The world isn’t cutting greenhouse gas emissions with anything like the speed required to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change, as the latest UN climate report published this month affirmed. Despite this, it’s become a trope of sorts to warn that we’re in danger of going too fast.The overlapping drivers and effects of the Russian military offensive in Ukraine, Covid-related supply chain disruptions and rising inflation have all fuelled a set of haphazard narratives that the clean energy transition will be highly inflationary — or, alternatively, that it will stall.The worries usually centre on the implications of soaring demand for commodities such as cobalt, lithium, nickel and copper that are used for electric vehicles, solar PV cells, wind turbines and electrical grids.Isabel Schnabel of Germany’s Bundesbank spoke in January about the inflationary effects…
Why the clean energy transition is not suffering from a lack of resources
