Investigative account of the global race for the rare and critical metals underlying clean energy and digital technologies, tracing supply chains from mine to product and exposing the environmental and geopolitical costs that are typically externalised in western sustainability narratives. Pitron’s central argument is that the EU’s preference for imported finished products over domestic primary production offshores the ecological damage of the clean transition rather than eliminating it — and that the mining conditions in China, the DRC, and elsewhere would be politically intolerable if they occurred in OECD countries. Required reading for understanding why Europe’s critical minerals policy faces a credibility problem that a list of 34 materials and a 10% domestic extraction benchmark has not resolved.