welcome to the documentary from the bbc world service where we report the world however difficult the issue however hard to reach podcast from them you world service i supported by advertising worrying marie or washington who was or was a born competitor or was champion in to sports shoes the michael jordan woman's basketball save lives at ten this sad but while she was fighting for titles on the ports she was facing prejudice often the reason is racism in sexes untold ledges aura a podcast when the bbc rural service and bbc south tells her remarkable story search for untold ledges wherever you found this podcast i am genuinely an object white and we're back with a new episode of our podcast lazarus heist rico in front of alive audience in new york city that's on you

special live episode of the lazarus heist podcast hacking and north korea and were returning soon with a second season so what but a moment to listen to the whole of seas and one if you heard it already listen again and yourself with the whole story for the new episode and for the whole of the first season search for the lazarus ice wherever you found this contest i may should glennie unusual listening to episode one of the scramble for rare earths on the bbc world service the number seven nineteen forty one a date which will land in the december nineteen forty one pearl harbor bombed america's pacific fleet almost

entirely destroyed a frequently forgotten reason behind the attack was that the u s had frustrated expanding global ambition by blocking its pacific rivals access to a critical raw material oil and that led japan very drastic measures fast forward ideas to twenty twenty one

i was listening to a young research a talk at the institute for human sciences in vienna which i now run she spoke about a brutal competition between the u s china russia and europe for natural resources except she wasn't talking about oil or gas know her subject was the scramble for today's critical raw materials that include a small group of metals known as rare earth elements written about that brutal competition in my bookmarks mafia over a decade ago warlords and mafia buses from across the world traded weapons to the warring factions in the democratic republic of congo in exchange not for drugs or people but for rare

metals in this series of two programmes i want to find out why they hold the key to our future but before we can answer that i suppose we need to know what they are doktor julie cleaner water a rare earth frontiers from terrestrial subsidies two luna landscapes and basic terms a term rare earth refers to seventeen chemically similar elements this consists of fifteen from a group known as the lamp and aids these are numbers fifty seven to seventy on the periodic table of elements and then i scandia atrium are the other two and the reason that there are grouped together as that they have these fairly similar geo chemical characteristics but they do have slight differences in atomic structure that gives them different fantastic magnetic electrical optic

were met allergic and other properties they have a vast and wondrous array of applications take serious for example if anybody's grandmothers are great grandmothers have you pink glass tv sets or a fancy dinnerware that is in fact syrian that is contained the glass in that way it's used equally to make the lenses in rose colored glasses and also to produce lasers that are used and precision guided missiles syria is also it's called a doping compound meaning it acts as something of a signal booster for example transoceanic internet cables require just a little bit of syria to be applied about every thirty kilometers or so in order to act as a signal boost and this helps make our global internet communications

and then there's atrium and europium which are used in smartphone batteries they also give the display screen color and make the phone vibrate when you get a text dysprosium is used in control rods for nuclear the nuclear reactors and some mariamne is used to treat lung cancer but what are they found if you read the news you'll come away with the impression that there are only found in a couple of places in the earth's crust in china and the u s few other places the nordic countries for example but if you take a look

its global maps of rare earth deposits you'll see that there are hundreds of potentially minimal deposits dispersed throughout the world which means that just about every country in fact has rare earth elements somewhere in their sub soils so why are they called rare earths because when they were first discovered in the late seventeen hundreds no one had ever seen them before at least not to their knowledge and so they were just assumed to be rare hence the term rare and then arthur was at the time a term to characterize non ferrous metals or elements they were simply called earths and so the name rare earth i think has stuck around because honestly i think it has a certain ring to it people get excited about things that are called rare as opposed to say things that are called scandia

but as well as rare earth minerals we also hear people talking about critical raw materials how do they differ exactly it's a little bit of a venn diagram so bare earth elements are are included in many countries lists of critical raw materials precisely big as they are so important for different technologies because of their electrical or magnetic qualities but the term critical minerals are critical me yours is a fairly flexible category that reflects the it concerns and technological needs of a society at a given moment in time right now this guy rocketing demand for new sources of renewable energy some of them are really important in green technologies such as wind turbines and electric car batteries if we

to transition away from fossil fuel infrastructure and fossil fuels transportation then we need these rare earth to help get us there so rare earth minerals are going to be critically important for future sustainability basically without them there is no transition to green energy not to mention no smartphones no computers and none peters and none of the infrastructure that already runs much of our lives so happy allowable access to them as well as more or less essential ok

who controls the rare othman arose right now because whoever is master of the supply and processing of critical raw materials also controls the future of technology in twenty ten a chinese fishing trauma collided with a japanese coastguard vessel near the disputed saint pack of islands in the east china sea japan detained the skipper of the chinese boat and in response paging said it would hold the supply of rare earth minerals to japan now that's no joke for an economy that is

wedded to tech innovation as japan is suddenly the world woke up to the geostrategic reality of china's near monopoly on rare earths time to panic in two thousand and ten china controlled ninety seven percent of the rare earth market not only was it mining most of the materials and exporting them but it also was very dominant in terms of separation and processing and that's what's important to date the percentage has dropped about seventy eight percent but what hasn't changed is this dominance and separation and processing or china is really strong this is why we talk about the entire supply chain from mine to market sophia collins that causes the author of china and the geopolitics of rare earths getting rare earths out of the ground is one thing separated

them from the minerals they come together with is quite another and then preparing them for industrial use is a further stage it's these last two that china is especially experienced in oh and beijing has another key advantage china isn't particularly dominant in the production of magnets and that's where rare earths come into play more specifically because the magnets are what are really important for both vehicles and for renewable applications like wind it wasn't always like this in the mojave desert in california as a huge mine complex mountain pass until thirty years ago this was the world's main supplier of vat able rare earth minerals in fact it was

unless the only source and the u s mind it subject to stringent environmental conditions but this was also the period globalization when the u s decided to turn china into the heartland of u s manufacturing and along with apple max and cuddly toys they shifted the extraction and processing rare earth elements to china few people understood the importance of this shift at the time but one person who did was deng xiaoping the architect of china's economic and political rise the middle east has oil he observed as early as ninety ninety to china has the rare earths mountain ass his gun in and out of service but it no longer even attempts to compete with china

that's the sound of america's flagship fighter gently the thirty five there are four hundred and seventeen kilograms of red minerals and everyone made you want to know what four hundred and sending kilograms looks like think of a grand piano now present donald trump on the verge of slapping tariff some rare earth imports from china anything he thought the bull inconvenience beijing and damage its economy tromp open pandora's box and started the trade wars with china and at some point he was told there rare earth were another critical minerals were absolutely essential for america's national defence

and you can't achieve anything unless it's a national security issue in washington so he did come up with an executive order that was meant to reduce u s vulnerability to china's dominance in wearers another critical minerals and that was important biden continued along these lines however the difference with biden was that he's more interested i guess in the green transition as an industrial plan for the united states ah now we're getting to the heart of the matter is supposedly were implementing this great green transition in transportation and energy diversification and because we want to respond to the climate crisis then there's going to be such a need for

more and more materials including errors and that makes the situation warrant greater diversification of resilience by all parties we need to mine all those metals because the planet faces a catastrophe human made climate change if we are to avoid the worst we have to dispense with fossil fuels at lightning speed but graham petal author of the rare metals war has a warning for us one frightening statistic we have to keep in mind is that for the next three decades the world will consume more metals and many wars than autumn towards a mini rules we have ever consumed for there are seventy thousand years since the beginning of human whoa let's just pause there a second more tools and minerals than humans have extracted in the last seventy thousand years that means we'll have to

rip open the land like there's no tomorrow for some people around the world it already feels like that they live in areas rich in elements which make up one of the products that is at the very heart of the green energy transition the lithium mayan battery the village the barroso lies in one of northern portugal's most isolated areas which unsurprisingly means its normally pretty quiet but last month a series of protests broke out some you can hear one of resistance so what terms this p village in northern portugal into the focus increasingly angry protests well barrel who is sitting on vast reserves of something

it's the mining industry badly once not gold not diamonds not even oil the minors are looking for the lightest metal on earth lithium it's one of the three elements which are critical for making the batteries which will increasingly power the world around us stands back i'm going to show that we are against mining here in our region which will destroy one of the regions of portugal with the greatest biodiversity which was recently classified as a world agricultural heritage site and this classification is in fact in danger due to the rampant development of mining projects here in the region that's local resident veto but the portuguese government doesn't agree

the price of lithium has more than quadrupled in the last year demand is growing at almost thirty percent annually and portugal sit some ten percent of europe's lithium deposits for a struggling economy that's an off a few governments would refuse when the universe was formed thirteen point eight billion years ago we think there were three elements present hydrogen helium and lithium today lithium is known as white oil doktor julie cling author of rare earth frontiers from terrestrial subsidies

two lunar landscapes lithium is really important for the green transition because its chemical and physical properties mean that it can store a lot of energy and lithium i am batteries can be charge without losing capacity and that makes it really important for things like electric vehicles and transportation systems that dont rely on fossil fuels anymore but there's a problem the challenge with lithium extraction and processing is a challenge that you find a cross are different forms of energy extraction and generation whether its oil or rare earth elements or something else and that's that they require of law of water your honor or uprooting local ecosystem that's there including the livelihoods that depend on it but in portugal the government is dangling a pretty big carrot in front of those communities terrorism

see the law always chief executive of the portuguese national laboratories then energy and geology she argues that a significant percentage of the cash generated by the minds will be ploughed back into the local communities these passionate h will be used by local government said through create new facilities that are very important that neither because these are areas funding through the region of the pantry less healthy than the rest of the country they need policies for residents new schools new kindergartens new less expensive energy and renewable energy and the money will be dedicated for death evaluated by local authorities does a hidden paradox here really thirdly if we want to reduce co2 emissions we need lots of critical raw materials like lithium to do it

but the mining processing and waste management of them hurt the environment and could hurt us to throw in the fact that corporate are preparing to make huge money from the industry and the moral complexity of rare earths deepens is a small village like we're also going to get new houses and schools without the money from lithium mining maybe maybe not but pepe another demonstrator has one big worry a theory that he will use and deplete a large part of the water resources in the area this will mean that it contaminates the land and the surrounding water with chemical products which will stop the use of water for agriculture or livestock in the region which can also with the local population feeds on people in portugal a far from alone in expressing their concerns chile's attic com a desert posts possibly the largest reserves of lithium in the world

but the decision to restart mining therein twenty sixteen has resulted in a series of protests in serbia earlier this year demonstrations force the government in belgrade to cancel a contract to extract lithium with mine john to tee said you never called lithium ion batteries woke lithium is just one can and a more precise name is a lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery and when it comes to mining cobalt one country always springs to mind henry sanderson is the author of a recent book about critical raw materials vote rush call both is very interesting because it completely dominated by democratic republic

guy right right now around seventy percent of the cobalt for batteries comes from the sea by the end of the decade perhaps sixty percent so we can see that this decade the sea is gonna be the saudi arabia of the cobalt market there's just no cobalt supply in scale and quantity without the day i i was alerted to the impact of critical raw materials on the de i'll see when writing my bookmarks mafia getting hold of critical raw materials and rare earth is sometimes not for the faint hearted we still have a lot of risks in terms of the actual logistics of getting the cobalt out of the country there's no port nearby struck the prestige countries

to the coastal town to durban in south africa so you not only have the political instability of the drc as a whole but you have the logistical issues and one of the issues we're seeing now is the supply chains is not good to rely on one country is not good to rely on one sort of single supply chain cause we can see logistical issues come up political issues come up and worcester with climate change weather events can also impact the supply chains the trade is dominated by a few companies with global reach glencore that she the biggest producer at the moment there are switzerland based commodity trader listed in london footsie one hundred company they are the biggest cobalt producer but then behind them you have this interesting chinese company china money and they went into the drc and bought one of the biggest copper and cobalt mines with two point six five billion in two thousand and sixteen of course the big beasts of the corporate world and ordinary people have interests which surprise surprise don't always coincide i visited the drc during the research

burke and it's very very start what you see because there is a small airport in cohesion this mining area that the sea and you have to see sort of private jets landing risks of workers to the big mining sites then when you drive around it was they see ordinary people money by hands the cobalt often with women and sometimes children working her as well and then darted around chinese buying houses were already congolese will take their sacks of cobalt to these buying houses where the chinese will weigh the cobalt and give them a price see what a stark contrast of these big mouth

i was sure behind gates they knocked off from the rest of the country and then all around them he's only people mind by hand very basic tools such as pay taxes and often the two worlds too often collide ordinary congolese often intrude onto the site of the twig mines to native essentially go mine the cobalt for themselves the deep sea has a history of foreign imperialists mainly from europe chewing up its territory for fabulously valuable commodities belgium's colonial regime was notoriously violent france enjoyed it deeply corrupt relationship president mobutu says seiko post independence now the john where than conglomerates in the chinese continue these imperialist practices as the author of the

metals war the french generally squeal petrol points out china exploits the land the congolese people provide cheap labour china doesnt transform doesn't process the commodity in congo that we'd be good for the congolese because that would mean that the added value would stay in congo china ships everything to its territory and the cobalt is being processed china and the added value is being incorporated into the finished product so china does want to sell the metal chernobyl to sail the finished product with a high value added price with the middle east processing rare earths and critical raw materials comes with a price to china though as well

as we have already learned one of the reasons were of the so called is because you have to mine huge amounts of rock and aggregate to get the stuff the very metals that you're after and that creates massive pollution especially if you're the country which dominates eighty percent of the market one rare earths chinese persists once told me china has sacrificed its environment to feed the rest of the world we rare arrest minerals it has polluted its waters polluted soils it hasn't taken care of humans health of animals hills it hasn't taken care of basic and round to regulations so that we in the west could enjoy having these metals refined in our technologies and claiming were cleaner were green and where responsibility towards future generations we have outsourced pollution

earlier in the programme we have pepe expressing his worries about how lithium mining embarrass barroso might contaminate water supply he should spare a thought the two million people living in the chinese city of bottle in in among which has the largest rare of mine in the world sighed the mind as a pond to contain the waste that seventy thousand tonnes of radioactive florian but upon doesn't lined promptly and the sludge is seeping into the groundwater and moving towards the yellow river where millions access drinking water thorium by the way causes pancreatic and lung cancer if we haven't twigged already the summer of twenty twenty two should have made it pretty clear

not a single inhabited continent is avoided raging wildfires drought and floods the impact of climate change is applied us so we almost certainly need these critical raw materials but how do we about mining them sustainably can we leave it to the market should there be state intervention and how do we guard against unexpected developments like war the third important element of the nicole did i battery is nickel did i mentioned was the biggest producer nickel and nickel or nor nickel and its control by vladimir putin and he's an oligarchy and instantly at the start of the war against ukraine they want sanction for a while there was a sort of the nico perhaps be acceptable

it might be acceptable but now the uk has sanctioned potanin and it is a real blow to europe's battery industry because i think europe to a great extent was expecting to rely on some of this russian nickel which was going to be processed in finland for it's electric vehicle industry and so if we take russia out of the equation i think europe and the us to some extent are going to have to look to countries like indonesia where again china controls almost all of the nickel industry country it took other countries quite a while to wake up to the monopolies emerging in the rare earth industry and in second episode of the scramble for rare earths will hear what they are planning to do to tackle it humble for rare earth was presented by mister glennie the producer has been carter and it was mixed by james beard

what's it like working as an outsider as an american inside i believe the most secretive country in the world north korea and how do you go tracking hackers in real time even reading the messages i generally i opened the first and only u s news bureau in north korea and i'm jeff white an investigative journalist covering tech and organised crime and grew back with a brand episode of our podcast lazarus heist recorded in full if a live audience in new york city were joined on stage by a north korean defector and a cyber security expert who tracks hackers and there's even some advice about trying to keep yourself safe from hackers online that's news shall live at the soda philosophers the full about hacking and north korea the latter is high slideshow it's available now i'm were excited tell you were returning sue with a second season the lazarus heist so here

also ready what better moment to listen to the whole of seas and one or if you put it already listen again remind yourself the story for the new episode for the whole of the first season search for lazarus highs wherever you found this podcast the starting great or washington who was or was a born competitor or was champion in to sports shoes the michael jordan woman's women's basketball save lives at ten tap but while she was fighting for titles on the ports she was facing prejudice often the reason is racism in sexes untold ledges aura a podcast when the bbc rural service and bbc south tells her remarkable story search for untold ledges wherever you found this podcast