9 ms·

The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth (2021) [pdf]

84 points by simonpure 4y ago

Vox_Leone 4y ago
A superb work that encapsulates the most pressing problems of the current times: the interplay between sustainability and the pressure for economic growth. Few issues are as consequential as these nowadays. Thanks for sharing.
legitster 4y ago
In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy: Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste high with pistachios - you could go in and eat as many as you wanted, but the shells will always have to be left behind. They start out easy and plentiful to grab, and you could easily do some math about how long this room of pistachios will last you. So on paper you are sure to run out. But in practice, you'll just spend longer going into the room every time to get what you want, and gradually stop going altogether - actually running out of nuts is pretty much impossible. You will almost never naturally run out of stuff. Low prices make them leave it in the ground - high prices makes people find substitutes. We're just in a weird place were China might be dumping money to artificially keep some resource prices low and still extracting tons of it.
- titzer 4y ago
  Tell that to the whales. Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain. Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.
  - legitster 4y ago
    Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
    - pjmorris 4y ago
      > Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.
      - legitster 4y ago
        Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon: mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium. But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard argument to make that there are specific material limits to economic growth.
        sbf501 4y ago
        It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) map of population death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/File:Ireland_population_change_1841_1851.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...
        scottLobster 4y ago
        I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.
        4y ago
- Paedor 4y ago
  It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.
  - legitster 4y ago
    > you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need pistachios, most rational people will start looking elsewhere. A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people from exploring them.
    - boringg 4y ago
      De-sal super expensive and has issues - isn't a silver bullet as proponents like to make it out to be.
      - acidburnNSA 4y ago
        Is it more expensive than running out of water though?
        adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        If the cost of running out of water is shutting down a few acres of almond farms, probably.
        pyuser583 4y ago
        It’s more expensive than other alternatives to running out of water. For example, mining fresh water from below the ocean floor.
    - lazide 4y ago
      The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t. Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use. But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine. So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here. Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Plenty of island communities actually ran out of resources, especially firewood.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Rare earth are not rare Euros just don't want the environmental problems and cancer cases. Even Serbia went full nimby on mining them lol.
nickpinkston 4y ago
First: The "Limits to Growth" language here is hyperbolic, and this report was commissioned by (and this PDF is hosted on the site of) a green materials/mining agency* GTK that has a "Circular Economy" project about material reuse. So this is clearly coming from a perspective of advocacy and economic interest. Second: If you actually read the paper, they freely admit that this isn't about minerals "running out", but more that they're becoming harder to extract - especially regarding more money / energy / water. The classic issue with this is that these models are highly sensitive to technological change, which is in turn driven by the economic realities involved. We've all seen what chips, PV panels, etc. when these all align. To wit, note that while there is a long analysis of how current mining practice is getting harder, there is no discussion of the pace of innovation in mining tech and the trends by which it would be adopted. An example of one tech that addresses their copper ore grade issue is biomining [1], which is using microorganisms to process the ore. This isn't widespread yet, but is in development because the industry already knows this is a problem. The mining industry and commodities more broadly actually suffer from boom and bust cycles with respect to their CapEx invested and payback period - ie everyone frantically fracks for gas until the price goes through the floor and they all go bankrupt. So resource extraction is more about economic viability than technical constraints like the author suggests. TL;DR: We're not in danger of long-term shortages of minerals, just shocks like we're having with oil, but these pose no danger to encountering any "limits to growth" anytime soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining * Corrected from "company" from comment below.
- ulrashida 4y ago
  All credit to my colleagues in academia, but the pace of technological change in mining is often wildly overstated by mining companies as an attempt to attract investors, greenwash, or genuine misunderstanding of the underlying technology. Most notably, many of the newer techs encounter meaningful difficulties as they attempt to scale. Nearly all of the advances in current mining have been either driving economies of scale (larger trucks, larger plants, block caving undergrounds) or sweating efficiencies (electronic detonators, computer-assisted monitoring and design, reprocessing tailings). One of the great things about mining is the ability to simultaneously accept there is often lots of free cash flow around to invest in the next great thing while acknowledging the brutal realities that all the tech in the world won't help if you don't have a matching orebody. While the author does a messy job of their pitch, it's indisputable that the overall quality and size of deposits is going down over time. For many of us in the industry, we know that the problem is not going to be running out but rather is society able to handle increasingly frequent supply/demand shocks without losing the collective plot. We already see a bit of this tension now: for every bio-mining initiative we have another set of lunatics who are proposing to "mine" sea beds. There are interesting times ahead.
mikewarot 4y ago
I don't dispute the validity of the claims made at all, however I believe strongly that failing global transport networks and population crashes are going to swamp these effects in terms of our day to day existence, and make it far worse. The security that allowed global transport of goods across the "free world" was a bribe offered by the United States to buy compliance from other nations for its security policies against the Soviet Union. We're backing away from those promises now that the cold war was won. The urbanization of the world has had some long term consequences, as people move into urban areas, the have fewer children, leading to many populations not having sufficient numbers of children and younger people entering the population pyramid to support those older than themselves. China has a real problem they can't solve in this regard. Deglobalization has begun, supply chains that rely on cheap reliable trans-national shipping are unsustainable, and need to be replaced. This compounds the effects highlighted in the original posting. It's not pessimistic enough!
- cannaceo 4y ago
  Someone has been reading their Zeihan! As a counterpoint--do you think there are other export-led countries such as China that are more than willing to guarantee the transit of their goods in exchange for people continuing to buy them? I think the answer to that question is clear.
  - DavidPiper 4y ago
    Ha! I was going to write exactly the same thing. I've watched a few of his talks and bought one of his books the other day. General question about Zeihan -- how substantial is his work? I think he makes compelling arguments and speaks/writes very well, but as a non-US citizen I don't really have enough historical or even present-day context to know where he sits on the hyperbole-realism scale. He's very thought-provoking though, regardless.
    - mikewarot 4y ago
      The population pyramids and demographic arguments seem to be rock solid. I've watched a ton of his appearances on YouTube going back almost a decade, and he doesn't vary his story, except to accommodate facts as they became known, it's very consistent. I'm worried about people in the rest of the world... even here in the least climate effected part of the US, I know the next decade or two are going to be rough, especially if our leadership fails to improve. I'm fairly certain he's right on almost everything. I haven't found any huge nits to pick.
yazzku 4y ago
This is a great report, thanks for sharing.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
There's a 15 minute YouTube presentation of the 72-page doc (by the author): https://youtu.be/JRGVqBScBRE https://youtu.be/JRGVqBScBRE
- elihu 4y ago
  There's also this much longer talk he gave that I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc The premise is that we don't have enough minerals to transition to a decarbonized economy if we just do the most obvious, naive thing. For some reason, he assumes we need a battery capable of storing the world's energy use for 4 weeks, and then shows that there's no way we can manufacture that amount of lithium ion batteries. His analysis also assumes pretty heavy use of hydrogen for ground transport to get around the limitations of batteries, despite being rather energy-inefficient by comparison. I'm actually kind of optimistic: his result just means we can't do things that don't scale, but we could do other things instead. Rather than building huge chemical batteries for grid storage, we can use pumped hydro and expand our power grids so we can move energy between continents and buffer out renewable energy variability and day/night cycles. Instead of using hydrogen fuel cells or huge batteries for ground transport, we can electrify our major highways so trucks only need small batteries to get from the freeway to their delivery/pickup point. (We could also rely on trains a lot more than we do.) Instead of building billions of brand new cars, we can convert many of the cars we already have to electric if they're still in good shape and worth the effort. We can stop using so much copper in everything, and use aluminum instead where it makes sense.
jwie 4y ago
I suppose we’ll have to mine asteroids for these minerals. Probably better get back on that “space” thing.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  There are probably economically exploitable deposits of most of these minerals left, but the current business environment disincentivizes exploration and the political situation in many of the countries that have lots of mineral resources makes big projects hard to fund/manage.
  - jwie 4y ago
    Yes. It’s weird that moving an asteroid into orbit and taking its stuff is probably easier than being allowed to take the stuff from the ground. But here we are. I find the asteroid mining interesting because it introduces post scarcity levels of raw materials, even rare earth elements needed for advanced applications.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Right, we cannot sustainably manage the planet upon which we evolved, so the next step is deplete what remains seeking shelter in an environment hostile to life.
halffaday 4y ago
I don’t see any concerns not addressed by markets. If iron becomes expensive to extract, it becomes expensive to buy, and people use it carefully. At one point unused cabins were burned down to salvage the nails. I just don’t understand the mindset of the humble author that the rubes are too stupid to modify prices or behavior, so they will just die en masse unless some heroic NGO gets enough donations to save them.
tuatoru 4y ago
From the abstract: "Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Many of the technology metals already have primary resource mining supply risks.." Not true. For a PV and storage based economy we need plastics, some lead and barium for perovskites, iron and aluminum for structures and machinery. Some sodium also. Some copper would be helpful for wiring. Storage can be iron-based, sodium-based, aluminum based or lithium based, as at present. Apart from perhaps barium (for which there are many substitutes, some possibly better), none of these are rare or difficult to mine, and all are mined in large quantities. The materials we need most of are already being mined in quantities greater than a PV-based society needs. This paper suffers from the same problem that nearly everyone writing about this has: they assume the current situation is fixed, and we can't do anything different. Fossil fuel lobbyists have use this to argue that renewables are too expensive the whole way down their price curve. INET Oxford published a working paper with charts that nicely illustrate this "we're stopped!" fixation.[1] The real problems we face are all political. The physico-chemical realities are that we are living on top of a deep pile of substitution turtles, and the "status quo" is about trends, not levels. 1. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-grounded-technology-forecasts-and-the-energy-transition/ https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-g... Look at figure 2 on page 4.
ggm 4y ago
It doesn't mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager It is possible to be "right in principle but wrong in practice" about things like resource limits to growth. Particularly about the cost of extraction, and the supply chain logistics. I think that the limits which exist here probably lie out beyond practical considerations in the known reserves, mines and processing chains. A lot of discussion about lithium (for instance) posit "what if we converted all cars now to lithium" forgetting that to do that means replacing hundreds of millions of things, which in turn implies factories, ships, shops, tyres, lightbulbs. What actually happens is there is a logistic supply curve change from the dynamics of ICE engines to EV engines, which takes time and we argue about the slope of the line, but there IS no cliff event of 100,000,000 cars being deployed on lithium at once. So, I really wonder at a 2021 paper which doesn't even reflect on the history of the claims.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I watched this guy's Youtube video and think he's a kook, but interested in reading this to see what he says.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  There are multiple questionable assumptions but I'll focus on one early one. "There is a current paradigm to phase out fossil fuels and all associated infrastructure. This will require an unprecedented volume of metals of all kinds. In particular, technology metals. Technology metals are the building materials needed to manufacture much of current state-of-the-art technology. Technology metals could include: Be, B, Sc, V, Ga, Ge, Se, Sr, Y, Zr, In, Te, Cs, Ba, La, Hf, Ta, Os, Tl, Li, Ru, W, Cd, Hg, Sb, Ir, Mo and Mg." This appears to be a random selection of metals, presented without justification. Nothing about transitioning away from fossil energy requires more mercury, osmium, strontium, barium, or thallium. They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells. Did the author actually have other energy-transition-critical applications in mind or is he just trying to dazzle with quantity?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc. It's also used in the production of batteries. You're supposed to recycle your AA batteries, for instance, because of the mercuric-oxide.
    - philipkglass 4y ago
      Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc. What is thallium needed for in semiconductor manufacturing? I tried searching Google Scholar and didn't turn up anything relevant. I've never seen thallium mentioned alongside semiconductor production in chemistry handbooks or chemical engineering encyclopedias either. Global thallium production declined from 15,000 kilograms in 1994 [1] to less than 8,000 kilograms in 2018 [2] even as semiconductor production volumes increased enormously, so I am skeptical that thallium is needed for semiconductor production. Mercury is banned in alkaline batteries in the US since 1996: https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries Panasonic claims that the battery mercury ban is worldwide now (and they should know), but unfortunately does not cite the relevant legislation: https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/mercury-batteries-why-they-were-popular-and-banned https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/mercury-batterie... [1] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 1996: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/thallium/thallmcs96.pdf https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/... [2] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 2018: https://d9-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/atoms/files/mcs-2019-thall.pdf https://d9-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...

84 points by simonpure 4y ago

A superb work that encapsulates the most pressing problems of the current times: the interplay between sustainability and the pressure for economic growth. Few issues are as consequential as these nowadays. Thanks for sharing.

legitster 4y ago

In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy: Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste high with pistachios - you could go in and eat as many as you wanted, but the shells will always have to be left behind. They start out easy and plentiful to grab, and you could easily do some math about how long this room of pistachios will last you. So on paper you are sure to run out. But in practice, you'll just spend longer going into the room every time to get what you want, and gradually stop going altogether - actually running out of nuts is pretty much impossible. You will almost never naturally run out of stuff. Low prices make them leave it in the ground - high prices makes people find substitutes. We're just in a weird place were China might be dumping money to artificially keep some resource prices low and still extracting tons of it.

titzer 4y ago
Tell that to the whales. Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain. Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.
- legitster 4y ago
  Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
  - pjmorris 4y ago
    > Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain. I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.
    - legitster 4y ago
      Oh sure. But this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon: mammoths, the rainforests of Scotland, silphium. But as a response to the paper, I just think it's a hard argument to make that there are specific material limits to economic growth.
      - sbf501 4y ago
        It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) map of population death toll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/File:Ireland_population_change_1841_1851.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...
        scottLobster 4y ago
        I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.
        4y ago
Paedor 4y ago
It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.
- legitster 4y ago
  > you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need pistachios, most rational people will start looking elsewhere. A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people from exploring them.
  - boringg 4y ago
    De-sal super expensive and has issues - isn't a silver bullet as proponents like to make it out to be.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Is it more expensive than running out of water though?
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        If the cost of running out of water is shutting down a few acres of almond farms, probably.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        It’s more expensive than other alternatives to running out of water. For example, mining fresh water from below the ocean floor.
  - lazide 4y ago
    The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t. Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use. But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine. So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here. Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.
imtringued 4y ago
Plenty of island communities actually ran out of resources, especially firewood.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Rare earth are not rare Euros just don't want the environmental problems and cancer cases. Even Serbia went full nimby on mining them lol.

nickpinkston 4y ago

First: The "Limits to Growth" language here is hyperbolic, and this report was commissioned by (and this PDF is hosted on the site of) a green materials/mining agency* GTK that has a "Circular Economy" project about material reuse. So this is clearly coming from a perspective of advocacy and economic interest. Second: If you actually read the paper, they freely admit that this isn't about minerals "running out", but more that they're becoming harder to extract - especially regarding more money / energy / water. The classic issue with this is that these models are highly sensitive to technological change, which is in turn driven by the economic realities involved. We've all seen what chips, PV panels, etc. when these all align. To wit, note that while there is a long analysis of how current mining practice is getting harder, there is no discussion of the pace of innovation in mining tech and the trends by which it would be adopted. An example of one tech that addresses their copper ore grade issue is biomining [1], which is using microorganisms to process the ore. This isn't widespread yet, but is in development because the industry already knows this is a problem. The mining industry and commodities more broadly actually suffer from boom and bust cycles with respect to their CapEx invested and payback period - ie everyone frantically fracks for gas until the price goes through the floor and they all go bankrupt. So resource extraction is more about economic viability than technical constraints like the author suggests. TL;DR: We're not in danger of long-term shortages of minerals, just shocks like we're having with oil, but these pose no danger to encountering any "limits to growth" anytime soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining * Corrected from "company" from comment below.

ulrashida 4y ago
All credit to my colleagues in academia, but the pace of technological change in mining is often wildly overstated by mining companies as an attempt to attract investors, greenwash, or genuine misunderstanding of the underlying technology. Most notably, many of the newer techs encounter meaningful difficulties as they attempt to scale. Nearly all of the advances in current mining have been either driving economies of scale (larger trucks, larger plants, block caving undergrounds) or sweating efficiencies (electronic detonators, computer-assisted monitoring and design, reprocessing tailings). One of the great things about mining is the ability to simultaneously accept there is often lots of free cash flow around to invest in the next great thing while acknowledging the brutal realities that all the tech in the world won't help if you don't have a matching orebody. While the author does a messy job of their pitch, it's indisputable that the overall quality and size of deposits is going down over time. For many of us in the industry, we know that the problem is not going to be running out but rather is society able to handle increasingly frequent supply/demand shocks without losing the collective plot. We already see a bit of this tension now: for every bio-mining initiative we have another set of lunatics who are proposing to "mine" sea beds. There are interesting times ahead.

mikewarot 4y ago

I don't dispute the validity of the claims made at all, however I believe strongly that failing global transport networks and population crashes are going to swamp these effects in terms of our day to day existence, and make it far worse. The security that allowed global transport of goods across the "free world" was a bribe offered by the United States to buy compliance from other nations for its security policies against the Soviet Union. We're backing away from those promises now that the cold war was won. The urbanization of the world has had some long term consequences, as people move into urban areas, the have fewer children, leading to many populations not having sufficient numbers of children and younger people entering the population pyramid to support those older than themselves. China has a real problem they can't solve in this regard. Deglobalization has begun, supply chains that rely on cheap reliable trans-national shipping are unsustainable, and need to be replaced. This compounds the effects highlighted in the original posting. It's not pessimistic enough!

cannaceo 4y ago
Someone has been reading their Zeihan! As a counterpoint--do you think there are other export-led countries such as China that are more than willing to guarantee the transit of their goods in exchange for people continuing to buy them? I think the answer to that question is clear.
- DavidPiper 4y ago
  Ha! I was going to write exactly the same thing. I've watched a few of his talks and bought one of his books the other day. General question about Zeihan -- how substantial is his work? I think he makes compelling arguments and speaks/writes very well, but as a non-US citizen I don't really have enough historical or even present-day context to know where he sits on the hyperbole-realism scale. He's very thought-provoking though, regardless.
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    The population pyramids and demographic arguments seem to be rock solid. I've watched a ton of his appearances on YouTube going back almost a decade, and he doesn't vary his story, except to accommodate facts as they became known, it's very consistent. I'm worried about people in the rest of the world... even here in the least climate effected part of the US, I know the next decade or two are going to be rough, especially if our leadership fails to improve. I'm fairly certain he's right on almost everything. I haven't found any huge nits to pick.

yazzku 4y ago

This is a great report, thanks for sharing.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

There's a 15 minute YouTube presentation of the 72-page doc (by the author): https://youtu.be/JRGVqBScBRE https://youtu.be/JRGVqBScBRE

elihu 4y ago
There's also this much longer talk he gave that I watched recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc The premise is that we don't have enough minerals to transition to a decarbonized economy if we just do the most obvious, naive thing. For some reason, he assumes we need a battery capable of storing the world's energy use for 4 weeks, and then shows that there's no way we can manufacture that amount of lithium ion batteries. His analysis also assumes pretty heavy use of hydrogen for ground transport to get around the limitations of batteries, despite being rather energy-inefficient by comparison. I'm actually kind of optimistic: his result just means we can't do things that don't scale, but we could do other things instead. Rather than building huge chemical batteries for grid storage, we can use pumped hydro and expand our power grids so we can move energy between continents and buffer out renewable energy variability and day/night cycles. Instead of using hydrogen fuel cells or huge batteries for ground transport, we can electrify our major highways so trucks only need small batteries to get from the freeway to their delivery/pickup point. (We could also rely on trains a lot more than we do.) Instead of building billions of brand new cars, we can convert many of the cars we already have to electric if they're still in good shape and worth the effort. We can stop using so much copper in everything, and use aluminum instead where it makes sense.

jwie 4y ago

I suppose we’ll have to mine asteroids for these minerals. Probably better get back on that “space” thing.

jeffreyrogers 4y ago
There are probably economically exploitable deposits of most of these minerals left, but the current business environment disincentivizes exploration and the political situation in many of the countries that have lots of mineral resources makes big projects hard to fund/manage.
- jwie 4y ago
  Yes. It’s weird that moving an asteroid into orbit and taking its stuff is probably easier than being allowed to take the stuff from the ground. But here we are. I find the asteroid mining interesting because it introduces post scarcity levels of raw materials, even rare earth elements needed for advanced applications.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
Right, we cannot sustainably manage the planet upon which we evolved, so the next step is deplete what remains seeking shelter in an environment hostile to life.

halffaday 4y ago

I don’t see any concerns not addressed by markets. If iron becomes expensive to extract, it becomes expensive to buy, and people use it carefully. At one point unused cabins were burned down to salvage the nails. I just don’t understand the mindset of the humble author that the rubes are too stupid to modify prices or behavior, so they will just die en masse unless some heroic NGO gets enough donations to save them.

tuatoru 4y ago

From the abstract: "Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Many of the technology metals already have primary resource mining supply risks.." Not true. For a PV and storage based economy we need plastics, some lead and barium for perovskites, iron and aluminum for structures and machinery. Some sodium also. Some copper would be helpful for wiring. Storage can be iron-based, sodium-based, aluminum based or lithium based, as at present. Apart from perhaps barium (for which there are many substitutes, some possibly better), none of these are rare or difficult to mine, and all are mined in large quantities. The materials we need most of are already being mined in quantities greater than a PV-based society needs. This paper suffers from the same problem that nearly everyone writing about this has: they assume the current situation is fixed, and we can't do anything different. Fossil fuel lobbyists have use this to argue that renewables are too expensive the whole way down their price curve. INET Oxford published a working paper with charts that nicely illustrate this "we're stopped!" fixation.[1] The real problems we face are all political. The physico-chemical realities are that we are living on top of a deep pile of substitution turtles, and the "status quo" is about trends, not levels. 1. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-grounded-technology-forecasts-and-the-energy-transition/ https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-g... Look at figure 2 on page 4.

ggm 4y ago

It doesn't mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager It is possible to be "right in principle but wrong in practice" about things like resource limits to growth. Particularly about the cost of extraction, and the supply chain logistics. I think that the limits which exist here probably lie out beyond practical considerations in the known reserves, mines and processing chains. A lot of discussion about lithium (for instance) posit "what if we converted all cars now to lithium" forgetting that to do that means replacing hundreds of millions of things, which in turn implies factories, ships, shops, tyres, lightbulbs. What actually happens is there is a logistic supply curve change from the dynamics of ICE engines to EV engines, which takes time and we argue about the slope of the line, but there IS no cliff event of 100,000,000 cars being deployed on lithium at once. So, I really wonder at a 2021 paper which doesn't even reflect on the history of the claims.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I watched this guy's Youtube video and think he's a kook, but interested in reading this to see what he says.

philipkglass 4y ago
There are multiple questionable assumptions but I'll focus on one early one. "There is a current paradigm to phase out fossil fuels and all associated infrastructure. This will require an unprecedented volume of metals of all kinds. In particular, technology metals. Technology metals are the building materials needed to manufacture much of current state-of-the-art technology. Technology metals could include: Be, B, Sc, V, Ga, Ge, Se, Sr, Y, Zr, In, Te, Cs, Ba, La, Hf, Ta, Os, Tl, Li, Ru, W, Cd, Hg, Sb, Ir, Mo and Mg." This appears to be a random selection of metals, presented without justification. Nothing about transitioning away from fossil energy requires more mercury, osmium, strontium, barium, or thallium. They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells. Did the author actually have other energy-transition-critical applications in mind or is he just trying to dazzle with quantity?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc. It's also used in the production of batteries. You're supposed to recycle your AA batteries, for instance, because of the mercuric-oxide.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc. What is thallium needed for in semiconductor manufacturing? I tried searching Google Scholar and didn't turn up anything relevant. I've never seen thallium mentioned alongside semiconductor production in chemistry handbooks or chemical engineering encyclopedias either. Global thallium production declined from 15,000 kilograms in 1994 [1] to less than 8,000 kilograms in 2018 [2] even as semiconductor production volumes increased enormously, so I am skeptical that thallium is needed for semiconductor production. Mercury is banned in alkaline batteries in the US since 1996: https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries https://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-batteries Panasonic claims that the battery mercury ban is worldwide now (and they should know), but unfortunately does not cite the relevant legislation: https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/mercury-batteries-why-they-were-popular-and-banned https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/mercury-batterie... [1] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 1996: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/thallium/thallmcs96.pdf https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/... [2] USGS mineral commodity summaries, "thallium", 2018: https://d9-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/atoms/files/mcs-2019-thall.pdf https://d9-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...