The Materials That Power the Green Transition Are Being Used as a Weapon.

Today, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sit down in Beijing.

On the table: rare earths, trade tariffs, and the materials that make wind turbines, EV batteries, solar panels, and defense systems possible.

What gets decided in that room over the next 48 hours will shape the energy transition more than any climate policy passed in the last decade.

Here is why — and here is what it means for you.

They look like separate news items. They are not.

China dominates around 85% of rare earth processing and more than 90% of magnet production globally. It is the leading refiner of 19 of the 20 most important industrial minerals. From 2000 to 2021, Beijing channelled almost $57 billion into mineral extraction and refining across nearly 20 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

This did not happen by accident. China's then-leader Deng Xiaoping remarked in 1992: "The Middle East has oil. China has rare earth elements." That was a 30-year strategy. It worked.

The materials inside your EV battery, your wind turbine, your solar panel — most of them pass through Chinese hands before they reach you.

Just days before the anticipated summit between Trump and Xi in Beijing on May 14–15, a senior US official confirmed that the rare earths deal between the United States and China remains in effect — underscoring the continued importance of one of the most sensitive economic issues between the world's two largest powers.

Beijing will likely be in the driver's seat of these trade talks. "They will play this again to their advantage in the trade negotiations — and to me, there is no doubt that they will also be very successful at it," said Tom Moerenhout, who leads the Critical Materials Initiative at Columbia University.

The US response has been aggressive: a $12 billion public-private partnership called "Project Vault" to stockpile critical minerals, a new trading bloc called FORGE spanning 50+ countries, and equity stakes in mining firms from Greenland to Brazil.

But here is what the headlines miss: "We're still a long, long, long ways away before we can declare any kind of partial victory in terms of developing a homegrown supply chain," said Chris Berry, president of House Mountain Partners.

While the US races to mine, Europe is taking a different path.

China's renewed signals to restrict rare earth exports forced a hard rethink across industries reliant on critical materials. Business leaders are no longer simply diversifying suppliers. They are turning to circular solutions — product take-back programs, advanced recycling, and designing for reuse. Circularity is moving from pilot projects to large-scale implementation — from moral values to business value.

The EU has signed partnerships with more than 14 countries and targeted 47 strategic projects under its Critical Raw Materials Act — but the deeper strategic bet is reducing demand for virgin critical minerals through circular design.

This is not an environmental story anymore. It is a supply chain security story. And that changes everything about who needs to pay attention to it.

"The US-China trade war is a political dispute — markets will stabilize."

"Rare earths are a niche issue for manufacturers, not sustainability professionals."

"Europe's circular economy agenda is about waste reduction."

➥ The green transition has a critical minerals dependency that no policy announcement has resolved. Every wind turbine, every EV, every grid-scale battery contains materials that China processes. That dependency is structural — not a temporary disruption.

➥ The Trump-Xi summit outcome today will either stabilize or destabilize the material inputs of the global energy transition. A breakdown in the rare earths deal does not just affect US defense. It affects European clean energy deployment timelines directly.

➥ The acceleration of rare earth extraction and processing outside China would eventually undercut China's dominance — but this assumes new capacity can be operated at competitive costs. In practice, high prices also create incentives for advances in recycling and substitution. The circular economy is not an ideological choice in this context. It is the fastest path to supply chain independence.

➥ Is Europe willing to take on the environmental consequences that come with extraction and processing of rare earth elements on its own soil? If European countries are not to buy Chinese renewable products, they will have to buy raw materials from China for the foreseeable future. Most corporate sustainability strategies have not modeled this.

➥ The companies best positioned in 2027 are not the ones that found alternative suppliers. They are the ones that redesigned their products to need fewer critical minerals in the first place. That is the signal hiding inside the trade war.

China controls the materials → geopolitics makes supply unpredictable → circularity becomes strategic necessity, not sustainability choice → Europe's circular economy agenda just became the most important industrial policy on the continent.

That chain is the story of this week.

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André Rodríguez
Founder | SustainMotion360