Mariane Paviasen Jensen, a Greenland MP for the Inuit Ataqatigiit party and prominent environmentalist, has described a 60 Minutes Australia program shown on Channel Nine on August 10 as a “propaganda broadcast” for an Australian mining company and the United States President Donald Trump — who has publicly declared his intention to takeover Greenland “one way or another”.
Entitled “Why are China and the US fighting over Greenland's rare earths?”, the program promoted a giant rare earths and uranium open cut mine in Kuannersuit near Narsaq — Paviasen Jensen’s hometown — which has been proposed by Australian company Energy Transitions Minerals (ETM) but rejected by the Greenland government in 2023. The company is challenging this decision in Greenlandic and Danish courts.
ETM chairperson Simon Kidston boasted on the program that this could be the “world’s biggest rare earths mine” which ETM managing director Daniel Mamadou said could be worth US$11 billion and operate “for centuries”.
Paviasen Jensen spent four and a half hours with 60 Minutes reporter Laura Sparkes explaining the concerns of her community, but the program only included fragments of her interview and allocated the most time to chummy talks and sightseeing on buggies and helicopters with ETM executives Kidston and Mamadou.
“They only used tiny parts of statements I made during the many hours I was with them,” Paviasen Jensen posted on her Facebook page.
The 60 Minutes broadcast is pro-mine, she explained.
“There are many statements about the ‘amazing’ economic benefits by less about environmental consequences, as well as consequences for existing businesses such as food production and tourism.
“There is also this arrogance again that ETM has the right to mine in Kuannersuit, and that the locals are just ignorant and therefore against it. What an arrogant attitude!”
ETM's mining proposal was rejected on the basis of a law banning uranium mining in Greenland because a deposit of uranium sits above the rare earth deposits. But the concerns of Greenlanders extend beyond uranium.
“The fact that uranium isn't the only problem in the Kuannersuit project and independence shouldn't mean that we become dependent on mining companies and that we need to remove the project/company so that we can move on developing our city and area by growing food products,” Paviasen Jensen explained.
She wrote to 60 Minutes’ Sparkes to express her disappointment this “documentary” that “looks mostly like a propaganda broadcast”.
In this email, shared to Green Left and environmental groups, Paviasen Jensen agreed with others that it was “deeply disturbing” to watch another television show about Westeners who adopt this paternalistic attitude towards Greenland and dismiss concerns about how exactly the Greenlandic culture would be affected, the short and long-term environmental consequences, the health effects and what the Greenlandic people have voted for.
“I told you what we are concerned about and [that] we are saying NO to project in majority in our area”, she wrote in the complaint.
“I told you about our culture, and [that] the project will not be a ‘Green’ project … they will destroy our backyard.”
In the 60 Minutes program, the ETM executives boasted that Trump’s threat to takeover Greenland had massively boosted the company’s share value and that investment from the US was flooding in.
The 60 Minutes promoted the argument that the Trump administration had a “duty to the Free World” to take control of Greenland and its resources to deny it to China and Russia.
ETM’s Kidston explained that its intention was not only to mine the rare earths but also to process them in Greenland. Although rare earths processing is a notoriously polluting process — and this is why most of this takes place in China and other Global South countries, including Malaysia — this statement was not followed up or interrogated by the reporter.
The ETM executive was not challenged on his claim that the project would follow the “best environmental practice in Australia” and that Greenlanders would benefit from the mine.
“People with money will promise a lot to local people,” said Paviasen Jensen in the email, but “at the end the local people will be left with nothing … only a destroyed, useless land…”
One powerful statement that this veteran fighter for Greenland’s independence, human rights and environment that the 60 Minutes program did not cut out was: “You cannot buy us. We are not for sale!”