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

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.