CONTINENTAL SHIFT Episode 2: A (Not So) New Gold Rush

[upbeat music] Over the past couple of years, the term critical minerals suddenly seems to be all over the news.

Extraordinary steps to make sure the United States has all of the critical minerals and rare earths that we need.

What the world wants is Canada to be the reliable supplier of critical minerals.

It's clear that securing access to this group of commodities from familiar metals like lithium and copper to obscure rare earth elements like yttrium is increasingly important to world leaders who consider China, currently the dominant producer, a threat.

Less clear is exactly what makes these so critical in the first place.

Who decides, and who benefits from that decision? In fact, whether a mineral is critical depends on who you ask and what their strategic priorities are, whether that's producing more electric vehicles, fighter jets, or AI infrastructure.

Importantly, extracting these minerals has profound human and ecological impact.

And this is what makes their governance so challenging because even in many green utopian visions of the future, with a world powered by renewables and running zero carbon public transit and everything else we might wish to see, there's no sidestepping either the need to extract these minerals or the harms involved in doing so.

So how should we understand the sudden push to control critical mineral supply chains? What is their role in competing visions of the future, and can there ever be a form of extraction that is genuinely just or sustainable?

Here to help answer these questions, in this episode, we're joined by Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, and Emily Ione Stewart, head of policy and advocacy at Global Witness.

I'm Adrienne Buller.

And I'm Youssef Bouchi.

And you're listening to Continental Shift.

This is episode two, A Not So New Gold Rush.

[upbeat music] Over the past couple of years, the term critical minerals suddenly seems to be all over the news.

Extraordinary steps to make sure the United States has all of the critical minerals and rare earths that we need.

What the world wants is Canada to be the reliable supplier of critical minerals.

It's clear that securing access to this group of commodities from familiar metals like lithium and copper to obscure rare earth elements like yttrium is increasingly important to world leaders who consider China, currently the dominant producer, a threat.

Less clear is exactly what makes these so critical in the first place.

Who decides, and who benefits from that decision? In fact, whether a mineral is critical depends on who you ask and what their strategic priorities are, whether that's producing more electric vehicles, fighter jets, or AI infrastructure.

Importantly, extracting these minerals has profound human and ecological impact.

And this is what makes their governance so challenging because even in many green utopian visions of the future, with a world powered by renewables and running zero carbon public transit and everything else we might wish to see, there's no sidestepping either the need to extract these minerals or the harms involved in doing so.

So how should we understand the sudden push to control critical mineral supply chains? What is their role in competing visions of the future, and can there ever be a form of extraction that is genuinely just or sustainable?

Here to help answer these questions, in this episode, we're joined by Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, and Emily Ione Stewart, head of policy and advocacy at Global Witness.

I'm Adrienne Buller.

And I'm Youssef Bouchi.

And you're listening to Continental Shift.

This is episode two, A Not So New Gold Rush.