Brazil is rushing to regulate its critical minerals industry and unlock its vast untapped reserves of rare earths, aiming to position itself as a strategic producer with Chinese and US companies competing for fresh supplies.
Despite opposition from some environmental and Indigenous rights groups, lawmakers in Brazil’s lower house of Congress passed the government’s critical minerals policy bill last month, and backers now hope to secure final Senate approval before October’s presidential election.
Already a major mining nation with large reserves of graphite and copper, Brazil has the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth elements after China, with the difference that Brazilian reserves are largely untapped. This group of 17 minerals is used in permanent magnets for electric motors vital for clean technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and wind turbines.
As Chinese and US companies compete to secure supplies, Brazil hopes to serve them both.
“We don’t have any preferences. Whoever wishes to participate with us to help with the mining, processing, and production of the wealth that these rare earths can bring is welcome to invest in Brazil,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told journalists after meeting President Donald Trump in Washington in May.
Value-added mining
The draft legislation, which is backed by industry groups, creates a $380-million Guarantee Fund for Mineral Activity meant to provide financial support for mining projects, grants priority status for permitting strategic mining projects, and requires companies to dedicate a share of their revenue for domestic research and development on mineral extraction and processing – part of the policy’s effort to maximise the benefits of mining.
To select strategic projects and support their environmental licensing, the bill envisions establishing a Committee for Strategic and Critical Minerals, which includes representatives from different government agencies, state and local governments, industry and civil society.
Mining Minister Alexandre Silveira said the government’s bill “aligns mineral exploration with national interests”, and he has pledged to work closely with the Senate to pass it in the coming months.
“Brazil … doesn’t intend to be a mere exporter of unprocessed raw materials, but to expand its industrial and technological capacity, too,” Silveira said last month.
The Brazilian government says the country presents an “unparalleled” opportunity for refining “green minerals”, given that around half of its electricity comes from hydropower.
At the other end of the supply chain, several Chinese companies have vast plans to assemble EVs in Brazil. EV manufacturing giant BYD opened a massive production facility in the state of Bahia last October – the company’s largest EV factory outside China. BYD’s top executive in Brazil told Reuters it is aiming to produce and source 50% of its vehicle components in the country by the end of the year. BYD’s subsidiaries in Brazil directly own mineral rights in the country’s “lithium valley”.
Brazil’s Congress defies Lula to push through “devastation bill” on COP30’s heels
Some pro-government lawmakers had proposed the creation of a state-owned agency that would hold a monopoly over mining projects, but that was eventually rejected after the federal government decided that no additional state intervention was needed in the sector.
Mônica Sodré, CEO of the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI), said the country’s mining rules were created when minerals were mainly seen as “commodities for export”. Today, they are “central to economic security, industrial policy and geopolitics,” she said.
The proposed legislation, she added, is “an important first step, not a final solution” to position the country as a major mineral producer, and developing projects will require continued efforts through the newly-created committee.
Soft on safeguards?
But despite the government’s pledges to develop a critical minerals sector that benefits the national interest, some environmental groups have opposed the critical minerals policy bill, saying it does not create enough safeguards for the protection of affected communities.
Adriana Pinheiro, public policy advisor with Observatório do Clima, a network representing 130 environmental nonprofits, told Climate Home News that the bill “lacks explicit provisions on free, prior and informed consultation”.
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The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib) said in a note to Congress that the bill has the “potential to significantly impact indigenous territories without adequately incorporating mechanisms for protection and participation”.
Sodré said the concerns are valid, but that the draft bill is not the place to address them. Instead, she said, indigenous rights and participation should be considered on a project-by-project basis and that safeguards exist under Brazil’s “extensive” environmental permitting legislation.
“Precaution is essential in mining policy, but it should not lead to inaction. Blocking investments or delaying projects without clear evidence of unacceptable risks can result in significant social and economic costs,” she said.
Pinheiro, of the Observatório do Clima, added that while the bill encourages domestic processing of critical minerals, it does not create mandatory quotas. Countries such as Indonesia and Zimbabwe have banned raw exports, forcing investors to set up processing plants in the country.
“This regulation is only positive if it combines industrial strategy with strong safeguards,” Pinheiro said.
Geological advantage
China extracts about 70% of the world’s rare earths and controls around 90% of the processing – creating a potential chokepoint that has alarmed Western countries at a time of heightened geopolitical tension. The US and China have opted to stockpile key minerals in case trade restrictions are enacted against them.
Brazil, which has strong trade and diplomatic ties with both Beijing and Washington, views the intensifying competition for rare earth supplies as an opportunity for it to develop a new mining sector. Brazil’s National Mining Agency has reported about 2,700 rare earths projects under consideration, according to local news outlet Folha de Sao Paulo.
The country’s rare earths reserves also have a geological advantage, as they are predominantly contained in ionic clay rather than hard rock. These deposits contain sought-after “heavy rare earths” and require less processing to extract.
Backed by $2.7 billion in financial support from US government agencies, American mining firm USA Rare Earths acquired Brazil’s Serra Verde group, which owns the high-grade Pela Ema mine. The ionic clay mine is the only one outside Asia capable of supplying all the four major rare earths at scale, according to the company’s CEO Barbara Humpton.
Other major firms have followed, with Canada’s Aclara conducting studies in the $680-million Carina mine and Australian companies Meteoric and Viridis also seeking to develop ionic clay mines for European and American buyers.
Despite growing Western investments, China remains Brazil’s largest trade partner and the country’s imports from Brazil have already tripled between 2024 and 2025, according to data by the Brazil-China Business Council.
The draft bill does not guarantee that Brazil will be able to compete with Chinese rare earths on the international market, Sodré noted. A “more realistic benchmark” is how effectively the country can position itself as major supplier of critical minerals for the energy transition, she added.
Pinheiro said clearer regulation may help shape investments into the country, but foreign companies will not necessarily wait for Brazil’s critical minerals policy.
“The central question is whether Brazil will use this moment to build domestic value chains, ensure socio-environmental safeguards and protect affected communities,” she said.
The post Brazil jostles for rare earths share as US-China rivalry heats up appeared first on Climate Home News.
Brazil jostles for rare earths share as US-China rivalry heats up
Governments are holding “critical” talks this week on a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, as some countries and activists warn that key issues – including measures to rein in soaring plastic production – are being sidelined.
Diplomats are meeting in person in Nairobi for the first time since negotiations were suspended in chaos nearly a year ago, stymied by a long-running deadlock that pits petrostates against more ambitious nations over the reach of the UN pact.
Because nearly all plastic is made from planet-heating oil, gas and coal, the sector’s trajectory will have a major influence on global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The four-day informal gathering, which begins on Tuesday, has been billed by the chair of the talks, Chilean ambassador Julio Cordano, as a “brainstorming” session in which countries are invited to put forward possible solutions to some of the treaty negotiations’ most divisive elements.
Cordano is expected to distill those views in a new document intended to serve as the basis for a new draft text of the future treaty, which governments would take up at the next official round of negotiations, scheduled for March 13-24, 2027.
Two earlier rounds, each billed as the final one, ended without agreement, derailed largely by a standoff over how the treaty should address plastic production, which the UN says is set to triple by 2060 without intervention.
Production curbs in the spotlight
Large fossil fuel and petrochemical producers, led by Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia and India, have repeatedly argued that the treaty should focus only on managing plastic waste. A US State Department spokesperson told Climate Home News that Washington supports “practical, cost-effective solutions” to plastic pollution, while opposing “global plastic bans”.
A majority of countries – including most European, Latin American, African and Pacific island nations -want to limit the manufacturing of plastic to “sustainable levels”, but have not pushed for any wide-ranging ban.
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Ahead of what it described as “critical” talks in Nairobi, the French government said last week it had already shown flexibility and “significantly scaled back” its initial ambitions. But a French official told a meeting of EU environment ministers that without an explicit reference to the “unsustainable nature” of plastic production, the treaty would be “fundamentally unbalanced, ineffective and, worse still, could set us on the wrong path for decades to come”.
In a separate written communication, the French government lamented that informal meetings held in recent months have given “disproportionate visibility to the positions of the least ambitious states”, fuelling a “risk that partial agreements may be reached only on the issues with the broadest consensus”.
Dennis Clare, a negotiator for the Pacific island nation of Micronesia, told Climate Home News that “if we fail to address any key elements”, including overproduction, the impacts of the plastic crisis on the climate, human health and ecosystems will only grow more severe.
Fears over “political calculations”
Despite such concerns, plastics production is not mentioned in the wide-ranging list of topics Cordano has drafted for the meeting – an omission that has alarmed observers.
Christina Dixon, a campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), said there appeared to be an attempt to write off this crucial element of the treaty as “too complicated and politically unviable”.
David Azoulay, environmental health programme director at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said the meeting’s proposed structure was “highly concerning”. He accused the chair of “making political calculations in favour of potential short-term wins” and aiming to deliver a treaty “based on the lowest common denominator”.
Speaking to journalists last week, Cordano pushed back, insisting that “no topic is off the table” and inviting countries to bring whatever proposals they judged necessary for a successful outcome.
He added that the treaty could not be allowed to settle for just any level of ambition, and that he would not be happy with an outcome at all costs.
“This is what makes it so difficult and complex,” said Cordano, who was elected in February after his predecessor’s resignation. Countries “are trying to be creative” in finding solutions, he explained, because “the road to the objective of our work might not be so obvious”.
The post UN plastics pact talks restart amid fears production curbs will be left out appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN plastics pact talks restart amid fears production curbs will be left out
A new report from Greenpeace Australia Pacific sets out the pathway forward for Australia to be a global leader on ocean protection. With the Treaty now in force, Australia and nations around the world, have an important opportunity to drive the creation of ocean sanctuaries on the high seas, by leading with ambition, science and collaboration to ensure this landmark agreement delivers lasting protections.
The report was launched on Tuesday 23rd June at Parliament House at an event to celebrate Australia’s recent ratification and look ahead to implementation. The event was attended by Parliamentarians, Ambassadors, Departmental leaders and civil society. Thank you to everyone for celebrating with us. To ensure the Treaty is strong, fit for purpose and delivers its role of creating ocean sanctuaries on the high seas across the global ocean – multilateralism and collaboration is essential. The event hosted by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and WWF was a strong step forwards on the implementation pathway.
The Global Ocean Treaty is one of the most significant international nature agreements in history and the first focused on protecting biodiversity in the high seas. These waters cover 64% of the ocean, are home to extraordinary biodiversity, and until now, less than 1% have been fully or highly protected.
Clean power added more to global energy supplies than any other source in 2025, according to the latest Energy Institute statistical review of world energy.
Outside the Covid pandemic, it was also the first year ever in which wind and solar, when combined, contributed more new energy than any of the individual fossil fuels.
The findings illustrate the “growing prominence” of electricity in the global energy system, according to the Energy Institute, a professional membership body that took over the production of the annual statistical review from oil firm BP in 2023.
It notes that electricity demand is rising much faster, at 3% in 2025, than energy use overall at 1.7% – and that all of the new power supply came from low-carbon sources.
While it includes data on data-centre demand for the first time, the review shows that these only make up 2% of all electricity use and 15% of the increase in 2025.
(The review does not explore other sources of demand, but separate data shows electrification of industry, heat and transport is a far larger driver of growth than data centres.)
At the same time, every source of energy – including coal, oil, gas, nuclear and hydro – also reached global all-time highs in 2025, the statistical review shows.
While the 86% of “primary energy” that came from fossil fuels is a record low, their real contribution to the economy is far lower, because roughly two-thirds of their energy is lost during combustion.
Below, Carbon Brief highlights the key findings of the review in six charts.
- Global energy supplies increase 1.7% in 2025
- Fossil fuels met a record-low 86.2% of global energy supply
- The ‘primary energy fallacy’ ‘inflates fossil fuels’
- Wind and solar were biggest source of new energy in 2025
- Clean energy met all of global electricity growth in 2025
- China generates more power than the US, EU and India combined
Global energy supplies increase 1.7% in 2025
The review shows that global energy supply reached a record high in 2025, climbing 10 exajoules (EJ, 1.7%) to more than 600EJ for the first time ever.
Within this total, there were new all-time highs for every energy source: oil; coal; gas; nuclear; wind and solar; as well as hydro and other renewables. This is shown in the figure below.
Notably, coal hit a new record of 166EJ in 2025, up 0.7% from a year earlier and 2.8% above the level reached in 2014, which had been seen as a potential peak for the fuel.
Wind and solar saw the fastest growth, up by 18.3% year-on-year, as well as adding more to global supplies – in combination – than any single fuel source.
Fossil fuels met a record-low 86.2% of global energy supply
Nevertheless, on the basis of these primary energy figures, the contribution of low-carbon sources to the global energy system still looks relatively small.
The latest data shows that fossil fuels made up 86.2% of global primary energy supplies, as shown in the figure below.
The rise of nuclear power had pushed the fossil-fuel share of global energy down to 91% as long ago as 1986, before the Chernobyl disaster pulled the plug on further growth.
It is only in the past decade that clean-energy sources have started to gain more ground, as a result of the rapid expansion of wind and solar.
The ‘primary energy fallacy’ ‘inflates fossil fuels’
Crucially, however, the statistical review is based on “total energy supply” (TES), a measure of primary energy. This counts the energy stored in coal, oil, gas and nuclear fuel going into the energy system, whereas for renewables it measures the amount of electricity coming out.
Yet, most of the energy in fossil fuels is lost as waste heat during combustion.
In fact, some two-thirds of all primary energy is lost before it can be turned into useful energy that moves a car, warms a home or keeps the lights on.
This gives rise to the “primary energy fallacy”, which tends to “inflate…the perceived contribution of fossil fuels” and the difficulty of replacing them with low-carbon energy sources.
For example, the figure in the post shows that 105 units of energy went into the global transport sector – almost all of it oil – but this only generated 20 units of transport “energy services”.
In other words, less than 20% of the primary energy being used for transport actually ends up moving people or goods, while the remaining 80% was lost as waste heat.
Until 2024, the statistical review sought to address this issue by using the “substitution method” for clean-energy sources. This listed the primary energy supplied by wind and solar, for example, as the amount of fossil fuels that would have been needed to generate the same amount of electricity.
It stopped using this approach in 2025, explaining that this would reveal the higher efficiency of a clean-energy system that loses less energy during fossil-fuel combustion. It explained:
“Put simply, in future we will need to supply less energy in the form of clean electricity to undertake the same amount of work as the equivalent energy supplies from fossil fuels. Primary energy demand will decrease as the energy system increasingly electrifies and renewable electricity continues to increase its share of generation..”
Wind and solar were biggest source of new energy in 2025
With this in mind, it is all the more notable that wind and solar, in combination, were the world’s biggest source of new energy in 2025, as shown in the figure below.
Again, perhaps two-thirds of the new primary energy added by fossil fuels last year will never actually contribute useful work to the economy, because it will be lost as waste heat.
In contrast, the new energy added by wind and solar is in the form of electricity and almost all of it can be used directly to power factories, homes, appliances and electric vehicles.
Moreover, wind and solar saw the fastest growth by far, up 18% in 2025 alone. Over the past decade, they expanded fivefold, while coal, oil and gas grew by 6%, 9% and 21%, respectively.
Clean energy met all of global electricity growth in 2025
The impact of renewables is clearest in the power sector, where combined with a new record for nuclear power, they met all of the growth in global electricity demand in 2025.
This is shown in the figure below, which illustrates how fossil generation was flat last year and how wind and solar now generate more electricity than hydro or nuclear power.
The review says that wind and solar power, when combined, grew by 18% in 2025, whereas there was a small decline in coal generation balanced by a small rise for gas.
Overall, it says that global electricity generation increased by some 940 terawatt hours (TWh, 3%), roughly three times the annual demand of the UK.
Separate figures, included in the review for the first time, show that data centres used 788TWh of electricity in 2025, up 130TWh on a year earlier.
This means that data centres accounted for 2% of global electricity demand.
China generates more power than the US, EU and India combined
The Energy Institute report says that the power sector is set to play an increasingly important role, because it is growing more quickly than other parts of the global energy system.
There is also increasing political attention on the idea of using expanded clean-power supplies to rapidly electrify other parts of the economy, particularly heat and transport.
The COP31 presidency has called for countries to back a global goal for 35% of “final” energy to come from electricity by 2035, against a global average today of around 22%.
China is well ahead of the global average, with electricity making up 30% of its final energy supplies in 2025. It recently adopted a 35% by 2030 target for electrification.
One reason it has been able to do this is the huge scale of its electricity system. Indeed, China now generates more electricity than the US, EU and India combined, as shown in the figure below.
While much of the rise in China’s electricity has historically come from coal-fired generation, there was enough growth of clean-power sources to push coal down last year.
The post Six charts show how clean power was world’s largest source of new energy in 2025 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Six charts show how clean power was world’s largest source of new energy in 2025
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