Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I am so glad you were
here because today, well today we are pulling on a
thread that starts in the most powerful office in the world,
stretches all the way up to the frozen tundra of
the Arctic Circle, and it ends up right inside your pocket.
Speaker 2: It is quite a journey, and it's one of those
stories that you know, it sounds completely made up. It
sounds like fiction until you realize it is the absolute,
concrete reality of the world we live.
Speaker 1: In now exactly. I want to start by taking you
back a few years. Do you remember where you were
in August twenty nineteen. It feels like, well, it feels
like a different lifetime, pre pandemic, pre a lot of things.
But there was this news cycle that summer that made everyone,
and I mean everyone stop and check if they were hallucinating.
Speaker 2: I think I know exactly what you're referring to. It
was inescapable.
Speaker 1: The headline was Trump wants to buy Greenland.
Speaker 2: It was the meme of the year. I mean instantly
it was.
Speaker 1: It sounded like a joke. It sounded like the kind
of thing a bored real estate mogul says when he's
run out of skyscrapers to buy in Manhattan. You know,
I'll take the big icy one at the top of
the map, please.
Speaker 2: And it was treated with so much derision. I remember
the late night host just having an absolute field day.
The Internet was just flooded with these images of gold
Trump Towers photoshops right next to igloose. It was. It
was just seen as completely.
Speaker 1: Absurd, and the diplomatic reaction was, well, it was just
as cold as the island itself. The Prime Minister of
Denmark came out and officially called the idea absurd. It
felt like the United States was treating a semi autonomous territory,
a home to over fifty six thousand people, like a
like a foreclosure listing or a used car.
Speaker 2: It felt so transactional. I'm clumsy. It was from a
public relations standpoint, a complete disaster.
Speaker 1: But and this is the hook for our entire show today.
What if I told you that all that laughter, all
that mockery was misplaced. What if I told you that
behind the bluster and the tweets and the awkward tone,
as the locals put it, there was a cold, hard,
strategic calculation that was actually correct.
Speaker 2: That is the twist, isn't it. When you strip away
the delivery, which was controversial to say the least, the
strategic assessment underneath it all was spot on.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, so you're saying buying an entire island is
a valid national security strategy for the twenty first century.
Speaker 2: In the context of what we are about to discuss. Yes, absolutely,
because this was never about the ice. It wasn't about
building golf courses in the snow. It was about what
is buried beneath the ice.
Speaker 1: We are talking about rocks.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the building blocks of the future,
something called rare earth minerals.
Speaker 1: Today on thrilling Threads, we are digging into an incredible
investigation by sixty Minutes Australia. They went all the way
up to a town called Narsac in southern Greenland to
see this whole situation firsthand. And what they found is
that Greenland isn't just a scenic backdrop for a postcard.
It holds the largest deposits of these minerals in the
entire world.
Speaker 2: And we really cannot overstate the stakes here. These minerals
are and this is a quote for the source that
I think is perfect. They are the DNA of modern life.
Speaker 1: I want to pause on that phrase because it's so powerful,
the DNA of modern life. What does that actually mean?
Because I think a lot of us, you know, we
hear the term rare earths and we just nod along
without really knowing what they are.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, think of it this way. If you could
snap your fingers and magically remove all rare earth minerals
from the world today, we would effectively slide back to
the technology of the nineteen seventies, maybe even earlier.
Speaker 1: That is that's terrifying thought. No Internet, no smartphones, that's
the reality.
Speaker 2: If you are listening to us right now. In a smartphone,
you are holding rare earths. The screen that makes the
color so vibrant, the tiny speakers, the little motor that
makes it vibrate. They all rely on elements with names
like neodymium and dysprosium. If you drove an electric car today,
the powerful lightweight magnets in that motor are made of
rare earths.
Speaker 1: So it's mostly consumer tech gadgets.
Speaker 2: No, it's everything. It's the guidance systems and advanced missiles.
It's the specialized magnets in the f thirty five fighter jet.
It's our satellites that give us GPS, it's the giant
turbines and wind farms. You literally cannot have a modern
economy or frankly, a modern military without these specific rocks.
Speaker 1: So suddenly the president of the United States wanting to
buy the one place that has more of these rocks
than anywhere else. It doesn't sound like a real estate
fantasy anymore. It starts to sound like a survival strategy.
Speaker 2: It is a global race, a new gold rush, as
the investigation describes it. But instead of prospectors with pickaxes
looking for gold, it's superpowers and multinational corporations chasing the
ingredients for well, for the green energy transition, and for
national defense. And right now the West is terrified because
we are losing that race.
Speaker 1: Badly, and that brings us to the cast of characters
in this ge political thriller. We have Donald Trump that
would be buyer. We have China, which currently holds the monopoly.
We have a small Australian mining company called Energy Transition
Minerals or ETM, caught right in the middle.
Speaker 2: And finally, and i are most importantly, you have the
people who actually live there. The locals of Narsak Greenland,
the community of about thirteen hundred people who were turned
right down the middle between the promise of economic salvation
and the threat of total environmental destruction.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is to unravel this incredibly complex web.
We're going to look at why the world's superpowers are
fighting over a frozen island and what it costs the
people who call that island home. Are you ready to
head to the top of the world. Let's do it, Okay,
So let's start with this setting Segment one, the Treasure
at the Top of the World.
Speaker 2: The sixty minutes Australia team travels to Narsak, and honestly,
listening to their description and seeing the visuals they captured,
it just sounds like a movie set.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem real, It really doesn't. They use phrases
like visually stunning in a mystical fantasy world. You hear
that and you just picture something out of a Tolkien novel.
Speaker 2: It paints quite a picture, doesn't it. Yeah, you have
these majestic, ancient icebergs floating silently in the harbor, reflecting
this deep blue sky. Then the town itself, these quaint,
colorful villages were talking. Bright red, blue and yellow houses
nestled right on the shoreline, you know, a splash of
color against the gray rock and the white snow.
Speaker 1: It looks pristine. It looks like a place that has
been untouched for thousands of years, a place you'd go
to get away from it all.
Speaker 2: Is the kind of place you go to escape the
industrial world, to find silence, which makes the contrast so jarring,
so completely dark, because right next to this mystical fantasy,
right underneath the surface of all this serene beauty, is
an industrial behemoth just waiting to be woken up.
Speaker 1: And that is the kavana Field Project, exactly Cavanashfield Mountain.
And this is where the Australian company ETM comes into
the picture. They're led by two guys, Simon Kitston and
Daniel Mamadou. Now what I found fascinating about this part
of the story is that they didn't just show up
because of the recent headlines. They didn't just arrive when
Trump sent a tweet.
Speaker 2: Oh not at all. They've been there for a very
long time. I heard the exploration rights to this area
nearly twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: Twenty years that is incredibly foresighted it is.
Speaker 2: I mean, think about the world twenty years ago, the
first iPhone hadn't even been released. We weren't having mainstream
conversations about electric vehicles or supply chain decoupling from China.
They saw the value in the geology when almost no
one else was looking that far ahead.
Speaker 1: And what they are sitting on is just it's mind boggling.
I want to throw some stats at you from the
report because the scale here is genuinely hard to grasp.
They have discovered over one billion tons of mineralized rare
earth or.
Speaker 2: A billion tons. It's a number so big it almost
loses meaning what does a billion tons of rock even
look like? It's a mountain?
Speaker 1: Well, let me contextualize it with another stat from the
report that makes it even crazier. They have only explored
one percent of the total deposit.
Speaker 2: That is the part that gets me every time. One percent.
Speaker 1: So you're saying there's potentially ninety nine percent more of
the stuff that they haven't even properly mapped yet.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. Yeah, they have drilled eight ty thousand
meters of core samples. They've spent over one hundred million
dollars and all of that effort has only given them
a clear picture of one tiny corner of the resource.
Speaker 1: Wow. The geologists in the report describe it as a
freak of nature.
Speaker 2: That's almost a technical term in geology, believe it or not.
It means that a posit of this size and concentration
shouldn't really exist. It's a massive outlier. The deposit is
roughly ten kilometers by five kilometers of solid rare earth ore.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a mountain made
of them of valuable technological ingredients on the planet.
Speaker 1: They say that just the one percent they've properly tested
could provide thirty five years of continuous mining.
Speaker 2: So if you just do some rough math on that,
if they were to mine the whole thing, we're talking
about a resource that could supply the entire world's needs
for hundreds of years. It's not just a mine, it's
a multi generational strategic asset.
Speaker 1: The total value is estimated to exceed eleven billion dollars USD.
Speaker 2: And that's conservative estimate that fluctuates with market prices. But honestly,
the dollar value is almost the least interesting part. The
real value is in the strategic independence It could offer.
Speaker 1: And this is the so what for the listener? Right?
Why dig up this pristine, mystical fantasy world. Why ruin
the view for those colorful houses. Simon Kitsten, the chairman
of BTM, is pretty blunt about it. In his interview.
He argues that you simply cannot have a modern future
without these rocks.
Speaker 2: He's tapping into a very difficult, uncomfortable truth. We all
say we want a green future. We want to stop
burning fossil fuels. We want wind farms stretching across the planes,
and electric vehicles in every driveway. But we often, you know,
we conventely forget that building those things requires materials. It
requires mining.
Speaker 1: Right, The hardware of the green revolution isn't green.
Speaker 2: To produce exactly, a single large wind turbine needs hundreds
of kilograms of rare earth magnets. An EV battery is
full of them. Kiston's argument is basically, if you want
the green transition, you have to break some ground somewhere.
You can't just wish it into existence.
Speaker 1: He views his company as the key to that. He
calls ETM a little assie babbler that's trying to unlock
this world class deposit for the good of the West.
But there is a very specific reason the pressure to
mine the specific deposit is so high right now, and
it has everything to do with who controls the.
Speaker 2: Rest of the supply And this brings us right to
the heart of the geopolitical stranglehold.
Speaker 1: Segment two, the China problem.
Speaker 2: This is the elephant in the room of this entire story,
the reason Greenland matters so much. Currently, China control somewhere
between ninety five percent and ninety seven percent of the
midstream supply chain for rare earths.
Speaker 1: Ninety seven percent that is, that's not a market share,
that is a total, indisputable monopoly.
Speaker 2: It is absolute dominance. And it didn't happen by accident.
This is a deliberate, long term industrial strategy.
Speaker 1: So how did we get here? How did the West?
You know, the US and Europe just let this happen.
Speaker 2: Well, while the West was you could say, asleep at
the wheel, or maybe more accurately two, focused on short
term profits and outsourcing industries that were considered dirty, China
was playing the long game for forty years. They build
a domestic industrial strategy around this. They mine a lot
of it, but much more importantly, they process it.
Speaker 1: Let's explain that distinction, because it's crucial mining versus processing.
Speaker 2: Right, So upstream is the mining, literally digging the rock
out of the ground. That's the messy physical part. But
the midstream is the processing and refining. You see, you
can't just shove a rock from Greenland into an iPhone.
You have to go through a very complex chemical process
to separate the seventeen different rare earth elements from the
ore and from each other.
Speaker 1: And that's difficult.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly difficult. It's chemically intensive, it's expensive, and increase
a lot of toxic byproducts. For decades, Western countries essentially
decided they didn't want that in their backyards anymore because
of stricier environmental regulations and high labor costs. So we
offshort it and China was more than happy to take over.
They doubled down and became the world's refinery.
Speaker 1: So even if we found a huge deposit in say
California or Australia, we'd probably still have to send the
raw ore to China to have it made into something useful.
Speaker 2: In many many cases, yes, that's the choke hold. China
has the refineries, the patents, the expertise, and this allows
China to weaponize the supply chain.
Speaker 1: The source material references a potential mad Max scenario, which
sounds dramatic.
Speaker 2: It sounds like hyperbole, doesn't it. But the investigation gives
a very real world example of this exact thing happening.
It's not a hypothetical threat they do.
Speaker 1: They mentioned an incident during a period of trade tension
where China simply restricted the supply. They just turned off
the tap to certain buyers.
Speaker 2: And the consequences were immediate and severe. A Ford plant
in the United States had to shut down production of
one of its most popular vehicles.
Speaker 1: Just pause on that for a second. A massive American
car factory employing thousands of people was ground to a halt,
not by a union strike, not by a logistics issue,
but because of a political decision made in Beijing.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it was a shot across the bow. It shows
the immense fragility of the entire Western manufacturing base. And
now you have to apply that exact same vulnerability to
national defense.
Speaker 1: Right the military hardware.
Speaker 2: The US military is completely dependent on these minerals. The
F thirty five fighter jet, Tomahawk missiles, night vision goggles,
drone technology. All of it relies on components made with
rare earth's processed in China. If China blocks that supply
during a major conflict, the US military is to put
it pluntly kneecapped. It is a direct and present threat
to US national security.
Speaker 1: You know, this context completely changes how we view Trump's
by Greenland idea, doesn't it completely?
Speaker 2: When you view it through this very serious national security lens,
it stops being blustered and it starts looking like strategic desperation.
The source quotes Trump directly saying we need it for
national security, for the free world.
Speaker 1: And they also spoke to Alex Gray, who was a
former National Security Council assistant director. He says something really interesting.
He said, Trump has gotten the entire world focused on
the strategic significance of Greenland.
Speaker 2: And that is the undeniable truth of it. Whether you
like the delivery or not, whether you thought it was
clumsy or brilliant, the underlying strategic assessment was accurate. The
goal now for the entire Western world is decoupling. They
need to build a secure supply chain that does not
run through Beijing. They need an insurance policy, and that
giant Mountain in Greenland is the insurance policy.
Speaker 1: So we have the treasure, we have the urgent geopolitical need.
Now let's look at the proposed solution. Segment three, The
irony of the Western Savior.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is where the story gets really twisted. I
love this part because it just exposes the incredible complexity
of the modern global economy. Nothing is as simple as
it seems.
Speaker 1: So ETM, this Australian company is positioning itself as the alternative.
They are the white Knights of the rare earth industry.
The Sixty Minutes crew film Simon Kiston and Daniel Mamadu
in New York City on Fifth Avenue of all places.
Speaker 2: A very very different backdrop to the icebergs of Narsacas.
Speaker 1: Completely different. They've traded the heavy duty puffer jackets for
expensive suits. They are in boardrooms pitching to US investors,
and they are leaning heavily into this Trump era rhetoric.
They are essentially saying, invest in US, and you are
investing in freedom, you are investing in the non Chinese solution.
Speaker 2: It's a fantastic pitch. I mean, it's brilliant marketing. It
aligns perfectly with US foreign policy. And the mood of
investors help us, help the free world break this monopoly.
Speaker 1: And here is the Gatcha moment that the sixty minutes
Australia investigation uncovered. There's a rather large.
Speaker 2: Complication, the significant one.
Speaker 1: Yes, the interviewer Tom Steinford asks some a very simple
direct question who owns energy transition minerals?
Speaker 2: And the answer just reveals how incredibly hard it is
to untangle these threads. It turns out the single biggest
shareholder in ETM is actually a Chinese company. They hold
about nine percent, maybe a little more now of the
company shares.
Speaker 1: You just have to appreciate the ironed The company that
is pitching itself as the one and only solution to
Chinese control is itself partly on by a state link
at Chinese company.
Speaker 2: It really shows how pervasive and strategic China's influence is.
The source notes that China has bought minority stakes in
almost every significant rare earth operation globally. They've hedged their
bets everywhere. They're playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
Speaker 1: So even if we dig it up in Greenland with
an Australian company funded by American investors, China still gets
a cut.
Speaker 2: Of the profits and more importantly, potentially still has influence
a seat at the table.
Speaker 1: The interview gets a bit tense at this point. The
ETM executives are pushed on this. They're asked if they
would be pressured by their Chinese shareholders, you know, will
you be coaxed into sending the raw minerals to China
for processing, which would of course defeat the entire purpose
of the project from a Western strategic view.
Speaker 2: And they insist quite firmly that they will not be coaxed.
They claim they have an independent board and will maintain
their independence ensuring that the processing happens in Western hands.
Speaker 1: But as an expert in the source material points out,
it just highlights how difficult it is to truly escape
China's web of influence in this sector. You can try
to decouple that the money trails and the ownership structures
often lead back to the very same place you're trying
to escape.
Speaker 2: It creates a real paradox. Can you have a truly
Western supply chain if the capital financing it is in
part Chinese? That is the billion dollar or maybe trillion
dollar question.
Speaker 1: But let's zoom in. Now we've been talking about global
superpowers and billions of dollars in geopolitical chess. But this
mine isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening in someone's backyard.
Speaker 2: And this is where we get to segment four, the
Battle for the Soul of Narsak.
Speaker 1: This is where the story becomes deeply human. We are
talking about a town, are just thirteen hundred people, and
the investigation introduces us to the two faces of this conflict,
the two competing visions for the future of Greenland.
Speaker 2: On one side, we have the opposition, a local politician
named Marion Paven.
Speaker 1: They call her a warrior woman, and in her interview,
she is fierce, she is passionate. Her stance is simple
and completely unambiguous. You cannot buy us.
Speaker 2: Her fear is palpable, and it's very easy to understand
when you see the geography. We have to be clear here.
This isn't a mine that's five hundred miles away in
the unpopulated wilderness. The proposed mine is a massive, open
cut mine. It's planned for the top of cavnah Field Mountain,
which sits directly above the town in the fjord.
Speaker 1: Right above it. You'd see it from every window. She
believes that if the mine opens, the town, as she
knows it, will die. She talks about the dust from
the blasting and crushing, the potential contamination of their drinking water,
which comes from the mountain streams. She points out that
Narsac is trying to build a sustainable tourism industry based
on its pristine beauty. Who wants to go on a
mystical fantasy tour If there is a giant, open pit
mine looming over the town.
Speaker 2: It's a fundamental threat to her way of life, to
her culture, she says, and there's a heartbreaking quote. It
will kill me if I stay here and look at it.
She loves the silence, she loves the clean air, the ice.
The mind threatens all of that.
Speaker 1: But then we meet the other side of the argument,
the woman named Kappanoakulsen who goes by Q and she
is a truly fascinating character.
Speaker 2: She really is. She is Greenland's only female mining engineer,
and in another twist of irony, she was educated in
Australia at the famous Kalgoorli School.
Speaker 1: Of Minds, so she knows her stuff. She is the
perfect person to bridge this gap between the local Greenlandic
culture and the international mining industry.
Speaker 2: She is and her argument is incredibly pragmatic. She says
Greenland needs income desperately right now. Their economy relies almost
entirely on fishing and on large financial subsidies from Denmark.
If they ever want true independence, which is a huge
political goal for many Greenlanders, they need a diverse economy
and for her that means mining.
Speaker 1: She claims she has personally reviewed the technical specifications and
the environmental impact statements for the project, and she argues
that the fears varian spheres are not anchored in science.
She believes the project can be done safely.
Speaker 2: She attributes the very vocal opposition to a lack of
information and maybe a fear of the unknown. She says
mining isn't part of their culture, so people are naturally
afraid of what they don't understand. She sees it as
her job to educate people in the realities of modern
responsible mining.
Speaker 1: It is a classic, classic clash of values. You have
the traditional way of life, fishing, hunting, the connection to
the ice and the silence versus modern economic necessity, jobs,
revenue independence.
Speaker 2: It is and it taps right into the broader political
situation in Greenland. Remember Greenland is a semi autonomous territory
of Denmark. A lot of Greenlanders want full independence, They
want to be their own nation on the world stage.
But you can't run a modern nation on ice and
fish alone. You need revenue for schools, for hospitals, for infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And here is the profound irony that the source points out.
To gain their political independence from Denmark, they might have
to sell the most valuable resources to foreign powers, be
it an Australian company funded by Americans with Chinese shareholders.
They risk swapping one master for another.
Speaker 2: It is the classic resource curse. Having the treasure buried
under your land doesn't always make you free. Sometimes it
just makes you a target.
Speaker 1: So you have this incredibly tense standoff. The locals are
completely divided, the global superpowers are watching. But then there
is another twist, a scientific deal breaker that changes the
entire equation. Segment five, the radioactive twist.
Speaker 2: This is what really complicates things from an engineering and
a political perspective. The rare earth minerals in cavena Field
Mountain are not alone in the rock. They're geologically mixed
with uranium.
Speaker 1: And you can't separate them easily, right, You can't just
mine one and leave the other.
Speaker 2: No, Geologically they are bound together in the same ore body.
To get the rare earth's out, you have to dig
up uranium. It is an unavoidable packaged deal.
Speaker 1: Now ETM, the mining company, argues that the uranium is
very low concentration. They say they can handle it safely,
just like mines in Canada or Australia do every single day.
They see it as a manageable byproduct.
Speaker 2: And scientifically that is likely true. We do know how
to mine and handle low grade uranium safely in many
parts of the world. But politically the word uranium is
a different story. It's a loaded term.
Speaker 1: And the politics shifted right under feet. A new Greenlandic
government was elected and a huge part of their successful
campaign platform was their staunch opposition to this specific mine
and to uranium mining in general.
Speaker 2: And they didn't just talk about it once in power,
they passed new legislation. They enacted a law that effectively
banned uranium mining across all of Greenland.
Speaker 1: So, because you can't mine the rare earths without also
mining the uranium, the entire Cavan of Shelled project is
for now effectively dead in the water.
Speaker 2: Under the current law. Yes, the ban on uranium acts
as a poison pill for the Rare Earth project.
Speaker 1: I mean, just imagine being ETM for a minute. You
have spent what nearly two decades one hundred and fifty
million dollars.
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty million dollar USD. They've drilled eighty
thousand meters of core samples, They've done all the environmental studies.
They spent years developing this project based on the laws
that were in place, and then at the finish line,
the new government says thanks, but no thanks, rules have changed,
pack it up.
Speaker 1: And Simon Kinston's reaction in the interview is well, it's
clear he's not packing up.
Speaker 2: No, he is defiant. He says, quote, we are not
going away. We are funded to stay the course. They
are now suing the governments of Greenland and Denmark for
hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in damages.
Speaker 1: They feel betrayed and you can see their point. They
were invited in by a previous government, they followed the
rules that were set, they invested a huge amount of
money in good faith, and then the rules were changed
at the last minute.
Speaker 2: It's a massive legal and political mess. From etm's perspective,
this is a case of sovereign risk, a government changing
the rules unfairly. But from the Greenland at government's perspective,
they are simply carrying out the democratic will of their
people who voted them in on this exact issue.
Speaker 1: So we are left in a complete stalemate.
Speaker 2: A very expensive, very high stake stalemate, with the future
of the global tech and defense industries hanging in the balance.
Speaker 1: All right, let's head to the outro and try to
summarize where this incredibly tangled thread leaves us.
Speaker 2: So we have the world's biggest and most accessible deposit
of the minerals that are essential for the future of
humanity just sitting there, locked in a mountain. The United
States and its allies needed for their national security. The
Australians want to mine it for profit, the Chinese are
watching from the sidelines and from inside the shareholder meetings,
and the local people of Narsac are protected for now
by a national uranium band.
Speaker 1: And through it all, the majestic icebergs just keep floating
silently by in the fjord.
Speaker 2: It really validates that whole great game narrative. Trump's tone
might have been off the offer to buy the island
was publicly mocked and rejected, but his fundamental assessment of
and its strategic value was one hundred percent correct. The
entire world is looking at Greenland differently now because of this.
Speaker 1: The great game for the Arctic is it seems just beginning, it.
Speaker 2: Is, and the stakes are only going to get higher
as the ice continues to melt.
Speaker 1: So I want to leave our listeners with a question today.
It's something I've been wrestling with while researching this entire
story before. We want to hear from you. In the
race for a green future, a future filled with electric
cars and wind turbines. We are told we need these minerals.
It's not optional, but getting them requires digging up pristine,
unique places like Greenland. So is it worth it? Is
it worth sacrificing a mystical fantasy world and going against
the wishes of a small local community to secure the
technology and the national security of the entire Western world?
Whose rights matter more the thirteen hundred people of Narsac
or the billions of people who rely on modern technology
and live under the Western security umbrella.
Speaker 2: It's a brutal, brutal question with no easy answer.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think in the comments. This
has been a fascinating and frankly a dizzying journey to
the top of the world. Thanks for listening to Thrilling Threads. Goodbye,
getch you next time.