Heard the joke about the traveller in Ireland who asked a farmer the best way to Dublin? “Well, if I were you,” answered the farmer, “I wouldn’t start from here.”

Much the same could be said about our quest for a flourishing future. We tend to look on our economy as demand-driven – if we need more energy, we’ll build more power generation; if we need more steel, someone somewhere will mine and refine more ore. But our economy has such long and labyrinthine supply chains that we have little sense of how easy or hard things are between here and the other end of them. And, as the Irish farmer implied, formidable obstacles are on the way.

Sometimes we get rude supply chain reminders. Covid lockdown was a classic, and olive oil users know the price went ballistic because climate change knocked out 70% of the Spanish olive crop. And when it comes to minerals, plenty of rude reminders are charging over the horizon.

Simon Michaux, an Aussie professor of geometallurgy working in Finland, has sounded the alarm for years. Michaux has performed eyewatering calculations on the global demands of the energy transition. Then, as if that’s not enough, he’s assessed the global capacity to meet those demands. And the two are poles apart. (Check out youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc, but expect a headache!).

In short, we can’t even deliver the first round of global electrification, let alone sustain such a system. “We need more than six times the mined copper throughout history,” Michaux says, like he’s reading a recipe. “And that’s for just one generation. Then, 20 years later, we do it all again, somehow … We need to come up with a different plan.”

The International Energy Agency’s Critical Minerals Report 2025 is worried, too, especially (but not only) about copper. “Despite strong copper demand from electrification, the current mine project pipeline points to a potential 30% supply shortfall by 2035.”

That’s huge! Once again, it looks like we’ll be learning the hard way that minerals are a lot more than what economists call a “derived demand”.

Toronto’s Lloyd Alter, writing in Carbon Upfront, picked up on the IEA’s alarm. “Do we need so many electric cars?” he asks. “Do they have to be so big? You can run 300 e-bikes with the batteries in one Rivian pickup truck – would we not be smarter to invest in making our roads safe for them?” (Equals: ‘We need to come up with a different plan.’)

Enter Morgan Sherburn of the University of Michigan. In an article called Mining enough copper to develop the world will require its price to more than double, he notes: “The world can mine copper to fuel the green energy transition, or it can mine copper to build the infrastructure of developing countries – but it will be extraordinarily difficult to do both.”

It seems the best way to the future we expect is not to start from here. But in that case, we’d better change our expectations because we’re sure as hell stuck with “here”.

Lindsay Wood, MNZM, runs climate strategy company Resilienz Ltd. He is active in policy, and on IT tools for decarbonisation, and speaks, writes and broadcasts widely on climate issues. In 2024 he was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to climate awareness and environmental sustainability.