Occasionally Random

As IMIP grew, locals like Sadip began to complain about rampant pollution. Because nickel is found in laterite deposits in Indonesia, a great deal of energy is needed to separate it from the iron in the soil. Companies like Xiang’s built dirty coal power plants to mine and refine the metals and began to displace families and farmers who had worked the land for generations. By 2021, IMIP was burning nine million metric tons of coal a year. Exhaust may have no longer been poisoning the air in Chinese cities. But instead, it was spewing out across the Indonesian rainforest.

The supply-chain issues surrounding both a territory that is quite literally at war and a commodity whose very existence the world relies upon to feed itself should be concerning. But nobody seemed to be considering it, neither among State Department officials I interviewed in 2022 and 2023, nor at battery conferences in Michigan and Stuttgart. No one professed to have considered supply-chain constraints on phosphates.

…most of these small-time Chinese businessmen are striking out alone, leaving their homes to find riches in the broader world. They are, in many respects, modern-day equivalents of the Western wildcatters celebrated in capitalist lore.