WR1 General Discussion, page-7117

FWIW I suspect that he, Mark Mills, is a fifth columnist for the hydrocarbon industries. The context is that he is a senior analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which is effectively an ideas bomb maker and chucker for vested interests. Just as the tobacco industry employed very smart people to try to shoot down arguments that tobacco causes cancer so there would be very smart people looking to damage any push away from hydrocarbons. My guess is Mr Mills is one of those very smart people and his presentation to Skagen Funds, which is a Norwegian funds manager, is one such effort.

The basic premise that the world does not have the capacity to change from hydrocarbons to electricity is bunkum. No-one knew of the Saudi oil fields existed when ICE transportation became the chosen one. It was a leap into the unknown then and we adapted to nail it. Humans are extremely adaptable - that is why we are at the top of the food chain - and if we cannot get "there" with just lithium then we'll also use solid state lithium and vanadium and sodium or something else yet to be identified. There's a famous pair of photos of Broadway in New York, one from 1907 which was jam packed with horse drawn vehicles and a single motor car and the other from 1917 which was jam packed with motor cars and with a single horse drawn vehicle. As numerous analysts, such as Cathie Wood and Tony Seba, keep harping on about changes tend to follow an S curve: change starts off slowly then everything happens in a rush and then everything begins to adjust into a steady state. We are clearly up the top of the S curve, and Mark Mills' comment that as clean energy only contributes 3% of energy it is a non-event is wilfully disingenuous. Same as with his point about the CO2 emissions - of course that will be the case as long as hydrocarbons are used to make electricity and to drive mining operations and transport.

But as a very smart person Mark Mills knows to base some / much of his argument on solid facts to give it credibility, such as far too little money is currently being invested in producing stuff like lithium and graphite and copper and so there will be sustained high prices for those materials. Which I guess is where you and I come in. My thesis is that we are at the top of the S curve of change, that the world needs multiples of those materials, that there will be a long term shortage of those materials and that I know and invest in a small group of companies that are setting themselves up to be major supplies of those materials.

Anyway I thought his was a sophisticated and interesting attempt to misinform the discussion.