Where Batteries Come From

Mining for minerals

 
The news: Last week I shared the (fantastic) news that 10% of the globe’s power came from wind and solar in 2021.

The only way forward is up:

-The CEO of the world’s third-biggest supplier of solar panels (so only marginally biased) said solar may generate half the world’s power by 2050

-China may install more wind and solar this year than the rest of the world did combined in 2020

-California — bellwether for the United States — may prohibit new gas or diesel cars by 2035

-Amid drastically increased competition in 2022 and beyond, Tesla blew away expectations in the last quarter

-The IPCC reaffirmed wind and solar as the most impactful and cost-effective ways to decarbonize

We have succeeded — I understand if this word is unfamiliar to you — in bending the curve of global warming outcomes significantly away from “totally fucked”, and a new paper in Nature revealed that if every country fulfills their current climate commitments, we could stay under 2C.

Understand it: As those ever-present stoics are famous for saying — the obstacle is the way.

If wind, solar, and batteries are the necessary infrastructure of the future (cough nuclear), the raw materials to build them — and the economies and geopolitics that profit and benefit from them — will rewrite everything we know.

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