The Hump - by Ed Conway - Material World

#environment #climate #pollution #resources

The charts underline an important point. We use an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels each year (far, far more than most people appreciate). And the main message from this chart is that while we’ll certainly need to do a lot of mining to get the copper, lithium, cobalt etc we’ll need, that weight of “new” stuff will be far less than the weight of all the fossil fuels we’re no longer using.

But the chart, which begins at around 2020, seems to suggest that this is happening now.

In other words, far from increasing in the short to medium term, as I wrote in my book, it looks tantalisingly as if humanity’s material footprint is actually about to fall immediately.

https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-hump