The company suing Greenland for the right to mine rare earth minerals has hired a lobbying firm deeply connected to the Trump administration, increasing the threat of US action against the territory.
This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!
Energy Transition Minerals announced yesterday that it hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard, a major donor and fundraiser for Trump, to assert what it says are its claims on the territory. Attorney General Pam Bondi, along with Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, were both hired by Trump straight out of Ballard Partners.
The news comes as the White House steps up its rhetoric over Greenland, saying this week that it was exploring all options to take control of the territory, including a military invasion.
Energy Transition Minerals, an Australian mining company, was given a license nearly twenty years ago to explore the Kvanefjeld deposit, which contains over 11 million metric tons of rare earth minerals, including large quantities of uranium. The size of Kvanefjeld makes it the largest thorium deposit, the second-largest uranium deposit and overall the third-largest rare earths deposit in the world.
In a world hungry for new energy sources, Kvanefjeld’s significance can’t be overstated.
Indigenous victory
For ETM this was taking democracy too far. The following year the company sued Greenland under antidemocratic neoliberal ‘investor-state-dispute’ laws, arguing that the decision unlawfully removed the rights it had been granted in the mid 2000s. The company, which recently accused Greenland of delaying arbitration proceedings, is seeking compensation of $11.5 billion, more than four times Greenland’s GDP. And in an eerie echo of US claims that Venezuela ‘stole’ American assets by nationalising its oil fields, Energy Transition Minerals says its assets have been ‘expropriated’ by Greenland’s decision to block mining at Kvanefjeld.
For its part, Florida-based Ballard Partners, which didn’t even have a Washington DC office before Trump’s first term, has taken advantage of its relationship with Trump and the corruption of his administration to become the largest lobbying firm in the US. Its clients now include staples of the American security state including Palantir, Boeing, Amazon, Meta, the government of Qatar, and the private prison firm Geo Group, which is now cashing in on Trump’s mass deportations.
ETM’s hiring of Ballard Partners, whose role the company says “will include advising on public policy and regulatory issues which shape the global rare earths supply chain,” is highly ominous for Greenland, for Denmark, and for whatever remains of global stability.
ETM, according to my research, took little interest in US politics until recently. A Sydney-based company, it has no American executives and retained no relationships with US legal, public affairs or public relations agencies. Yet in common with Donald Trump, it has an adversarial relationship with the Greenland government and is making essentially the same claims about Greenland and rare earths that Trump made about Venezuela and its oil. It’s rhetoric and material interests are aligned with Donald Trump. And now it has a direct line to the Oval Office.
The danger to Greenland is real, and growing.
Katie Miller, a former spokesperson for Elon Musk’s DOGE department, and the wife of neo-Nazi Trump aide Stephen Miller, tweeted last week that the US would annex Greenland ‘soon.’
And in a New York Times interview yesterday, Trump asserted that he wanted the US to own Greenland, and that agreements and leases are not good enough.
The case of ETM will almost certainly be used by the US as a weapon to put maximum pressure on the indigenous leadership of Greenland, under threat of military force. ETM working with Ballard also means that not only will ETM have a direct line to the White House, but that the Trump administration will have allies on the ground in Greenland able to intimidate, bully, and report back.
The timing of ETM’s hire of Ballard is also extremely convenient for Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi, who earned millions in her seven years working for the firm, has an ethics agreement that prevents her from participating in any matter involving Ballard Partners or a party represented by them. This agreement expires early next month. Bondi then is likely to play a key role in ETM’s legal case and in US moves to annex Greenland, liaising between her former boss and her current boss.
And in a further ominous sign, ETM has hired the same advisory firm used by Trump last year to raise $2.5 billion for his Truth Social website. ETM says it has hired Cohen & Company Capital Markets to advise on a potential Nasdaq listing, which is curious given that ETM has never operated a single mine. The company has been sitting on shareholder capital for years, unable to act on its core business proposal. It makes little sense for an essentially inactive company tied up in an expensive legal battle to be pursuing a stock-market listing in the US. Unless, of course, it has gleaned information from its backdoor into the Trump administration that has encouraged it to believe it will soon be able to move forward with its core business proposal.
The case of ETM, Greenland and Trump is a case of the pieces coming together at a crucial moment in history – of force multiplier acting on force multiplier, as I argued in my last article. Now, the gangster state stands poised for another naked breach of international law. Once again the theft of resources from an indigenous population looms, assisted by neoliberal capitalist laws that enable corporations to over-ride democracy.
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