The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the world must transition from fossil fuel to renewable power. Their declaration is endorsed by many global institutions, governments, environmentalists, policymakers, and the media. Such a transition means relying primarily on greater use of wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries for electric vehicles. It also means managing grids with increasingly unreliable sources of electricity generation, even as demand rises due to policies seeking to electrify everything else before 2050.
According to the IEA and others, building all that renewable hardware entails a massive fourfold to sixfold increase in the use of critical and rare earth minerals. That unprecedented increase in the volume of these minerals mined and refined will necessarily entail a collateral increase in the need to transport all those gigatons of materials, most of them by sea.
The global maritime industry…
