Summary

President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on March 28 that Ukraine will reject a proposed U.S. minerals deal if it endangers the country’s EU accession.

A new draft, reportedly granting the U.S. extensive control over Ukrainian natural resources, raised concerns over economic sovereignty.

Zelensky said lawyers will review the agreement, emphasizing it must not conflict with Ukraine’s constitutional EU alignment.

The initial deal would create a joint fund reinvesting extraction proceeds into Ukraine. The White House views it as a way to recoup aid, but Kyiv remains cautious after a prior dispute with Trump.

    • P1nkman@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      But the minerals will make the rich richer, so of course, the minerals MUST be mined! It’s capitalism 101

      • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Iirc the dirty secret of rare earth metals is that every country has them in at least some capacity even if there’s variability in how easy to access those deposits are. The dirty part is that the countries that produce them less so have a particular abundance and more so have a lack of environmental regulations.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      It’s like they want humanity to starve.

      Quite a few members of the Trump Administration, including his Secretary of Health and Human Services, are avowed eugenicists.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      18 days ago

      Around here they build shopping malls over the most fertile land we have access to instead of using it to grow food for the millions of people living right next to it…

    • gressen@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      I was with you until you mixed nuclear into the post. Chernobyl was a series of human errors and bad decisions. We need nuclear to fix our energy issues and slapping the name onto a separate issue is dishonest and makes me doubt your intentions.

      • Denvil@lemmy.one
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        18 days ago

        They never claimed that nuclear is bad, they claimed that the Chernobyl disaster has already negatively impacted the land enough, mining would only make it worse

      • Metz@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Who is “we”?

        e.g. Germany already produces 60% of its power reneweable. The plan is 100% by 2030-2035. And the prices for reneweables are already far below the ones for nuclear.

        So why throw 10 billion euro into building a nuclear power plant that delivers 1 Gigawatt when you build reneweables for 1 billion that delivers 10 Gigawatt?

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          The argument behind this book revolves around cheap, durable, and at-cost managed utilities with the capacity to shepherd renewable energy in a manner that replicates the need for base load.

          The problem with this as a solution comes down to an unforgiving contradiction - this solution does not create high rates of profit. Without high-profit public works, you don’t get buy-in from the financial sector. And without financial sector buy-in, you don’t get business administrators willing to engage the private sector in construction, development, and maintenance of these systems.

          The book doesn’t mint enough new billionaires, so it won’t be accepted as a solution in a western free market system. It is, incidentally, why nuclear energy is also unpopular in the US. Compared to gas, oil, and coal, the margins on nuclear electricity are too damned low. Green energy only works because it is so intermittent and temporal, allowing energy brokers to trade on the ups and downs of supply as they fall out of sync with demand.

          If you make the system efficient, you lose all the opportunities for arbitrage that incentivize private actors to invest and extract wealth.

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Claiming “we need nuclear” makes me doubt your competence. And I say that as someone who prefers fission plants over burning fossil fuels.