Lack of sources Alicia Valero: "We are close to reaching the geological limits of the planet"

The work of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, father and daughter, thermodynamic engineers of the University of Zaragoza, is essential to understand the physical and geological limits of planet Earth.In 2014 they published in English a monumental essay on the exhaustion of mineral resources before an economic system based on exponential growth.Recently and with an interview format they published Thanatia, the mineral limits of the planet (2020, Icaria), where they explain didactically and without technicalities what happens when the unlimited consumerism of capitalism clashes with a planet with limited resources.

The crisis of raw materials and the basic components for the technological industry that the global economy experiencethat is needed for the technology industry and the so -called green revolution.As an advisor to large companies, such as Seat, and director of the Industrial Ecology Group at the Energy Resources and Consumption Research Center (Circe), Alicia Valero is an essential voice to approach a problem - the shortage of resources - which recently agoIt was merely theoretical.For this teacher, the lack of raw materials is no longer a future theory or possibility, it is a tangible reality that can only go more if consumption habits are not changed.

It seems that before talking about material scarcity seemed taboo. ¿Esto ha cambiado?Yo creo que sí, ahora la gente lo está viviendo en primera persona.Even the most conservative sectors are already admitting that there may be a serious problem due to shortage.

¿Cuánto tiene de coyuntural y cuánto de estructural esta crisis de desabastecimiento?Es una crisis estructural, aunque obviamente agravada por la pandemia, que sí ha sido coyuntural.We hope that the effects of the coronavirus are referring and the stops due to the pandemic are less and less or even none, and that will favor the factories to return more or less to normal.That said, all this has a common factor, which is that demand has shot exponentially.Factories do not supply to supply so many demand, especially electrical and electronic devices, which require a specialization of factories and people, which are based on elements that are scarce and that, in addition, are controlled by few countries.

We are running with the limits of factories.But if you extrapool this to the great factory that is nature, sooner or later we will also encounter its limits.And if we continue with this exponential consumption those limits are very close.Look, in these 20 years of the 21st century we have extracted both copper and throughout the history of humanity.We are close to reaching the geological limits of the planet.And I do not say that we exhaust all resources, but that we exhaust accessible resources, which are two different things.

¿Ya estamos en ese proceso que algunos llaman colapso o gran escasez o esto es solo una ventana hacia lo que puede pasar en un futuro próximo?Creo que es el principio.It is a window, but we already see the cliff, we are already seeing those unequivocal signs that soon the problems of scarcity will be our daily bread.

Recently the speech about the climatic crisis was mostly theoretical and only now begins to see how any of these warnings become a reality. ¿Está pasando lo mismo con la escasez de materias primas? Sí, está pasando lo mismo.There is talk of climate change, there is talk of the shortage of raw materials, there is talk of the loss of biodiversity...is that everything is related.Precisely, we have a climate change problem due to an overexploitation of fossil resources and if today there is a shortage of oil is because we have consumed it exaggeratedly and this has caused, in turn, the problems we have today of climate change today.The natural network is so complex that you cannot act on a slope and forget about the others.We have a huge natural complexity, which makes it to act on multiple fronts and every time we give a step we must question what the consequences on nature, about society, on the economy, and it is not worth looking only at the economy.

¿Las materias primas que tienen problemas de abastecimiento son las que tienen las reservas más escasas?En parte sí.In fact, we studied in 2018 and analyzed which materials could present bottlenecks and it turns, of nickel—, and for many renewables, such as photovoltaic.

¿El problema con estos minerales es que no hay reservas, que la extracción no es rentable o que está muy concentrada la producción?Hay varios problemas.The first is that since demand is growing so quickly there are no enough reservations in the deposits that are now exploitable today.Of course, new deposits will be found in the future, but to open a new deposit it takes about 15 or 16 years of average.Here there will be a very important decouple between supply and demand.In addition, so far we have extracted the Low Hanging Fruits [fruits at hand], which is easily removable and now there is talk of going to the oceans, the Amazon, the Antarctica, but what cost?Are we willing to sacrifice our natural reserves?

On the other hand, lithium reserves, for example, are concentrated in Australia and in Latin American areas, in the Lithium Triangle.And then that lithium - and all those raw materials and the rare earths - controls them China to refine them...The cobalt is concentrated in the Congo, with all social, political, instability, child labor problems in deplorable conditions...All of that implies that governments such as those of the EU say that it is necessary to extract in the territory itself to avoid that dependency.But almost no one is willing to have a mine or a factory near all the impacts it has and until now produced abroad had been cheaper and, in addition, the pollution was taken by other countries.We have different brakes and different barriers that are physical, but also social and environmental, which make us go scarcity of various types.

There are some signs that indicate that this crisis has reached its peak. ¿Cuánto crees que puede durar todavía esta crisis de materias primas?Poco a poco se irá normalizando, pero no vamos a volver a lo de antes.Just in Time's model, that I request it and tomorrow I have it, I think it will end.We will have to rethink the economy model we are carrying, because to the rhythm of consumption and waste of products that we use it is clear that this is unsustainable and will explode somewhere.Or we do it to good or in the end the physical limits will impose us to regulate the bad.

Given the exhaustion of fossil fuels, great hope is set in renewables. ¿Qué problemas encuentra la revolución verde?Es importantísimo que se lleve a cabo esta revolución verde, no podemos seguir quemando combustibles fósiles.Now, what we cannot do is continue to grow in energy consumption and replace fossils with renewable energy.First because there are not enough raw materials to do this.If we continue along this path, we will immediately see that there is not enough cobalt, that there is not enough lithium, that there is not enough teluro, and so on.So painting the current economy will be impossible.And also renewables have network destabilization problems and we must build network stabilization systems in parallel.Renewables need a natural gas contribution to avoid tension peaks and blackout.Because the surface that needs renewable energy compared to an equivalent potential system of a combined cycle plant or a nuclear is much higher.Here we will run into blockades like the ones we have seen with entire peoples who refuse to have solar or wind orchards.You cannot paint the green economy, you have to decrease.The materials used have to be designed so that they can be reused.

You have worked in contact with the industry. ¿Cuáles son los principales problemas que está teniendo la industria española en relación a esta falta de materiales y esta crisis energética?Los problemas son gravísimos, estamos viendo cómo están cerrando las fábricas y están no solo haciendo ERTE sino cerrando completamente, como está ocurriendo con la industria de los fertilizantes.This is very serious: we can live without cars, but not without food.That the fertilizer industry has to close and cannot produce those fertilizers that are necessary for the field is something unprecedented and very serious, and here you can see the enormous dependence we have of fossil fuels.You have to replace them as soon as possible.

There is an extended criticism that this type of speeches about scarcity is creating alarmism and this can favor demobilization or the extreme right.It is true that sometimes you have to moderate the language a bit not to create the opposite effect, that is, the save who can, and I am aware that some of our analysis incite that."Buah, if we are so bad that who can be saved, we will consume as much as possible" and some will take advantage of this matter.But if reality is not known, if we continue with our eyes over what is happening, which is very serious, we will hardly be able to act.It is important that people know where we are and that the policies that are being carried out so far are wrong.At least, the decisions are as informed as possible to try to raise the planet towards sustainability.