cancers and cognitive and developmental delays among children living within this watershed. So I've moved on now. I'd like to point out that this photo is not black and white. This is a photo from the tailings pond adjacent to the binaural mind and inner Mongolia autonomous region. And we'll return to return to this in a moment. I'd like to point out that these sorts of things the pollution human and animal suffering and all of this, whatever we end up doing with our rare supply chains we have to avoid recreating this at home, and be supportive of China's efforts to clean this up. So in the 21st century this is a preposterous price to pay for innovation and there's nothing really innovative. I would argue about the wholesale destruction of landscapes and lives, even in the name of critical materials security, and especially when we are talking about sourcing these things to power our transition to a post carbon future. So among China's cleanup efforts, one of the most conspicuous changes that that local officials noted when I was conducting research for the book. The earlier part of the decade is all of a sudden right around 2000 2009 2010 polluters started paying their fines to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Prior to that it had just been kind of a joke. Right. Environmental officials would go out and document or note cases of illegal dumping or environmentally irresponsible behavior, and they would issue fines to the offending companies would never be paid. But at some point that started to change. Right, so we, we have had now for about a decade heightened environmental enforcement as as part of a central strategy to change the country's position in the global division of toxic river to shift from a net exporter of rare earth elements to a net importer. And this has been combined with the forced closure and consolidation of a number of private mining companies, and the consolidation into what are now called the big six rare earth companies operating in China so small independently owned and some clandestine mining sites they were forced to either sell out or shut down over a period of a couple of years. So what you're looking at here is an abandoned office building that that I visited I guess to the extent that I could in Inner Mongolia in 2013. Now the fourth myth. This is also worth addressing. The fourth myth is that China embargoed rare earths against Japan in 2010. Now scholars of war and conflict will know that an embargo is a very specific thing. The narrative is that the Chinese government ordered the embargo of rare earth shipments to Japan in retaliation for an ongoing Japanese actions and an ongoing dispute over the Senkaku or the Diaoyu islands. Now an embargo is an official act right a stoppage of trade undertaken by one government against another in a time of war or in a case of a serious treaty breach. This was of course reinforced by New York Times headline and has since been treated as accepted fact in the policy circles that that I engage with. Now what did happen is that yes shipments were disrupted from one port in eastern China, and about one third of Japan's ports reported some sort of disruption in in rare earths and other shipments at the time. But this was not a calculated move by the central government and my research at the port in question really verifies that this was a matter of local people taking things into their own hands and this is of course corroborated by the fact that China customs authority apparently had no idea that anything was awry until Japan's customs authority inquired after it. We're right along here to our fifth myth here which is that, and this is of course related to earlier myths which is, you know that the solution is to open more minds outside of China. Right so the assumption is that China controls most of the rare earth mining and you can see the bunch of photos here of remote and far flung front perspective frontiers from earlier in the presentation. Right China is now a net importer of rare earth ores in fact China became a net importer of rare earths in 2018 for the first time since 1985. And this is a result of a number of factors of reducing domestic mining output to clean up contaminated sites, and to import from new minds opening overseas to emphasize value added processing, and to increase R&D and technological applications, and also to enhance the profile of higher tech exports right so what of Xi Jinping's campaigns has been to make the made in China label something of high status and high quality. And this is actually quite closely related then to our sixth myth, which often gets confused, particularly in defense related discourses. Now the myth is that the world is dependent on China for rare earth elements, full stop. And this is this is indicative of the kind of fuzzy thinking that I think has gotten us into trouble and stymied the development of more robust and effective policy. So the assumption is of course that if China cuts off rare earth exports again then the rest of the world will be unable to build its necessary technologies. And this may be true in some sectors more precisely and particularly to folks in the dissents in the defense sector. It's not rare earth elements per se. Right that are the problem so it's not that you know the US military won't be able to build. It's aircraft or missiles, if China stops exporting refined rare earth oxides that's not what's needed. Rather, it's the rare earth bearing tech components right the technological components that are manufactured in and exported from China that are actually quite important. And even amidst all of the trade disputes of the previous administration in the US with China, we didn't actually see a disruption to these rare earth bearing technological components. And I think that's really important, but I guess, perhaps that's not as well known as it should be because it doesn't make as juicy of a headline. Let's move on then to the seventh myth that renewable energy technology is the primary driver of increased demand for rare earths. So the assumption and the narrative is that renewable energy technology uses lots of rare earth elements therefore, quote, green energy has a dirty little secret and you'll see why I'm putting it in quotes here. Right so this is a popular headline a popular talking point, both among those who are concerned with making sure that the transition to renewable energy is in fact sustainable for all involved, as well as those who are just who are deploying this discourse in bad faith in order to undermine efforts to transition to renewable energy technology. But in fact if we look at the supply webs of rare earth elements in the energy sectors, we see that every major form of energy generation whether nuclear fossil big hydropower or renewable. It's high to some extent on rare earth elements, if not in the refining process then in in the transportation infrastructure, or the generation, or the generation technologies themselves. All right. So those are our seven minutes. Let's move on to the policy challenges. And for the major policy challenges for the purposes of this presentation, I have outlined three major ones. And I phrase them in the form of a question because I'd like us to really think about what it takes to engage and overcome these challenges. So the first one. Are we capable of a broad based conceptualization and integration of the challenges needs and strategies that characterize the entire rare earth supply web. So we have up here in the corner a series of photos of important applications for rare earth elements, everything from big physics right this is the large hadron collider to advanced modes of transportation and energy generation lasers surgical dental medical applications as well as a variety of our information technologies, and also some elements such as such as serium in part this lovely pink color in glass and other elements so they're used in lasers and also rose colored glasses. So we have to consider then right we we have to consider the material financial and policy needs of multiple sectors, and ask which sector or sectors has the priority. What we've seen in the US at least is an emphasis really on one or two sectors, primarily defense. What we've seen in the in the EU is an emphasis on auto, auto mobility and transportation. But really, we have to consider the entire web as opposed to the entire chain of rare earth supplies. We have to look at the infrastructural needs of the entire supply chain for mining to recycling, what kinds of infrastructure physical right as well as social and political are needed in order to reinvigorate and sustain new supply systems from mining to recycling. And also we have to address sustainability concerns across multiple and often competing interest groups. As I'm sure scholars scholars present today are no doubt aware that the term sustainability means very different things to different people. So the meaning interest means of course sustaining a certain rate, or increase in the rate of extraction whereas sustainability to environmentalists and public health advocates means of course something entirely different. And then of course there's a question of sustainability on a national scale versus a global scale. Right so sustainability on a national scale when it comes to critical materials, often means something kind of synonymous with supply chain security and sustain a steady flow of these elements that are needed for critical sectors, where sustainability on a global scale often brings in or immediately brings in questions of climate change and transition to a post carbon future, which of course, we have a diminishing of time in order to take decisive action which requires these elements. And so we have to be able to put all of these different sustainability concerns on the table to conceptualize them broadly and to integrate them in our policy. This is a major policy challenge. This is another question, are we capable of imagining China's role in the global rare earth economy as anything other than a threat or conspiracy against the West. Now, one of the first things that I think we have to do in and this really is a call to people who are fluent in Mandarin. As well to bridge the yawning chasm between what is actually written in China's policy documents what is documented in Chinese literature and what is practiced in mining sites in China, and what is actually reported in the anglophone press. I was here with you. I was in a, I was having a discussion with a former, I guess, national security advisor in the US concerning draft of China's recent rare earth law that came out kind of, or was circulated for comment at the beginning of this year. I was talking about it in the context of, you know, having just been approached by journalists and I, and so I asked, Oh, so so you've read it what do you think about it. And they said, Oh, I never bother reading that stuff I know it's all lies anyway. And so I was just kind of baffled. Okay, like you, you've given public commentary on a thing that you haven't actually read that actually explains a lot and for us professors, you know, to speak without doing the debate is just, you know, scandalous indeed. I think the other thing that we need to do is to build on and strengthen international cooperation and science and engineering research. One of the important and notable things is that China's rare earth research organizations have continued to host scientists from around the world. They even amidst these ongoing sort of geopolitical flashpoints that have periodically flared over the past decade or so. And this is something that I think we need to strengthen because we all have a common interest in making rare earth, mining and processing, more environmentally responsible, and also securing a sustainable global supply. And along those lines I think it's important to engage China's efforts in international standards development, such as through the international standards organization. You know, in order to develop standards for these social environmental and occupational health and safety and standards for recycling as well. And so I think there's actually some real opportunities here provided we are willing to let go of, you know, the the influences of Hollywood movies and certain video games, and the sort of narrative pop culture talking points that help us to understand what China is doing in the rare rare earth domain as some sort of a neo cold war, you know, rivalry, when in fact our our inch we have much more in common than is typically appreciated. The third major policy challenge will ask this as well are we capable of moving beyond antiquated notions of mining in order to support the construction of a circular economy as the new normal. There are squarely a government subsidy practices that favor disposability, particularly around the exportation of e waste or electronic waste. We should be focusing on repatriating this, and I'm actually quite encouraged that there are initiatives underway in the UK to develop battery recycling capacity in particular I think that's an excellent example. So we need to build the necessary social infrastructure in order to deploy proven recycling technologies at scale. So the thing with rare earth recycling or recycling of rare earth bearing components it's not that we don't know how it's not that we don't have the demonstrated technologies to recycle different things it's just that we don't have the necessary social infrastructure right how do we collect our rare earth bearing electronics and infrastructures and get them to a central location where they can actually be processed. Now this to me is actually quite encouraging because the hard part we've already figured out what remains then is sort of akin to you know how we eventually all had to figure out how to recycle our bottles and our newspapers, we can do this. So now let's talk about some possible pathways forward. What do we do to achieve critical mineral sustainability and security. I think if we take a dispassionate. Look at the status quo, and look at what we're actually doing our current approach is to dig a big hole somewhere new to source the rare earths turn them into all sorts of different technological components, and then we build a trash but not in my backyard. This is where we are. The key point here is that rare earth elements are not destroyed in this process rare earths are not like fossil fuels in that they are combusted and destroyed through use. Rather, knowing this and knowing how basic our status quo is we can actually we can reimagine our future in some interesting ways. And I think that actually begins by engaging with frontline communities to collaboratively collaboratively envision and design our pathway forward. And also I mean this is, you know this is. If there are other folks from the US in the audience will certainly sympathize with this, we have to dare to think beyond our election cycle while addressing the livelihood needs of the present, and also to connect with established institutions at home and as well as community organizers in perspective mining manufacturing and recycling sites, because often the the local issues with heavy industry, manufacturing or recycling citing in their area is not that the industry is there it's that it is there in such a way that is generating active harm. And so, taking all of the lessons from critical development studies and development practice over the past several decades we can apply them. I think quite instructively to rare earths and start with a community engagement from the get go. The second thing we can do is we can recycle. This is the low hanging fruit. So, you know the prospect of mining on the moon might be sexier and more exciting to some. We could actually just figure out how to recycle rather than digging up the moon or the Amazon or under the Greenland ice sheet, because currently less than 1% of all rare earths and less than 12% of all electronics period. Those that are consumed are actually recycled. And so important achievements by EU US and Japanese researchers have not been scaled up to unlock new and sustainable sources of rare earths and other critical materials that are accumulating around us in our waste. And so I think we also need to think about selectively and smartly repatriating production so not just mining but the entire rare earth supply chain. And what this requires is that we rebuild industrial and research capacity on a regional scale. Because it makes sense for most or many countries to to go it alone so we need to collaborate with our neighbors and to most importantly to invest in the entire supply chain, not just the first stages in order to revive and stimulate innovative R&D. We can develop programs to pilot and deploy innovations at national and regional scales. And really importantly, we can stop exporting E waste because this is treasure that we are throwing away. And all of this requires of course that we legislate right so that we create a regulatory environment that rewards upstream firms for socially and environmentally responsible mining and processing. It is like tax incentives for downstream firms to purchase certified clean rare earth elements in order to create market certainty until we get to a place where we have a new bottom line, where it's not the lowest cost, but it is the lowest social and environmental cost. We also need to work at state, local, federal and regional levels to create multiple clean high tech and functionally renewable rare earth supply chains, so that we don't recreate a monopoly somewhere else. And above all, I think that we should seize the low hanging fruit so here we have a pile of discarded cell phones. This is a photo from South Africa. There are abundant resources around us rare earths and otherwise that we can access without digging new holes in the ground, while also reducing our overall global waste footprint. So I'll end there. I'm happy to take your questions my contact info is here. So feel free to to get in touch or to join the discussions that unfold on Twitter. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I look forward to your questions and the discussion. Thank you.