Thread by @wang_seaver

Amused that Alexander Zaitchik @newrepublic attacks @billmckibben’s citation of my paper on clean tech minerals in critiquing McKibben’s “ecomodernist optimism” on green growth, yet doesn’t point to anything specifically wrong with my research.

Spoiler: I’m right.🧵

I think this is an example of the shallowness of some pushback against ecomodernism. Despite revering "scientific" refutations of growth, critics often don’t actually read underlying research, let alone offer specific critiques of research they dislike.

newrepublic.com/article/199748…

Zaitchik’s core critique of my work is:
- I find global mineral reserves suffice for decarbonizing the power generation sector to 2050 for nearly all minerals in 75 scenarios.
- but another Cornell/UMichigan study finds copper can’t “be mined fast enough” to electrify the US.

To which I point out:
1) “the Earth has enough copper” and “we can’t mine it fast enough” are not contradictory
2) Zaitchik misstates Cornell/UMich study as results for the US when it actually reports world supply/demand, probably since the news article he read was misleading.

3) related to 1), it’s untrue copper can’t be mined fast enough to electrify the US. We published another study finding the US from 2025-2050 would need 33 to 36 million tons copper for low-carbon electrification (power generation + EVs + transmission)

thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…

Global copper refinery production in 2023 was 27 million tons, so we’re talking 1.5 yrs of global copper output to take care of the whole US energy transition for the next 25 yrs. Our two scenarios both targeted a net-zero power sector by 2050.

Our scenarios give an avg US annual copper need of 1.1 to 1.6 million tons, vs US mine + recycling production of 1.25 million tons in 2023. Add imports (0.89 million t in 2023) and the supply picture hardly seems dire.

Copper can likely be mined fast enough to electrify the US.

On 2), the Cornell/UMich study (Cathles and Simon) **agrees** with our conclusion that “copper resources are available”
“There is plenty of copper available. The concern is that we may not be able to mine the copper resource fast enough.”

.ief.org/reports/copper…

Zaitchik misstates the scope of the Cathles + Simon paper as “copper—cannot be mined fast enough to electrify the United States, never mind the planet.”

This is probably because he read the circulated UMich press article but never read the actual study:
techxplore.com/news/2024-05-c…

Zaitchik’s description of Cathles + Simon’s paper is factually wrong. A more accurate summary would be:

“global copper demand in 2050 may require copper production to increase from today’s 27 Mt/yr to ~44 Mt/yr, of which EV + grid upgrades might comprise 8 Mt/yr”

(The actual study compared global copper mine output versus demand from EVs + EV grid upgrades for a fairly ambitious scenario of full substitution of the global vehicle fleet with EVs by 2050, atop a baseline projection for rest-of-society copper demand from another paper)

I’ll note this finding of medium-term supply/demand imbalance for copper is not only well-known but fairly atypical, with the IEA 2025 critical minerals outlook identifying copper + lithium as exceptions to otherwise likely adequate future supply of energy transition minerals.

Increasing copper supply is a solvable problem. The IEA’s set of minerals with potential supply/demand imbalance is a few items smaller than yrs ago!

Copper supply hardly blows a fatal hole in my paper’s finding that we’re mostly okay resource-wise.

iea.org/reports/global…

Finally, Zaitchik misreads our research as well if he thinks measures to address demand are a silver bullet for mineral constraints. Our paper did actually evaluate a Low Energy Demand (LED) IPCC modeling scenario and found it to actually require more minerals on average, because energy transition mineral demand is actually much sensitive to the desired speed of decarbonization (e.g. 1.5C vs Lower 2C versus higher 2C) than it is to the level of societal energy consumption per se. A more ambitious climate target requires more minerals faster. It's just math. You're rebuilding the entire global energy system.

At any rate, if Zaitchik does not like our modeling scenarios, he can take the issue up with the IPCC since that is where we adapted literally every scenario from. Our paper simply calculates the materials implied by the level of solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear, etc… deployed in 75 of the scenarios presented in the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) 1.5C Scenario Explorer and “underpinning the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2018.”

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Additionally, my work does consider recycling, which reduces demand but only modestly. Myself, Zaitchik, and probably everyone all agree that recycling is important to invest in and expand.

But the minerals supply side of decarbonization must go much deeper than "recycle more"

Meanwhile, ecomodernists continue to support an actual option for reducing energy transition minerals demand that many critics of ecomodernism and proponents of demand reduction see as taboo and won't even talk about.

Nuclear power.

thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…

In any event there is great irony in Zaitchik labeling @billmckibben's citation of my work as a selective narrative that ignores competing research results while misreading those research results thanks to relying on a secondhand summary of them. (END)

newrepublic.com/article/199748…