New standards needed for the clean energy technology supply chain

New standards needed for the clean energy technology supply chain

This year's G7 meeting is the middle of a three-act play “” after President Biden's Climate Leaders' Summit, and before the Climate Conference of the Parties in Glasgow.

In fact, according to UN Climate Change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa, the decisions the G7 makes in the next few weeks will have a major impact on the success of COP26, a truly green recovery from the pandemic, and whether nations reach their long-term goals under the Paris Agreement.

As such, this G7 may be more consequential than a simple gathering of western powers reading high-level talking points. Rather, this year's gathering may set the contours of a new global economy.

Meeting the Paris targets will require an unprecedented deployment of clean energy technologies at scale. This policy-induced demand will trigger a corresponding and exponential demand for several critical minerals. The International Energy Agency projects that we would need to quadruple current mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040 and increase them six-fold to achieve net-zero by 2050.

Consider the scale of the challenge before us. In the last 5,000 years, humans produced about 550m tons of copper. We will need to produce that much again in the next 25 years to electrify the globe.

Yet, today's