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Fearing toxic waste, Greenland ended uranium mining. Now, they could be forced to restart - or pay $11billion investor-state dispute settlement.
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- Authors
- Patrick Greenfield, Phoebe Weston
- Published
- Mar 5 2025
- Word count
- 2259 words
No, no, that‘s not how capitalism is „supposed to work“. We privatise the gains and socialise the losses, that‘s how it‘s done!
It‘s very unfortunate, but we have come this far in the capitalist nightmare.
First of all, the loss in this case is directly due to actions of the government. Secondly, yes, yes, that's a huge reason we have a government in the first place. When someone is paid out unemployment benefits from the government, that's socializing the losses. When someone declares personal bankruptcy, that's socializing the losses. The gains are taxes, those taxes are used in part to compensate for the losses. Take off your anti-corporate glasses for a second.
You're right, but we are not talking about let's say health regulation making it too expensive for the company to operate, we're talking about a targeted ban. And actually, in the comment you're replying to, I'm not even talking about this particular case, but about a concept of compensating losses as a whole.
No, it's a compensation on the value of the deposit. No one is trying to invent the future here, it's direct cause and effect. Saying that "well maybe your mine would have collapsed in a week anyway and therefore you aren't owed compensation for us taking your business away" (which is how I'm reading the implications of your bankruptcy comment) is way more of a baseless speculation.
And for the nth time, I'm not saying that this particular company deserves the full amount, only that companies do get awarded such compensation, and the concept isn't outrageous at all.
The part that makes me super uncomfortable is that this is eroding the sovereignty of nations and their citizens right to self-determination.
Something really needs to be done globally to rein in the excessive amount of power corporations currently wield.
No they didn't. They went ahead with a legal project and the law changed specifically to prevent them from doing so. That's not gambling, that's the government action targeting your business. I swear, it feels like everyone in this thread is just anti-corporate. Imagine if your coffee shop got demolished to make way for the railway line that the public really likes - you really don't think that you should be entitled to compensation in this case?
I think it's fair to argue that they should be compensated for their expenditures in preparation for the project, but it's insane to me to say that they should be compensated for the profits they would have made. Why can't governments go after categories of businesses they don't like? If you don't like it, try convincing a Greenlandic citizen to vote otherwise. In the case of eminent domain, you get compensated for the value of your land and other short-term financial losses, not the total expected lifetime value of your business.
Opportunity cost, time wasted, efforts wasted, interest accrued are all things beyond just what it cost you to make preparations up to that point. But indeed we'll see if in this particular case the cost of future profits are justified. There are other examples where those have been awarded (see the article) so while I'm not an arbitration expert, at the very least some people that are disagree with you on this.
Um, because it's discriminatory? I thought at the very least most everyone on tildes would agree that authoritarian discrimination is not a good thing?
I really recommend you view what you're saying in any other context than "big bad evil corporation". If my neighbors all vote to kick me out of my own house, should I be forced to leave? This doesn't make any sense. The whole argument here is that it wasn't let's say a safety hazard law that forced the company to shut down, it was a targeted ban. By law, expropriation is not allowed in Greenland. Passing a law that outlaws companies which have 5 letter names which being with "Tes" and end with "la" because the public really really dislikes Elon Musk at the time of the election doesn't circumvent that.
Even if that's the case in Greenland and applies in this particular case (which it may very well do, I just don't know), that doesn't imply that the owner of the private property has done something wrong. Various eminent domain laws may also include clauses aimed at preventing economic harm, in which case there may be an argument for long term profits as well. Also I'm guessing there should be a good reason for the government acquisition, such as public utility construction, not just a ban. But, as I said, I'm not arguing that this particular case should be ruled in this way.
Paid a fair price for the land and building on it? Sure.
Paid a price based on a guesstimate of future profits assuming coffee prices and business expenses stay steady for the rest of eternity? Absolutely not.
But it's not for the rest of eternity. It's the value of the deposit. If you buy a forest to make a logging business and the government declares that forest to be a national park and bans logging, it's not unreasonable to ask for the value of the goods. It's not the cost of chainsaws you're losing, it's the raw materials you'd be obtaining with those chainsaws. And companies do get those compensations, which is what half the article is about.
If a government wants to build some infrastructure,and something's in the way, there's a process of compulsory acquisition in which e.g. a coffee shop in the way would be bought out.
On the other hand, if you start a coffee Roastery and then later it turns out that roasting coffee causes cancer and the government decides to ban roasting coffee - well, tough.
Businesses should include in their risk analysis the possibility that their business model could be subject to future regulation. Especially when the business model has a huge environmental impact.
Suing for potential losses is perverse. Regulating business becomes impossible.
Indeed. You should read the papers filed, the argument is exactly that it wasn't part of any health regulation or anything of the sort. I posted corresponding quotes elsewhere in the thread.
I get that they'd want to be compensated for any money they've already invested but claiming compensation for the lost profits are wild.
Wouldn't be surprised if the entire lawsuit was the idea of Burford Capital as they would make a killing if they would win.
Imagine the precedent this would set, you literally can’t lose money with speculative hostile business ideas because if the government wants to stop you from doing harm, they have to pay you the potential profits as compensation!
Maybe the government should turn it around and say “we speculate that you would have mismanaged things and run the company into the ground therefore actually you need to pay the government the cost of future potential bailout money for preemptively saving your company from this fate”
But... the article already mentions that the precedent is set, and how various companies have been awarded compensation for stuff like this in various countries. There's even a companion article linked right in the beginning that goes more in depth about it.
In any case, don't you think it's fair? If you spend a lot of money investing in something completely legal, and the government goes ahead and bans you from doing it in the middle of it, are you supposed to just lose all of that? Like if a railway line goes through my coffee shop, am I not entitled to compensation because the public really likes the railway much more than my coffee shop?
It’s not like this happened behind closed doors. The company knew there was a possibility of this happening. That is a basic form of risk, and in risk it is possible to lose your investment.
That's like saying just because you know there's a danger of a cop shooting you then you can never sue the public for when they do so wrongfully. The argument here is that the government wrongfully essentially seized their business. The question is whether that was wrongful is more key here than whether the company knew of the possibility of that happening.
The police do not go about openly declaring that they are going to shoot you because if they do so it becomes an even worse crime. But making laws are not crimes. This company way not unfairly targeted, and if there were another company trying to mine the site for uranium, they would have been affected the exact same way. There is absolutely nothing unfair happening here. This all happened in the public in the light of day. Saying the government seized their business seems like a really far-out take in any case.
Guess Greenland/Denmark shouldn't have signed onto international treaties that opened themselves up to the threat of these lawsuits.
I don’t know if you’re trying to be facetious but yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have. Extralegal arbitration just seems to be a bad thing in general because it tends to side with big corporations.
I was, but it was to try to make a point. Your argument throughout the thread mostly hinges on the corporation being able to foresee that. I disagree that that is enough to absolve the government of responsibility, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that's true.
In the case that being aware of the risks is merely enough, then the government is even MORE aware of the risk of having to pay out according to the laws that the government signed onto. The law, which you so highly touted for binding the corporation, also states that the government cannot arbitrarily destroy a business. This law, which Greenland may be regretting now, exists because over hundreds of years of evolution, serves toward Greenland's benefit as well. Greenland wishes to join the international order on its very own legs. They need a lot more revenue in order to do so. They want to gain revenue by attracting foreign investment, so they explicitly agreed to ensuring a level of predictability in exchange for enticing foreign investment. They cannot have their cake and eat it too.
Focusing too much on the future profits part is unreasonable. First, being compensated for opportunity costs is a very real thing. If someone temporarily deprived me of my ability to work, say through a car crash, I would want something to make up for what I lost out on. The number that the corporation is asking for may be unreasonably high; I do not contest this. But both sides are going to ask for the minimum/maximum amount they can and the arbiter will decide somewhere in the middle.
If Greenland is so sure that its past agreement was not actually a legally binding one, it is their choice to fight this and possibly win. But that they are worried signals that they know what they agreed to. My not-a-lawyer opinion is that their approach was dumb. They could have instead passed legislation to require safe mining procedures in order to get the desired effect. Explicitly campaigning on revoking a specific business's ability to mine shows prejudice and makes it more likely to a court to find them in the wrong.
Edit: when I say law I don't have one specifically in mind. I refer to "law" here as legal system. I base this on Greenland/Denmark being a part of ISDS which apparently was meant to incentivize foreign investments.
Well, guess we'll see how the case resolves. I don't find your argument compelling at all, the reality is that this company's business was essentially destroyed by government action and I think there's a world of difference between predicting economic conditions or future regulations and have your business annihilated on a whim of your neighbours.
If you will excuse my assumptions here, you will never find my or anyone else’s arguements compelling because you are adamant that the government is in the wrong for regulating against uranium mining.
None of this was a “whim”. This was government moving at the glacial speed of government.
You also seem to think that this is a case of the government being a bad actor. I will admit that I don’t know the full workings of how Greenland’s government works, but the article seems to make it fairly clear that this wasn’t a bait and switch thing; the government changed hands and the new hands implemented its agenda like they said it would. Every single part of this, from my understanding, was open and predictable. And as such it is logical to say “hey, sorry investors; the risks were realized so therefore you will not recoup your investment.” And if one really thinks this was wrong than it makes sense to sue the government to recoup that investment. Instead they are saying they have a legal right to the profits they would have made given they continued the project. That, to me, sounds completely unhinged.
Forget the legalities for a moment. Why would they have a legal right to those assumed profits? By most philosophical frameworks, they shouldn’t, right? For one thing, they didn’t do the work, so they shouldn’t get the pay. By what logic does their investment give them the right to future profits?
Another way to think of this is that the ability to sue for future profits essentially allows them to hold the country hostage. It allows them to say “either pay us in the health of your people and the environment and the ecology of the area, or pay us to leave”. Is this moral? Do you think there is any level of investment which should allow this kind of situation? Do you think it is morally acceptable for a company to be recouped for more than their investment and to make doing such things a profitable venture in doing so?
Well, not a single reply has actually substantiated the danger of uranium mining warranting a ban, for one. I have no problems with regulations based in reality, which already exist in Greenland and cover the mining industry. Instead of changing that legislation they enacted a targeted ban instead. Combined with nuclear in general being (in my opinion wrongfully) targeted purely based on layman opinion, yes I'm happy to be a devil's advocate here.
I don't find it compelling that the government ostensibly declared their intentions before getting elected and following through with them. This has in my mind absolutely no relevance - one can campaign on whatever they wish, but if those are wrongful actions, they don't stop being that way simply because you campaigned on them. See the whole Trump situation, for example. I wouldn't consider any immigrants any more deserving of additional punishment just because they didn't do something while Trump was campaigning. Expecting businesses or people stop what they're doing just because there's a party or an individual campaigning on something is absurd in my opinion.
You're loading the question by assuming there's some sort of "health payment" that the company is demanding. Obviously that would be wrong to do, but I don't see that it's necessarily happening here. I don't view corporations as cackling evil satan worshipping bad guys, which I know is often a view among people online these days.
It's not future profits, it's the fair market value of the deposit. Kind of like if you found a gold deposit on your property, the value of your property would go up accordingly and if the government bought it from you to put down a railroad, its value would be taken into account. Yes, I believe it's totally okay as a principle to include that value. I don't know if it's appropriate in this particular case as I'm not an expert on Greenland mining permits, but the principle since totally fine to me.
The health impacts are in the article, though. The slurry can seep out and poison water sources. And why do you need us to give you something that can easily be looked up? The fact that these minerals are radioactive means that it will have even longer lasting effects on the ecology. Is it wrong for the government to protect the environment? The government is doing the right thing. They are doing what the people demand of them for one, the article even called it “the mining election”.
I wonder if you are defending them because of some pro-nuclear ideas you have here, but do keep in mind that this is not a uranium mine. I thought it was at first too, but upon inspection I see that the minerals they are trying to unearth primarily will require them to remove radioactive materials.
I could go on and on about details of why it’s not right to give them profits based on the value of the land, but I don’t have a great grasp on that kind of law and I don’t think it would change your mind if I did the research.
No, the fact that local people feared the slurry is in the article.
Precisely because of misinterpretations like this. Believe it or not, I did a quick search before making my very first post in this thread and I couldn't find a definitive answer. If it's so easy to look up, then why haven't a single comment among dozens provided anything on the matter, even when I directly mentioned that I'm not sure that it could be just yet another nuclear scare?
You're right, it's a rare earth mine that got hit with the uranium mining ban. I'm disappointed I missed that, but it would be strange if my stance included only uranium mining.
Recouping money that you’ve spent so far, I think I can get on board with, but even then I’m not sold.
Being paid your future potential profits from running the business when you no longer need to run the business I think is a terrible idea, because regardless of how fair and justified it might feel in the moment, it sets up perverse incentives and encourages even more speculative behaviour in future.
For this particular instance, the company should have done more research to make sure they were forewarned that this kind of thing might happen, and factor that risk into their business idea. This feels like either they didn’t factor that in, or worse, they factored it in and their plan all along was to establish the legal case to sue, in which case you actually have a business whose profit model is not “extract resources to contribute to the economy” but rather looks a lot like “extract money from the government with a clever trap”
I think a government should exist as an extension of the will of the people that it represents, and if that means changing the rules to protect people from a loophole they didn’t see before, that’s well within the rights of that government to do so. Businesses need to play by the rules that government sets, and rules need to change over time to account for things previously not considered. This company happens to have been caught out in the middle, which sucks, but it shouldn’t give them the rights to go against the will of the people.
But if they have a legal case then the government did do something wrong here. If they didn't, then there is no legal case and therefore the company is just in the loss. I see absolutely nothing wrong with "extracting money from the government" for wrongful actions. You seem to think that government cannot be in the wrong and company cannot be in the right.
You seem to be equating "legal" with "right" tbqh. It's perfectly possible for someone to have a legal case for something but for the defendant to not be in the wrong based on a moral or ethical analysis. We're talking about shoulds here. A company having a legal case to sue the government for making something illegal doesn't help us in establishing whether they should have a case here -- and having read this thread, I fall pretty firmly on the side that they shouldn't. Private companies shouldn't be able to sue the government for lost profits when their industries are regulated or banned, whether they actually are able to legally do so in this case or not.
But I'm not. If anything you're the one implying that government action is necessary right. I'm saying that's not the case and if it wasn't right, the impacted parties deserve compensation.
I am a different person than the one you were replying to upthread, and I don't think either of us is claiming that anything the government does is inherently right. My position (and that of the person earlier in this thread, I think) is that there's not sufficient good evidence that the government is actually doing something wrong in this case, at least not in principle. The existence of legal precedent for private companies to receive damages from the courts in comparable circumstances doesn't serve as convincing evidence to us that that's a good or just outcome. I agree that if the government does something wrong, the impacted parties should be compensated. But I'm not convinced that the government is doing something wrong here -- and that doesn't mean that I believe that it's not possible for a government to ever do anything wrong.
The whole point of having the arbitration is to figure out if there was any wrongdoing and if any parties are entitled to compensation. We can't rule this case one way or the other here. I was speaking out against many commenters that seem to imply that the company cannot possibly be in the right in circumstances like this.
That is the point of arbitration, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the outcome of arbitration corresponds to what we believe is just. None of us here, to my knowledge, has the legal expertise to judge the case on its legal merits, but that doesn't prevent us from having opinions on what would be a just outcome.
Well, you may know more about these matters than me. I'm not an expert, so I defer to them.
You’re almost correct, and I think I’ve come to a similar conclusion about our underlying disagreement.
I think my personal opinion on this ultimately stems from the idea that a business does not have a fundamental right to exist, and therefore if the outcome of regulation is that the business goes under, I’m not particularly worried about that.
On the other hand, I believe democratically elected governments as an (sometimes imperfect) extension of the will of the people does have the right to exist, and an international company extracting enormous amounts of money via arbitration can certainly reach a point to destabilise said government if the country is small enough and the company is big enough, and I worry about that potential.
I think it's fair to be compensated for money you've already invested.
I don't think it's fair to be compensated for money that you were intending to make.
It's the value of the deposit on their property.
Fuck em. I hope more governments shut down polluting projects and seize reckless companies with zero compensation to the greedy capitalists behind it all.
At that point you should be advocating for putting humans to hibernation or something, because our entire existence is polluting. How do you think you're able to have a device to send this message from, genuinely?
You aren't exactly the first person to observe that the contrivances of a modern, western lifestyle are made possible by offshoring our suffering to places with fewer labor and environmental protections. And I'm not going to defend a position I don't hold, because I'm not advocating a return to nomadic hunting at 2% our current population.
My point is that governments need to be able to represent and work for their people without fear of retaliation by the worst members of society, and those jerks shouldn't get golden parachutes and the freedom to take another swing at building the Torment Nexus because Number Go Up.
Maybe try formulating this sentence without unnecessary emotional moral language and you'll see that the logical conclusion of your beliefs is authoritarianism.
Actually try this first.
That's not even the person you were responding to previously. If you're not interested in continuing the conversation, just don't.
Sorry, what are you saying? zestier replied saying they cannot see a link, I told them they will see a link if they actually do what I suggested. What's your issue with this?
You're telling someone to reformulate someone else's sentence.
Personally I don't think that the sentence has "unnecessary emotional moral language", but you also seemed entirely unaware that you were responding to someone else. This is dumb.
Apparently they already did, everyone actually participating in the conversation understood the necessity for reformulating, so not sure what you're complaining about.
Ah. Well the reason I didn't understand that is because you just went from using negative emotional moral language to using positive emotional moral language. Let's actually review what is happening:
You don't see it presumably because you keep changing the wording to be different than what is being talked about. Obviously a government changing policy due to public opinion is not linked to authoritarianism. A government being able to change policy unimpeded and without any recourse from the affected parties is what is linked to authoritarianism.
I mean I'm not here to play word definition games. If you don't understand what I'm attempting to communicate then ask for clarification on what is it that's confusing to you. If you do, what's the point of this remark?
There's nothing emotional about my argument. By authoritarian I do mean authoritarian, I even gave you an example of Russia, an authoritarian state that started as a democracy increasing the power of the government. Just to double check that I'm not insane and what I meant (and elaborated on) is, in fact, considered authoritarian:
And yes indeed a powerful government is a precursor to an authoritarian government. Specifically the government without sufficient checks and balances. That was my point the entire time.
Oh gee, this “small company” that somehow feels it’s worth billions of dollars is being bullied by the corrupt big bad government just because of some pussies who don’t want to be poisoned. But clearly this company who doesn’t even seem to have been granted the mining permit to begin with certainly has the god-given right to extract the resources of the country. They are so sure of it, they are completely bypassing their legal system and instead using an arbitration system that is sure to be a whole lot more official-like.
Fuck this company and every company like it. They are a cancer on humanity.
It's not the company that's worth billions of dollars, that's the Fair Market Value of the deposits, so basically the profits they would have made if they were allowed to proceed with the extraction. 4 billion of which is the interest.
Well they argue this:
I'll be honest, nuclear/radiation gets so much bad rep that I'll need some more info on how impactful mining with modern methods actually is. From what I know infamously coal mines were releasing way more radioactive pollution.
Why?
I'd be curious to see which way this case goes.
Ah, curious. So basically by publicizing this they want to influence the votes for the upcoming election (and the potential new government which could allow the mining).
And the amount of profit doesn't contribute to a company's worth... how?
Their arguement doesn't matter. If you need a license to do something and you haven't been granted that license, then it is illegal to do that thing. I could have hired a contractor to build a house and have submitted my plans to the county and done everything needed, but it's still illegal for me to build that house until I get the license.
Frankly, it doesn't matter much that it's uranium mining because, to my knowledge, all mining operations produce hazardous wastewater products that could potentially harm living creatures. They use water to prevent dust from coming up which will kill the miners, and the resulting slurry can often be toxic.
Regardless of the legality of their claims, they were denied the permit because the people did not want them doing that kind of work. And the people can and must have the right to refuse it, especially when public health is at risk. This company is trying to circumvent the will of the people rather than try to change their minds, and that's a shitty thing to do.
In Nevada, there is a large nuclear waste storage facility. It was never used because of public opposition to it. This is the way things should be.
By the way, it feels incredibly antagonistic to have my comment ripped to shreds like that. If you want to disagree with me, just write your reasoning.
I don’t read that reply as antagonistic in the slightest though?
I don't read the reply as antagonistic at all, just a well-structured response where your points have been responded to individually. As someone reading this discussion, I very much appreciate having the specific context of the point that's being responded to.
The point is that I don't think that anyone claimed that the company is worth this much now. They're not even paying the legal fees themselves.
Okay, but then
sounds like it's completely true?
Well, that feels pretty contrived to me, but that's why I'm curious to see how the case gets resolved.
I think some decisions should definitely be left to the experts and not the public, but sure. I mean public decision making is basically how nuclear got shut down in Germany in favor of coal. This is why I am hesitant to instantly jump in support of the public in this case, because nuclear has been under attack for ages, including completely unfairly.
Sorry, I just felt it was important to bring up the quotes rather than only the interpretation of them.
I guess the antagonism thing must just be me then. Almost every time I have had someone tear apart my comments like this in the past it was from someone who was trying to do the smarmy “everything you said was completely wrong” thing.
I agree that being anti-nuclear because of FUD is a bad thing. But the company involved is not trying to fight that. They are trying to make money. They are taking this outside of the country’s legal system into an international arbitration system, and it is not going to affect the way the government operates for any other entity. The reason why they aren’t paying for this themselves, according to them, is that a law firm smelled that they could potentially make a big payday and teaming with them meant they did not need to gather the money themselves.
Here is an article about broader trends with these lawsuits.
How long before drug dealers start suing for not being allowed to deal drugs?
In a close parallel, Philip Morris sued both Australia and Uruguay for essentially lost profits (technically trademark expropriation due to plain packaging laws) but in both cases the governments told them to go pound sand.