We will not achieve net zero if we have a long-lived shortfall of lithium or copper, which means we need more people with more ingenuity to think about ways of obtaining those minerals. But at the time of writing there was such a dearth of young people wanting to study mining that the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, one of the world’s pre-eminent metallurgy institutions, had suspended new intakes for its mining engineering degree. If there is no one left who knows how to procure the minerals we need, what hope have we then?
