How Fighting in Myanmar Could Slow the Energy Transition
Plus: Dead Cell Phones Are Big Business; This Week in Sand!; and more about the real costs of renewable energy and digital technology —and how we can do better.
How Fighting in Myanmar Could Slow the Energy Transition
Earlier this week, way out in a remote, mountainous corner of Myanmar, in southeast Asia, a local rebel group seized a small piece of territory from a pro-government militia. A minor military victory in an obscure backwater—but nonetheless one with important implications for the world. Why? Because that territory is an important source of rare earth metals that are crucial components of electric cars and wind turbines.
As the consulting group Adamas Intelligence explains, Myanmar’s Kachin state is full of mines producing rare earth metals. The main mining area had been controlled by a militia allied with Myanmar’s military junta government. That militia had been doing a brisk business in rare earths with companies in China, which borders Kachin. China is the world’s leading consumer of rare earths, which it uses to produce permanent magnets. Those are the gadgets that convert wind into electricity inside wind turbines, and electricity into motion in electric car motors. Smaller permanent magnets make your cell phone vibrate. With such an eager customer right next door, Myanmar’s rare earth production has exploded in recent years. In 2014, Myanmar exported just $1.5 million worth of rare earths to China, according to Global Witness, a UK‑based nonprofit. By 2021, that figure had rocketed to $780 million, and has since grown into the billions.
Myanmar now ranks among the world’s top producers of rare earths. The country is especially important when it comes to two particular rare earth metals, dysprosium and terbium, both important elements in permanent magnets. Myanmar currently supplies 57 percent of the entire world’s supply of those metals, according to Adamas Intelligence.
Those metals come at a bitter cost. Government-aligned militias have seized lands at gunpoint from the Indigenous Kachin people. To extract the rare earths, miners drill holes into mountainsides and inject them with an ammonium sulfate solution that liquefies the earth, which drains into chemical-saturated collection pools. The process have spread toxins into the country’s soil and rivers, according to Global Witness and local media reports. They also cause landslides; just last June, a landslide at a rare earth mine in the Kachin region killed at least ten people.
Ethnic rebels with the Kachin Independence Army have been fighting for their land and autonomy since the junta took power in 2021. As the combat drew closer to the mining zone, workers fled and China was obliged to halt rare earth imports. Now that the rebels have taken the mining area, they could go into the rare earths business themselves, but that will take a while. In the meantime the chaos is likely to cause rare earth supply shortfalls. And if the fighting picks up again, the mines could be offline indefinitely, throwing a new obstacle into the path of the energy transition.
The whole situation is another unsettling example of how heavily the world relies on some very unreliable sources for the critical metals we need for renewable energy and our digitally-enabled lifestyles. It also points up how our move into this new era will ultimately benefit most of us—but in the meantime is imposing severe costs on only some of us.
Book Excerpt! Dead Cell Phones Are Big Business in the Developing World
The latest issue of Bloomberg Business Week includes a short’n’sweet excerpt from Power Metal, my forthcoming book! It’s all about how e-waste entrepreneurs in places like Nigeria are getting rich selling trash from some of the world’s poorest countries to some of the world’s wealthiest. I went to Lagos for this story, and I can honestly say it was some of the most surprising and fascinating reporting I did for the whole book.
Speaking of that book…it comes out November 19, and now is a great time to preorder! Preorders are super important to a book’s potential success. Publishers use them to help decide how heavily to publicize a book, which drives media attention. Retailers also look at preorder numbers to decide how many copies to buy and how prominently to display them. So if you want to help get the word out about the issues involved in the global race for critical metals, and/or if you want to help me continue doing this kind of work, please preorder today. You don’t have to take my word for it being worth your time. Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Kolbert calls Power Metal “an essential read for anyone concerned about the future.” If you can’t afford it or don’t want to buy a copy, you can also help by asking your local library to order the book.
This Week in Sand: $108 Million House With an Imported Beach
My last book was about sand, of all things, so I just couldn’t resist this juicy bit of ridiculousness. Seems a tech billionaire is selling a comically oversized mansion he built for himself on the coast near San Diego, dubbed the Sandcastle, for the bargain price of $108 million. Picture Versailles if it were in Vegas. Among it’s gotta-laugh-or-you’ll-cry luxuries is an on-grounds artificial beach, made with pure-white grains of the same sand used at Augusta National Golf Course. That presumably means those grains were imported all the way from Spruce Pine, North Carolina—the hurricane-battered source of the world’s purest quartz that I wrote about recently. The owner told the Wall Street Journal he’s selling the place “because he doesn’t use it as frequently as some of his other residences.” I’m sure folks who lost their homes in Spruce Pine will be comforted to know they’re not the only ones with housing troubles.
More News Worth Knowing
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🙅🏾♀️ NIMBY Nation: Across America, Clean Energy Plants Are Being Banned Faster Than They're Being Built
♻️ Mercedes-Benz Opens In-House Battery Recycling Plant
💵 General Motors Invests $625 Million Into Joint Venture With Lithium Miner