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Beneath Greenland’s Ice Lies a Climate Solution—and a New Geopolitical Battleground
Modern society, and the clean energy revolution, depend on rare earth elements. Can Greenland help break China’s stranglehold on the market?
The Trump administration’s aggressive language has spooked Indigenous Greenlanders in particular, who make up 90 percent of the population and have endured a long history of brutal colonization, from deadly waves of disease and displacement to forced sterilization. A more immediate problem with mining is the potentially toxic dust generated by so much machinery, said Niels Henrik Hooge, a campaigner at NOAH, the Danish chapter of the environmental organization Friends of the Earth. Like China’s state-sponsored rare earths industry, the US, Canada, Australia, or the European Union—which entered into a strategic partnership with Greenland in 2023 to develop critical raw materials—might band together to guarantee a steady flow of the minerals that make modern militaries, consumerism, and the energy transition possible.
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