The race for so-called green energy has spawned another race, one for the
minerals needed to make the devices such as solar panels and batteries that produce, store and transmit that energy.
A hitherto largely unchallenged economic idea—that we will always have
supplies of everything we need at the time we need it at prices we can
afford—is in the process of being tested.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the
world will need to produce six times more of these critical metals
than we are producing now to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a
target widely held out as an essential goal for avoiding catastrophic
effects from climate change. The need for lithium—the key component in
lithium batteries that are prized
for light weight and the ability to charge quickly—will grow 70
times over the next 20 years, the IEA predicts.
One wonders what the price trajectories of the minerals IEA mentions will
look like in the coming years. The long-term charts are concerning for nickel,
lithium, cobalt
and others since this appears to be just the beginning of the run-up.
The world is experiencing shortages already of many key commodities and
manufactured items (such as computer chips). This is, in part, due to lack
of investment over the last decade after a general slump in commodity
prices following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and a broad moderation
in worldwide economic growth. Certainly, we can expect increased
investment in these critical metals. But will it be sufficient to match
our dreams for a green technology future?
I
cite again an exchange I had way back in 2009 with someone in the
computer industry who contended that because indium and gallium—two metals
critical to the production of flat-screen technology and solar panels—were already in
billions of consumer devices, they must be in plentiful supply. His
argument boiled down to this: The people who run the computer industry are
really smart and would not have put the industry on a collision course with a scarcity
of key resources. Therefore, continuous exponential growth in demand for these
and other metals would not be a problem.
But I imagined a much different world, one in which public officials and
corporate leaders acted heedlessly based almost solely on the exigencies
of the moment. I wrote at the time that the kind of denialism on display
with this computer professional was perhaps the hardest to cut through:
"If one admits this kind of incompetence is possible, then it
implies that we could be hitting limits all over the place which have not
been foreseen by corporate and government planners. That would mean a
complete readjustment of one's world view and a concentrated dose of fear
and uncertainty to boot."
The alarm sounded by the IEA last week is not the first since my 2009
piece. But the alarms are coming more frequently. Just last December I
wrote about a report from the European Commission touching on the
same issue. Usually, when high government officials start talking publicly
about critical shortages, the world is already far along into the
shortage. That's when such problems get moved from the back burner—if they
are on any burner at all—to the front burner because they are now visible
and officials are forced to acknowledge them.
Acknowledgement is not resolution, however. Part of the difficulty in
solving this emerging shortage is that the mining required to solve it is
unspeakably polluting. This cements my belief that the chief source of
problems is solutions to other problems. We have gotten ourselves into
such loops because we believe that technology itself equals solutions
rather than simply more and different problems. To get out of that loop we
would need to go beyond technology to rethinking our entire way of life.
I don't expect the European Commission or the IEA to do that. But the
emerging shortage of these critical minerals forces us all at least to
confront the possibility that technology will not preserve our precious
climate all by itself.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider, and many other places. He
is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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