Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

In fact, a better number to focus on is not the reserves figure miners usually cite, but another number: the resources. Resources, it turns out, are a measure not just of what we have already pencilled in for future extraction, but all the metal under the ground, including stuff yet to be discovered. The figures here clearly involve a lot more guesswork, but they are also somewhat more reassuring: according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the world’s total copper resources are 5.6 billion tonnes, of which we have already discovered 2.1 billion tonnes. This works out at roughly 226 years’ worth of our annual copper consumption today—or about 115 years based on our consumption in a decade’s time, when the green energy transition is in full flow.[20] Yet there are, of course, consequences to all of this. The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual copper production by 2.6 per cent. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75 per cent. The most staggering thing about this statistic, however, is not just the numbers themselves but the fact that they show up in no environmental accounts or material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measures of how much humans are affecting the planet, this ...