Photo by Lee Lawson

On May 23rd, with several strokes of his pen, President Trump issued orders that would roll back US energy policy about 50 years.

On that day, Trump signed five Executive Orders (EOs): Restoring Gold Standard Science; Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base; Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy; and Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security. (This page keeps a running tally of all the White House executive orders.)

All of this madness was announced in a press release headlined “President Trump Signs Executive Orders to Usher in a Nuclear Renaissance, Restore Gold Standard Science.” Just in case there was any confusion about what this meant, the press release included an explanation that read: “Gold Standard Science is just that—science that meets the Gold Standard.”

Collectively, the four orders that focused on the nuclear sector would: reduce and undermine the already inadequate safety oversight authority of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); fast-track unproven new reactor projects without regard for safety, health or environmental impacts; curtail or possibly even end public intervention; weaken already insufficient radiation exposure standards; and reopen the pathway between the civil and military sectors, all while “unleashing” (Trump’s favorite verb) nuclear power expansion on a dangerous and utterly unrealistic accelerated timeline.

The precursive warning shot to all this had been fired on February 5th with Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s own Executive Order:  Unleashing the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance, ‘dominance’ being another of Trump’s favorite big beautiful words, along with ‘big’ and ‘beautiful’ (—see his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.) “It’s time for nuclear, and we’re going to do it very big,” Trump told industry executives when he signed the orders.

Perhaps it’s no surprise to find that ‘dominance’ appears 35 times in the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 handbook, Authoritarianism for Dummies, officially known as Project 2025. Variations on the word ‘unleash’ appear 19 times. ‘Tremendous’ shows up 11 times. So does ‘gold standard’.

Which brings us to the fifth executive order of May 23, Restoring Gold Standard Science. While it does not specifically reference nuclear power, the order determines a hierarchy that will put political appointees in charge of specialized federal agencies, including the NRC.  The order also itemizes a set of requirements on how scientific research and activities must be conducted, including “without conflicts of interest.”

But guess whose stocks soared after the release of Trump’s nuclear Executive Orders? Answer: Oklo, the company attempting to deliver the first US micro-reactors. Guess who was on the board of Oklo before his appointment as Trump’s Energy Secretary? Yes, Chris Wright.

Uranium mining company Centrus Energy and the U.S. Navy’s main nuclear reactor supplier, BWX Technologies, also saw their stock prices soar after Trump’s executive orders were released.

An Oklo executive, Jacob DeWitte, who was present at the signing, brought along a golf ball to help Trump understand just how little uranium is needed for the lifetime needs of a single human being (an entirely irrelevant statistic given the lethality contained in that glowing little golf ball.) Trump called the golf ball show-and-tell “very exciting” before teeing up another order that will not only muzzle but actually persecute scientists for any findings with which the Trump hive don’t agree.

The definition of ‘sound science’, under Trump’s ‘gold standard’, is simply anything happening now or under the previous Trump administration. Anything that happened under the Biden administration is “politicized science”.

Among the enforcers who will police and punish the NRC, along with other federal agencies who stray from Trump’s “science” script, is the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, one Michael Kratsios.

Kratsios is the former chief of staff to AI entrepreneur, venture capitalist and nuclear promoter, Peter Thiel. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund,  supported nuclear fuel start-up General Matter, in contention to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for advanced nuclear reactors. One of the executive orders will “seek voluntary agreements pursuant to section 708 of the DPA with domestic nuclear energy companies that could deliver HALEU fuel.”

Kratsios is already sharpening his knives to go after the NRC, viewed as an obstacle to fast-tracking the new nuclear projects that Kratisios’s former boss, among others, will be pushing.

“Today’s executive orders are the most significant nuclear regulatory reform actions taken in decades,” said Kratsios on May 23. “We are restoring a strong American nuclear industrial base, rebuilding a secure and sovereign domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and leading the world towards a future fueled by American nuclear energy. These actions are critical to American energy independence and continued dominance in AI and other emerging technologies.”

There has already been some pushback against allowing a political appointee to be the arbiter of scientific integrity. “Putting that power in the hands of a political appointee who doesn’t need to consult with scientific experts before making a decision is very troubling,” Kris West of COGR, an association of research universities, affiliated medical centers, and independent research institutes, told Science.

A group of scientists has written an open letter, retitling the order “Fool’s Gold Standard Science,” declaring that it “would not strengthen science, but instead would introduce stifling limits on intellectual freedom in our Nation’s laboratories and federal funding agencies”.

Part of the “regulatory reform” outlined as “gold standard science” and that Kratsios will oversee, is gutting the NRC, which, complains the White House, “charges applicants by the hour to process license applications with prolonged timelines that maximize fees while throttling nuclear power development.”

Somehow, “throttling nuclear power development” is not what springs to mind when reviewing the record of an agency that consistently favors the financial needs of the nuclear industry over the interests of public safety and the environment.

Furthermore, charges the White House, the NRC “has failed to license new reactors even as technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”

Trump, who seems to treat executive orders like a Nike slogan (“just do it”), has commanded that the US quadruple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. This will be achieved not only by stripping the NRC of its power to scrutinize the safety assurances for new, primarily small modular reactors, but by expediting their licensing while keeping current reactors running longer and hotter and even reopening permanently closed ones.

Licensing timeframes will be slashed to “a deadline of no more than 18 months” for final decisions on construction and operating license applications for new reactors, and to just one year “for final decision in an application to continue operating an existing reactor of any type.”

The Trump order will also require “the reactivation of prematurely shuttered to partially completed nuclear facilities.” The former refers to Palisades, Three Mile Island and Duane Arnold so far. The latter is about the abandoned two-reactor Westinghouse AP 1000 project at V.C. Summer in South Carolina.

Currently operating reactors will be expected to add “5 gigawatts of power uprates”, which comes with its own set of safety concerns given the age of the US nuclear reactor fleet.

Everything has been put on a superhighway to nuclear hell, unhinged from the very real obstacles to fast-tracking nuclear expansion, most notably the cost and risks.

“A pilot program for reactor construction and operation outside the National Laboratories,” will require the Energy Secretary to “approve at least three reactors pursuant to this pilot program with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026,” one order said.

An astonishing “10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030,” is another aspirational command.

The Secretary of Energy must also designate at least one site for advanced reactor technologies within three months of the order, and ensure that it will host a fully operational reactor there “no later than 30 months from the date of this order.”

None of these timelines share any precedent with the track record of nuclear power plant construction, and bullying or handcuffing the NRC won’t change that.

That’s because, as Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace point out in their recent column in The Hill: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not presented the key obstacle to nuclear development in the U.S.” The orders, they said “underestimate the addition of time to market due to limitations on workforce availability, supply chain, financing, specialty fuels and community buy-in.”

The Carnegie authors also criticized the way the orders treat nuclear power as if it is similar to any other form of energy. “The orders downplay or ignore the special magnitude of nuclear risks, the series of traumatic accidents suffered by leading nuclear power nations and the unique environmental and multi-generational footprint of nuclear waste and spent fuel,” they wrote.

What reining in the NRC will achieve is an even greater reduction in confidence over the safe operation of current and future nuclear reactors.

“This push by the Trump administration to usurp much of the agency’s autonomy as they seek to fast-track the construction of nuclear plants will weaken critical, independent oversight of the U.S. nuclear industry and poses significant safety and security risks to the public,” said Ed Lyman, a physicist and Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

To set all this right, the DOGE kids will soon be paying a visit to the NRC to fire people. DOGE, says the Reform the NRC order, will “reorganize the NRC to promote the expeditious processing of licensing applications and the adoption of innovative technology. The NRC shall undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization, though certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”

But “reorganizing” the NRC will have the reverse effect, argues Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) a longtime nuclear watchdog on Capitol Hill, including during his earlier years in the US House of Representatives. “It will be impossible for NRC to maintain a commitment to safety and oversight with staffing levels slashed and expertise gone,”Markey said.

“Allowing DOGE to blindly fire staff at the NRC does nothing to make it easier to permit or regulate nuclear power plants, but it will increase the risk of an accident,” said ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who called the orders “dangerous.”

But then the Trump administration doesn’t actually consider nuclear power itself to be dangerous, and instead accuses the NRC of being overly cautious, saying: “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion.”

Consequently, it’s no surprise to find a clause in the order that reads: “The personnel and functions of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) shall be reduced to the minimum necessary”. The ACRS panel is composed of cream-of-the-crop scientists from the national laboratories, universities and other areas of academia. Its mandate, ironically and in place for decades, has been precisely to uphold “Gold Standard Science” in the nuclear power sector.

Like everything else Trump does, all of this constitutes another accident waiting to happen. “If you aren’t independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident,” confirmed former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane of efforts to undermine her former agency.

The orders are a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system”, another former NRC chair Greg Jaczko told the Los Angeles Times.

Also guillotined is any pretense about protecting the public from the harm caused by exposure to the ionizing radiation released by the nuclear power sector.

No longer must we adhere to the standard, endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, that exposure to any amount of radiation, no matter how small, could be harmful to human health. (This is especially true if it involves consistent and chronic longterm exposure even to what might be considered “low” doses.)

Instead, say Trump’s orders, “the NRC shall reconsider reliance on the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard, which is predicated on LNT.” Those models, says the White House, are “flawed.”

This will of course open the door to the hormesis advocates who, without any firm basis in actual science, insist that a little radiation is good for all of us.

“It’s time to set the record straight on radiation and the damage it causes, particularly to pregnancy, children and women,” responded Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “Contrary to what Trump’s recent EO claims, abundant and largely officially ignored scientific evidence demonstrates that childhood cancers increase around normally operating nuclear facilities, with indications that these cancers begin during pregnancy. The uranium mining needed to produce fuel for reactors, is associatedwith a number of health impacts. Even already existing background radiation is associated with childhood cancers.”

The already flimsy separation between the civil and military nuclear sectors is all but erased in the new EOs, most notably in the emphasis on a return to the reprocessing of irradiated reactor fuel. This operation separates out the uranium and plutonium while producing a vast amount of so-called low- and intermediate-level liquid and gaseous wastes that are routinely released into the air and sea.

Reprocessing was rejected in the US by the Ford and Carter administrations as too proliferation risky, given that plutonium is the trigger component of a nuclear weapon. It is still carried out in France — and until recently in the UK — where radioactive isotopes released by these operations have been found as far away as the Arctic Circle. The UK reprocessing activities at Sellafield rendered the Irish Sea the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world.

But, wrote the White House in the Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies EO: “Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy shall identify all useful uranium and plutonium material within the Department of Energy’s inventories that may be recycled or processed into nuclear fuel for reactors in the United States.” That sounds like a return to mixed oxide fuel, or MOX, another program that was abandoned, but not until after a protracted opposition campaign launched by our movement — Nix MOX — finally prevailed.

Another order directs “The Secretary of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army” to “commence the operation of a nuclear reactor, regulated by the United States Army, at a domestic military base or installation no later than September 30, 2028.”

Some of those closed civil nuclear power plants could find themselves repurposed by the Department of Defense, serving as “energy hubs for military microgrid support.” Advanced nuclear reactor technologies will also be expected to power AI datacenters “within the 48 contiguous States and the District of Columbia, in whole or in part, that are located at or operated in coordination with Department of Energy facilities, including as support for national security missions, as critical defense facilities, where appropriate.”

Pronounced Kratsios in the May 23 press release: “We are recommitting ourselves to scientific best practices and empowering America’s researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries.”

Until they come and arrest you for telling the truth.

This first appeared on Beyond Nuclear International.

The post On the Superhighway to Nuclear Hell appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Google Earth Image of the “checkerboard” pattern of alternating private lands (with clearcuts) and BLM lands (US federal land; remaining green areas between clearcuts) in southern Oregon. Onshore logging does nothing to solve domestic forest losses or global deforestation.

Increasingly, we are hearing rhetoric about how domestic logging in Canada, Australia, Europe, and the US is ‘home grown, green, sustainable,’ and necessary to avoid global (offshore) deforestation problems. In a May 1 Letter in Science Magazine, “Benefits of onshoring forestry rely on science,” lead author Matthew Betts claims there is scientific support for onshore (domestic) logging as directed in the Trump timber executive orders. Their core argument, along with related claims in other countries, is that domestic forestry practices have superior environmental benefits than offshore logging at inferior standards. Further, increased onshore logging, at least in the US, is claimed to reduce domestic imports and therefore environmental impacts abroad. We vehemently disagree with this notion, given that onshore timber production to meet domestic needs does little to offset land-use conversion, forest degradation, and the unmitigated consumption of forest products domestically and globally. Further, it would set a dangerous precedent for 127 nations (including the US under Biden) that have pledged to end deforestation and forest degradation by 2030 under the Glasgow Forest Leaders’ Pledge.

The Betts et al Science letter has far-reaching implications, as the House recently passed the “Fix Our Forests Act,” which is set to undermine the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, raising serious doubts about the presumed superior benefits of US logging practices. In Canada, onshore logging is also touted as better than tropical deforestation and is Canada’s ‘home-grown’ response to attempts to undermine its sovereignty and US tariffs on that nation’s logging exports.

In the US, federal forests are under the direction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the United States Forest Service (USFS) that must manage them for multiple uses, including biodiversity, clean water, Tribal needs, climate mitigation, and other values. US federal forests support imperiled wildlife, clean drinking water, substantial carbon stocks and contain the bulk of remaining mature forests and intact roadless areas that are a national and global treasure. Increased logging would target these critical areas and not solve challenges associated with domestic wood consumption for many reasons. Economically, it would depress timber prices on private lands and create a negative incentive to timber production from privately held US forests. The ~420 million m³ annual US wood consumption cannot be significantly met by federal forests that currently produce just 4% of that total, with even less of that total available from older forests given their rarity. Environmentally, increased onshore logging would contribute to already extensive forest degradation. Socially, increased logging would not solve the wildfire crisis as also claimed.

In the time since the Betts et al. Science article, additional directives and proposed rules have been promulgated by the Trump administration’s Department of Interior (DoI), Department of Commerce (DoC), and Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that undermine environmental laws and ignore ecological and associated social costs:

+ CEQ proposes to eliminate all regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, leaving implementation to individual federal agencies.

+ DoI and DoC propose to remove habitat modification as a cause of harm to threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.

+ Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ Secretarial Order mandates broad use of emergency powers to log indiscriminately, including many of the Pacific Northwest’s iconic protected areas.

+ The scientific workforce also has been cut via massive firings and deferred resignations that are crucial to ensuring timber sales protect Tribal interests, imperiled species, air and water quality, and cultural values.

Inconsistent and unprecedented tariff policies add to the confusion over onshore vs. offshore supply chains and relative impacts. Moreover, the combination of President Trump withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, his lack of any attention to the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests, the damaging logging executive orders, and the Fix Our Forest Act all signal that the US is officially on the sidelines in achieving its share of international sustainability targets. Meanwhile, thousands of scientists have issued repeated global warnings that rapid loss of the natural world, triggered in part by too much domestic and global consumption of natural areas, is in no one’s best interest. Increasing domestic logging, whether in the US or anywhere else, is a race to the bottom to feed the endless consumption of wood products with increasingly dire ecological and climate consequences. Rather than support this misguided approach, our understanding of current science requires that we oppose regressive policies like the Trump Executive Orders and the Fix Our Forest Act and related policies abroad as out-of-step with global calls for increased forest protections (e.g., 30 x 30) and reduced consumption levels.

The post US Policies are a Race-to-the Bottom for Nations Trying to End Forest Losses by 2030 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Jim Frenette

The clean energy transition that the Biden administration touted as the focus of its industrial policy required large amounts of mineral inputs. Batteries for electric vehicles depend on lithium, solar panels contain gallium and molybdenum, and powerful magnets in wind turbines can’t be built without rare earth elements. Biden’s landmark legislation, such as the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Act, effectively resurrected industrial policy in the United States but this time on the basis of a shift away from fossil fuels.

Donald Trump, since taking office in early 2025, has swung U.S. policy back again toward oil, gas, and coal. But the Trump administration is no less interested in securing access to minerals. After all, the same “critical minerals” necessary for the Green transition are coveted by the Pentagon for use in nearly all high-tech weapon systems. The United States depends on foreign sourcing for nearly all of these mineral inputs. And the country that controls the lion’s share of these resources—as well as the processing of them—is China. The Pentagon is particularly uncomfortable with China’s potential to hold major U.S. weapons systems hostage.

Two regions that have figured prominently in Donald Trump’s mineral ambitions are Ukraine and Greenland. These two areas, one a country at war and the other a semi-autonomous possession of Denmark, couldn’t be more different. Greenland is the world’s largest island. Covered mostly with ice, it has a population of fewer than 60,000 people. Ukraine has a smaller land mass but is a major industrialized country and a top agricultural producer, with a current population of about 37 million people.

From Donald Trump’s point of view, the two regions share a key attribute: they are, in the lexicon of Wall Street, assets ripe for a takeover. Ukraine has been weakened by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and has come to rely heavily on U.S. military assistance and intelligence. Greenland, without a military of its own, has been angling for independence from Denmark.

During his first 100 days in office, Trump spoke of acquiring Greenland and didn’t rule out a military intervention. With Ukraine, the U.S. president complained that the country was taking U.S. weapons without giving back anything in return. In one of his classic transactional moves, Trump proposed that Ukraine pay its “debt” with the mineral resources beneath its soil.

Trump’s interest in both regions is not purely mineral.

“When President Trump has said several times now that the United States is going to get Greenland one way or another, it’s not always clear what the primary driver is,” explains Klaus Dodds, “At times, for example, we’ve been told it’s on the basis of international security. On other occasions, minerals and energy security have been explicitly cited. Actually, what perhaps was underpinning all of this was a desire to make sure that China never established any kind of economic, political, infrastructural foothold in Greenland.”

As for Ukraine, the agreement over minerals that was finally reached at the end of April didn’t ultimately contain a provision requiring Ukraine to pay down its “debt” with minerals. Rather, it spelled out in vague detail how the sale of the country’s minerals—and other natural resources like fossil fuels—would go toward economic development under the joint supervision of the United States and Ukraine. The Trump administration also hoped the deal would be a preliminary step in reaching a ceasefire in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

From Ukraine’s point of view, however, the agreement has some problematic elements. “There is nothing in this agreement regarding the contribution of the United States in the form of investment in a fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine,” explains Volodymyr Vlasiuk. “Also, there is nothing in this agreement about Ukraine capturing the maximum value of the minerals extracted in the territory of Ukraine.”

As both president and businessman, Donald Trump is using the power of his company (the United States) to strong-arm weaker partners into lopsided agreements. In Greenland’s case, he is even considering a hostile takeover. As Dodds and Vlasiuk explained at a Global Just Transition webinar in early May, U.S. policy has as much to do with the acquisition of valuable minerals as it does with the U.S. effort to achieve a geopolitical edge, primarily over China.

U.S. Policy toward Greenland

The United States has a longstanding military relationship with Greenland that dates to 1941 when, after Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, Washington sent troops to the island to construct air bases and weather stations. A decade late, a 1951 treaty gave Washington the formal right to build military bases there and move around freely as long as it gave notice to both Greenland and Denmark. The United States currently maintains the Pituffik airbase—previously Thule—that serves as an early-warning system for missile attacks. After a jet bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed onto the ice in the northern part of Greenland in 1968, it was revealed that the United States was also using the Thule base as part of its nuclear strategy, with tacit Danish consent.

Geopolitics and minerals were a dual priority from the beginning. “During the Second World War and in the early years of the Cold War, the United States was well aware of the strategic resource potential of Greenland,” Klaus Dodds points out. “And that partly explains why Harry Truman offered to purchase the island in 1946. At that time, the interest was largely in cryolite, which was essential to the manufacture of aluminum.”

A mining operation in Ivituut, the largest source of naturally occurring cryolite, sent 86,000 tons of the mineral to the United States and Canada in 1942. The mine closed in the mid-1980s. Much of the wealth from the sale of cryolite ended up in Denmark, which remains a point of tension between the island and the Danish government.

But that conflict pales in comparison to the disruption that Donald Trump has caused, first with his stated desire during his first term to buy the island, and then with his continued threats to acquire Greenland when he returned to power in 2025. In both cases, he has been rebuffed by both Denmark and Greenland.

Again, minerals seem to be of great interest to Trump, in this case the promise of critical minerals, including rare earth elements. According to a Danish study, the island has 31 of the 34 minerals identified by the EU as critical.

But accessing those minerals will not be easy. “There’s a long history of mining and extraction in Greenland,” Dodds explains. “If President Trump thinks that critical minerals or rare earths are going to be exploited at some point during his second administration, he’s likely to be disappointed. Mining, particularly in remote, challenging areas, is a long-term project. And Greenland is a textbook example of why these things are challenging, why they’re often expensive, and why also politics can complicate things.”

Greenland offers a number of physical challenges. It is very cold, and sites might be accessible only part of the year, depending on location. The mines are likely to be remote, and there isn’t much in the way of infrastructure to access those mines. There is a skills shortage as well on the island.

Then there’s the bureaucracy. “If you look at the experience of licensing, which the government of Greenland is very much in control of, the vast majority of companies and entities that have taken up some kind of license have ended up being disappointed,” Dodds adds. “That’s true of oil and gas. That’s also true of other minerals.”

Greenland currently only has two operational mines. Companies have invested in other mines, and some have spectacularly failed, like the effort of the Australian outfit Energy Transition Minerals that, with Chinese investors, plowed $100 million into a rare earth element mine. Because these minerals are often intermingled with uranium, community opposition to the environmental consequences of this particular enterprise led the government to pull the plug. The company is now suing either to get approval to resume operations or to get compensation to the tune of four times Greenland’s annual GDP.

Many Greenlanders want independence from Denmark, a trend that Trump seems to want to exploit. “If Greenland were to become independent, many Europeans will worry that the United States will try to shape that independence or make sure that it becomes an independent island state under very, very close U.S. supervision,” Dodds points out. Meanwhile, Greenland retains a lot of autonomy short of independence, “and government ministers there have continued to stress that Greenland is open for business and that openness does not necessarily preclude Beijing. So, I predict that American pressure on Greenland and Denmark will continue.”

U.S. Policy toward Ukraine

Donald Trump spent a lot of time on his presidential campaign complaining about all the weapons the Biden administration was supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. As president, Trump became fixated on getting Ukraine to pay off the “debt” it had supposedly accumulated from these deliveries of arms. When apprised of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, he began to push Ukraine to sign a deal that would deliver to the United States at least some of the profits from those extracted minerals.

Ukraine holds as much as 5 percent of the world’s supply of critical raw materials, though what is known about Ukraine’s mineral wealth comes largely from Soviet-era geological exploration.  It’s one of the top five countries in terms of its graphite deposits, and it contains one-third of Europe’s lithium. It also has significant amounts of titanium and rare earth elements. According to Forbes Ukraine, the total value of this mineral wealth is nearly $15 trillion.

“We have to be very careful about such a figure,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk pointed out. “This is the whole value of all the deposits of all the minerals in Ukraine. The value of critical minerals is much less than this.”

Vlasiuk divides these critical minerals into three categories: for batteries (lithium, graphite, manganese), for semiconductors (gallium, germanium, metallic silicon), and for strategic construction (titanium, zirconium, hafnium, vanadium). Ukraine has a significant portion of these materials: in the case of both lithium and graphite, for instance, Ukraine has roughly 4-5 percent of the world reserves.

All these minerals add up to a lot of potential money. The first group, Vlasiuk estimates, is worth about $200 billion, the second about $44 billion, and the last about $12 billion. Together, that adds up to about $250 billion—a considerable figure, but considerably less than $15 trillion. Also, some of the deposits are in the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

Three factors make Ukraine’s deposits appealing, not just to the United States but to the European Union and to China. The resources are available in good quantities and of sufficient quality for industrial processing. Because of Ukraine’s infrastructure—transportation, energy—the deposits are relatively easy to access (at least, those not in the occupied territories). “We can get easy access to these deposits, maybe by constructing 5-10 kilometers of road or adding a few kilometers to the electricity grid,” Vlasiuk added. “This is in contrast, for instance, to Siberia or Greenland.”

Finally, Ukraine offers minerals at a competitive cost and the mining projects will be economically efficient.

But processed materials are worth a great deal more than raw materials. If Ukraine produces semi-finished products with these minerals, it could boost the total value to $678 billion, Vlasiuk estimates. Meanwhile, finished products would yield nearly $1.4 trillion. Ukraine is already involved in the production of electrolytes, separators, and graphite rods for electric smelting furnaces, and could supply the nearby European Union. “So, it’s very important to capture the value added through this downstream process,” he concludes.

But much depends on the recent agreement signed with Washington and the resulting United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The Ukrainian parliament approved the deal unanimously—but only after the objectionable sections of earlier proposals were removed. In this final version, the United States has committed to investing capital in Ukraine to build up the extractive sector—including gas and oil—and all revenues for the first decade will be reinvested in Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, gets preferential access to what’s produced.

The Role of China

Behind all of this maneuvering lies China. The United States has two primary concerns: the control that China exerts over the critical minerals supply chain and the spread of its geopolitical influence in places like Ukraine and Greenland.

“President Trump has been very clear that he thinks the United States faces an existential threat in the form of China,” Klaus Dodds notes. “Trump absolutely wants to keep China out of Greenland. Remember, Greenland did flirt with Chinese investment. There was talk at one stage about China investing in airports there and maybe even purchasing an abandoned naval station.”

Shift the focus away from minerals and toward seafood and China suddenly becomes a lot more significant. “China has next to no physical presence In Greenland, full stop,” he continues. “But the most important export of Greenland is seafood, and China is the key market. If Greenland wants to become an independent country at some point, and I believe it does, then it’s got to do two things. One is to find a replacement for the block grant, which is an annual transfer of about 500 million euros from Denmark. Second, you don’t want to alienate unnecessarily your biggest consumer of seafood.”

China is also a key partner for Ukraine. “China is the second biggest external trade partner after the European Union,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk reports. “After Russia disappeared from our radar, China became a major consumer of Ukrainian foodstuffs—wheat, corn, sunflower oil.” China has in the past offered loans to Ukraine, such as a $3 billion “loan for corn” deal in 2012 and a $15 billion loan for construction in 2015. During the current war, however, China has focused on partnering with Russia, though it also remains poised to be part of Ukrainian reconstruction once the war ends.

“China’s a powerful country, and this creation of trade barriers by Mr. Trump is not a very good step,” Vlasiuk continues. “From the economic point of view, nobody benefits from this, including the United States. Such barriers make it difficult for countries to benefit from world trade, to achieve an economic impact from globalization.”

He adds that “it’s quite obvious that the United States and the European Union have lost time while China has made a very impressive step forward to reach these deposits and to take the control of global supply chains. China continues to look around the world for more deposits. It is very active in the Africa and the Middle East. And, of course, there is closer cooperation between China and Russia. There are a lot of Chinese workers in Russia. China is profiting a lot from buying Russian natural resources at a cheap price. Putin wants China to invest in the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, but so far China has refused. But I am sure that China will use this war to reach deposits in Russia, which will make China even more powerful in controlling the value chain of these critical minerals.”

More Geopolitics

China is not the only geopolitical consideration. For Donald Trump, the acquisition of territory is an obsession. Trump considers Greenland to be integral to the U.S. sphere of influence.

“It’s worth recalling that this is a president who likes maps, globes, charts,” Klaus Dodds points out. “As everybody knows, the Mercator projection makes Greenland look even bigger than it is. It’s three times the size of Texas, but it’s probably not quite as big as Donald Trump thinks it is. Trump wants to be immortalized in U.S. history as the president who made America bigger: the Trump Purchase, if you will.”

The Cold War pitted two superpowers in a race for resources around the world, particularly in the Global South. Today, this tension is being replayed by the United States and China. “To a certain extent, there’s a certain sort of deja vu to all of this,” Dodds continues. “The names change, but the impulse remains the same: to create ‘supply chain resilience,’ which is the term we use nowadays. With the Kennedy administration, for instance, when it came to places like Ghana, bauxite loomed large, for aluminum smelting, which was also linked to dam construction because of the enormous amount of power and cooling required. Today, it’s the Democratic Republic of Congo where there is a scramble for influence that involves China, the European Union, the United States, and also regional actors such as Rwanda.”

On the Ukrainian side, geopolitics boils down to defeating Russia and moving closer to the European Union. The mineral agreement “gives Trump the instrument to continue to support Ukraine with military equipment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Without this cooperation, the risk would increase of a cessation of U.S. military aid.”

But the agreement could contain some potential pitfalls for Ukraine. The United States could still try to condition future military assistance on the delivery of an equal amount of mineral wealth as a quid pro quo. Or Washington could focus on the extraction of primary materials and discourage Ukraine from processing the ore or producing finished products, thus depriving the country of considerable value. “In terms of the operation of this fund, Ukraine and the Ukrainian people should benefit as the owners of these deposits and derive the maximum value added in Ukraine,” Vlasiuk maintains.

Also, he continues, “it’s very important that this agreement should not create any barriers for Ukrainian access to European Union. Our European Union colleagues would also like to make a win-win project in the exploration and processing of these deposits. But with this agreement, the Americans would like to take a dominant position in order to choose the most attractable deposits for future processing. So, we have a very difficult job ahead of us. We need to be careful. We would like the West and East to cooperate and for there not to be a split between democratic and not-so-democratic countries, especially in such an explosive form as on our territory. But it’s not our choice.”

Environmental and Labor Considerations

Although most pictures of Greenland feature sparkling ice, polar bears, and imposing mountain range, the Arctic is not pristine.

“When you look at ice cores taken from the Greenlandic ice sheet, what you discover is a record of traces of lead and other pollutants going back to the Roman era,” Klaus Dodds reports. “Greenland has borne the brunt in one form or another of past centuries of extraction and use of various minerals, which are trapped in Greenlandic ice. Because of melting, these pollutants are making their way through the island and into the neighboring sea.”

Then there’s the more recent history of mining. “There were lead and zinc mines in Greenland going back 50 or 60 years,” he continues. “And they are still causing pollution-like consequences, particularly in certain parts of southern Greenland. There is a legacy of toxic mining. People haven’t forgotten this, and they’re living with those consequences because in some cases those mines were not that far away from communities. So, there was a very public shift, a visceral reaction against uranium extraction in the aftermath of a longer history of unhappiness over the toxic consequences of mining.”

On the labor question, Greenland has a small population. Any significant mining operation will require foreign laborers. “This is not unique to Greenland, but it does create anxieties about importing the labor force,” Dodds notes. “Where are these people going to be staying? How are they going to be supported?”

The European Union’s environmental standards apply to Greenland (through Denmark). But they also exert influence on Ukraine, which hopes to accede to the EU as quickly as possible.

“The development of mining and processing of critical minerals is not friendly to the environment,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk points out. “Especially, for example, the processing of lithium ore in the form of spodumene concentrate. In our business plan, we mention that pollution is the costlier part of the project. But now, after seven years, we have discovered that there are much more effective technologies that ensure that this processing is less dangerous for the environment. We want to cooperate with more technologically developed countries so that they will invest as much as possible in the technology that reduces this pollution in Ukraine.”

Vlasiuk adds that Ukrainians are often well aware of environmental consequences and have mounted protests accordingly. “So, it’s very important to have political support and local support and to explain the benefits and that the pollution will not be dangerous for either health or social stability.” Ukraine, he notes, also has a skilled labor force and specialists who can do the work.

Corporate Interest

With the exception of mining corporations owned by the state—in China, Vietnam, Tanzania, Chile—private corporations are responsible for the bulk of mineral extraction around the world: BHP Group (Australia), Rio Tinto (Australia-UK), Glencore (UK), Vale (Brazil), Freeport-McMoRan (U.S.).

“Greenland in the recent past has had no shortage of companies interested in both minerals and oil and gas,” Klaus Dodds says. “Exploration licensing over the last 20-odd years has been genuinely a multinational affair: North American companies, Australian, European.” Some of those companies have included Green Rock, Amaroq, and Critical Minerals Corporation. Most recently, the government inked a deal with a Danish-French consortium to mine anorthosite, a substitute for bauxite.

“In 2021,” Dodds continues, “when the elected government of Greenland moved away from uranium mining, it left some companies rather exposed and, in at least one case, profoundly irritated by the loss of millions of dollars spent on drilling and investment.”

Corporations are also not the most reliable sources on the value of their enterprises. “This is not an island that has been lacking when it comes to mapping, surveying, and resource valuation,” he adds. “In many parts of the world, and Greenland is absolutely typical, there is a tendency on the part of commercial enterprises to engage in boosterism. When you read various estimates about what the rare earth value might be of Greenland, you might alight upon figures of $30 billion, $70 billion. I would treat this with a degree of healthy skepticism. It wouldn’t be the first time that companies have tried to talk up the value of their licenses and their investment.”

Outside corporations are also lining up to have the opportunity to access Ukraine’s mineral wealth—particularly because of the accessibility of these deposits. “Maybe I’ll not give you the concrete names of the companies,” Volodymyr Vlasiuk says, “but I can say that companies from the United States, Germany, and Japan are interested a lot in investing in Ukraine deposits. In 2013-4, both Shell and Chevron entered Ukraine to explore and extract shale gas.” The Chinese, meanwhile, have been interested in Ukrainian coal.

What hasn’t happened yet, according to Vlasiuk, is Russian exploitation of mineral resources in the occupied territories. However, in January, Russian forces occupied Shevchenko in the Donbas, home to one of Ukraine’s largest lithium deposits.

In terms of the new U.S.-Ukraine mineral agreement, it will be the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) that will serve as the U.S. partner along with Ukraine’s State Organization Agency on Support of Public-Private Partnership. “As I understand, this financial corporation as a state entity can also invest and will have very close contact to other U.S. investors,” Vlasiuk concludes.

The post Trump Dreams of Minerals appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.