The Sobering Maths of Going Green
We are constantly being told about our glorious, clean, electric future. Politicians stand at podiums, beaming, as they promise a world powered by the wind and sun. It all sounds rather lovely, doesn't it? There is just one grubby, inconvenient little problem. We don't have the raw materials to build it.
I find the numbers quite staggering. Every electric vehicle you see gliding silently down the road requires about four times more copper than its petrol-guzzling cousin. Every giant wind turbine, a modern steel monument to our green ambitions, needs nearly five tonnes of the stuff. This isn't some far-off projection, it's the simple, unavoidable maths of the transition. The International Energy Agency, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, is already warning of severe shortages by 2030. To me, this looks less like a smooth transition and more like a traffic jam on the road to net-zero.