From the abstract: "Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Many of the technology metals alre

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.