Is material abundance actually possible?: Resource realists

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In 2021, the IEA published a chart that should have ended several careers’ worth of optimism. To decarbonize by 2040: six times more lithium, three times more cobalt, four times more nickel than 2020 extraction. The lithium alone requires forty to fifty new mines — each taking seven to fifteen years from discovery to production, each facing permitting battles and water-use conflicts.

We count things. Not projections. Not theoretical reserves. The actual, extractable, processable tonnage. The count is the argument.

The post-scarcity theorists describe cheap solar. We have no quarrel with the cost curve. What solar does not become is a battery, a transmission line, or a semiconductor. The abundance story is about the numerator. We look at the denominator.

Cobalt: 65 percent from the Congo, artisanal mines employing children as young as seven. Lithium: the Salar de Atacama requires 500,000 gallons of water per ton, in one of the driest places on earth. Rare earths: China controls 60 percent of mining and 90 percent of processing. One country. One chokepoint. The nation-state dynamics the theorists ignore are the abundance question.

The technologists understand materials better than the theorists. They argue in units. Where we push back: learning curves are S-curves, not exponentials. Solar costs fell 99 percent and will not fall another 99 percent because the floor is materials, labor, and land. Each has a physical minimum.

Thermodynamics is the wall nobody mentions at the TED Talk. The minimum energy to desalinate a liter is set by physics. No engineering changes the theoretical limit. Every abundance projection promising near-zero cost for physical goods collides with thermodynamic floors.

Where we concede ground: The Club of Rome predicted collapse by 2000. Every Malthusian prediction has been defeated by ingenuity. We stand in that tradition.

What would change our mind: Viable substitutes for lithium, cobalt, and rare earths reaching commercial scale from abundant materials, holding performance five years.

Read the full synthesis: Is material abundance actually possible?