I’m certainly not the only person who noticed before now that sustaining our
increasing consumption of copper would be difficult as I suggested in my
July 2022 piece entitled "Acceleration
forever? The increasing momentum of mineral extraction." But the
mainstream media now seems to be catching up with the story. The
boom in demand for copper for electronic devices, electric vehicles, and
energy infrastructure is likely to lead to shortages in the next decade.

The Reuters story cited above also tells us that mines take 10 to 20
years to develop AFTER the deposits they are based on are identified.
There is, therefore, little prospect that copper production will be
dramatically increased in the next decade. (I’m assuming that there are
going to be no crash government-subsidized programs and waiving of
environmental and permitting regulations. But, even if such programs and
waivers emerge, I’m not sure they will have much effect in the next
decade or so.)

Copper isn’t the only critical metal of which we may not have enough. The
European Commission noted in a
2020 white paper the growing list of critical minerals, the supply
of which may not be adequate. Some are in demand because they are
important to an increasingly electrified transportation system and the
renewable energy industry. Many so-called Rare
Earth Elements fall into this category. Right now those metals come
primarily from China.

I summarized the mentality that has neglected what to me was an obvious
emerging problem in a
piece I wrote in 2009. Let me quote from that piece:

[A reader] insists that indium simply can’t be that scarce
because–get this–there is indium in billions of electronic devices
including cellphones and computer screens, in fact, in nearly everything
that has a flat-screen display associated with it.

This is curious logic. It says that because we are using a resource
ubiquitously and at an exponentially increasing rate, it must be
plentiful. Now, I would conclude that such a situation would, in fact, be
likely to result in the very scarcity I fear. Of course, it is always
possible that everything will turn out all right with regard to the supply
of critical metals and energy. But given the risks and uncertainty, is it
wise to bet the future of civilization on the most optimistic assumptions?

I realized later that what this computer professional actually meant was
that the corporate and government planners charged with thinking about
resource supply issues couldn’t possibly have made a colossal blunder
which would lead to a catastrophic shortage of key metals in the
electronics industry. He presumed, I think, that such an outcome was
simply out of the question given the competence and intelligence of the
people in his industry.

I think this is really the hardest kind of denial to cut through. If one
admits this kind of incompetence is possible, then it implies that we
could be hitting limits all over the place which have not been foreseen by
corporate and government planners. That would mean a complete readjustment
of one’s world view and a concentrated dose of fear and uncertainty to
boot.

Of course, the long-running denial about limits is what has gotten us to
this point. We won’t get a do-over. We will just have to stumble forward
from here. And, that is what I expect, a lot of stumbling. There will be
finger-pointing and excuses and even recriminations against anyone who can
be labeled an "environmentalist" (and therefore somehow vaguely
responsible for standing in the way of mine development). But there will
be almost no talk of egregiously bad planning and wildly optimistic
cornucopian assumptions.

We live in a world in which the main equation in economics for
calculating production has only two factors, capital and labor—leaving out
the obvious: physical resources. In the Cobb-Douglas
production function, physical resources are assumed to be readily
available in the quantities we require at the time we need them and at prices we
can afford. (By the way, I am no relation to one of the authors of this
function, Charles Cobb.)

So, here we are in 2023 and someone has discovered, "Oops, we don’t have
enough copper to do all the things we think we’ll have to do to support
population growth and an energy transition to renewables." Maybe
everything will work out. But that’s what my reader back in
2009 thought. The truth is that things are NOT working out and we don’t
have plan.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant
who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

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