India is heavily reliant on the Gulf for fertiliser as well as the natural gas it needs to make its own, mainly urea.
Worrying for the first and third global producer of rice and wheat.
Construction work on the Panama Canal in 2016 has dramatically shifted the ecology of the waterway, replacing a freshwater fish community with a marine-dominated one.
The change took place within just a few years.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Interesting that the US prioritised cost & foreign supply in minerals security as early as 1951. It reframes the current reshoring push: not just a backlash against the past 40 years of free trade orthodoxy but the symptom of a much bigger shift in international political economy over the past 70.
This 1983 policy paper indicates how far US views on critical minerals security has changed since the Korean war, when it encouraged foreign supply "at the least cost possible for equivalent values".
A far cry from current calls for resource sovereignty, which emerged only in the late 2010s.
A durable rally would still need higher global battery demand growth and it remains unclear where this would come from.
China has so far been unwilling to stimulate overall consumption while the US is rolling back battery stimulus policy.
However, the sheer scale of oversupply means targeted shutdowns may not be enough to make a difference, esp to producers outside of China, who need a higher incentive price.
Chinese lithium prices are at an 8-month high as the government combats oversupply.
CATL’s closure of its Jiangxi lithium mine (~3% of expected global 2025 production) may be the latest in a series of govenrment-mandated suspensions.
www.reuters.com/markets/comm...
Climate disaster companies are outperforming the S&P index, according to Bloomberg analysis.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
In international relations, trade, security and capital markets, the themes are the same: in place of decades of reliance on the US and its assets, the rest of the world is now seeking to diversify, decarbonize, defend, and dedollarize.
The NYT famously hate the liberal establishment
The KIA has said it will levy a $4,800/tonne tax on the rare earths but questions remain about how effectively it can regulate the sector over the long run.
Chinese-led projects have operated without social and environmental guardrails in Myanmar since the early 2010s.
tinyurl.com/4ds44ey4
Myanmar rebel group KIA reportedly allows rare earth inventory shipments to China for the first time since seizing major mining areas five months ago.
China's global rare earths dominance owes a lot to its presence in areas of Myanmar now under KIA control.
On a basic level, Christophers’ argument accords with what energy investors on the ground actually say and do - oil majors being the obvious example.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Structural conditions mediate the impact prices and cost will have on profit (i.e. vertically integrated versus unbundled, consolidated versus competitive industries)
Critical minerals producers, for example, do not wait for a particular price so much as a price that supports profit given their particular cost structure.
One reason Christophers’ argument is compelling because he separates price and profit. This is what gives his argument so much analytic range.
If renewables are so cheap, why no energy transition?
Brett Christophers offers a compelling answer: that the electricity industry is too competitive to maximise profit, relative to fossil fuels.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
'Trump’s approach to dominance without hegemony is rooted more narrowly in the basic mentality of a real estate developer: acquire property, or more accurately a “site” ... develop it & then lease, rent or sell it for the sole objective of profit'
proteanmag.com/2025/02/27/s...
Drought and excess rainfall to hit Indian sugar and cotton output in 2024/2025 archive.ph/IEmRH#select...
Trump seeks minerals refining on Pentagon bases but questions remain about sourcing, domestic mineral demand, and technical know-how
archive.ph/PMZgo
"What's really happened here is this threat of tariffs and the aggressiveness of Trump is forcing other countries to spend more."
archive.ph/sQmLM
US tariffs might finally force the CCP to get over its scepticism of welfare provision, one factor dampening Chinese consumer spending
archive.ph/VDGWR
"Another poor harvest in 2025 could force the government to lower or remove the 40 per cent wheat import tax, making India more reliant on costly imports at a time of volatile global food prices."
www.independent.co.uk/climate-chan...
Performative references to Greenland & 'raw earths' are part of the Trump admin's wider rhetorical obsessions - payback for US largesse abroad, fiscal & trade balancing. Nothing to do w/ resource security for strategic sectors that it is basically indifferent about and has no coherent policy for.
Trump is fundamentally uninterested in the industrial race with China. This is what makes media coverage that reads the Ukraine deal through the prism of US geoeconomic strategy so ludicrous.
www.reuters.com/technology/t...
DR Congo stops cobalt exports in attempt to halt sliding prices
www.ft.com/content/1d4f5517-545c-47...
Vietnam's reliance on both US markets & Chinese investments now puts its export-led development & independent foreign policy at risk
It is a key example of how Chinese overcapacity plus US protectionism are placing immense pressures on the middle powers that benefited from China+1 shorturl.at/6b8fk
