The world is running out of time to kick our fossil fuel addiction and stave off the most destructive effects of climate change. To keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, climate scientist Kevin Anderson calculates that we need to cut emissions by 8 percent every year, starting now — which means replacing oil and gas with clean electricity, fast.
But electrification poses its own problems, chiefly that batteries powerful and plentiful enough to run everything from cars to homes to industry require vast quantities of critical minerals like graphite and cobalt. And at present and projected rates, we won’t be able to mine these critical minerals fast enough.
Consider an optimistic scenario in which we need 85 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of battery storage (compared with 140 TWh or more by some estimates) to electrify the global economy. Bloomberg predicts we will only have 7.3 TWh of battery capacity in 2035 — less than 10 percent of what we’d need in this scenario. This pathway is too slow to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.