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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

We have enough materials to power the world with renewable energy

The news: Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis.

Greater pay off: Although emissions are an unavoidable side effect of extracting the materials, over the next 30 years they add up to less than a year’s worth of global emissions from fossil fuels. Experts are confident the up-front emissions cost will be more than offset by savings from clean energy technologies replacing fossil fuels.

But there’s a catch: While we technically have enough of the materials we need to build renewable energy infrastructure, actually mining and processing them can be a challenge. If we don’t do it responsibly, getting those materials into usable form could lead to environmental harm or human rights violations. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

Could ChatGPT do my job?

—Melissa Heikkilä, senior AI reporter 

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether journalists or copywriters could or should be replaced by AI. So far, newsrooms have pursued very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new tool, ChatGPT, into their work: tech news site CNET secretly used it to write articles, while BuzzFeed (more transparently) announced plans to use it to generate quiz answers.

But here’s the dirty secret of journalism: a surprisingly large amount of it could be automated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if we can outsource some of the boring and repetitive parts of the job to AI. The real problems arise when you give AI too much control. Read the full story.

Melissa’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into a fintech platform
It’s all part of his plan to look beyond advertising to make money. (FT $)+ Ex-Twitter staff don’t know what to do with their old laptops. (Wired $)
+ The company has made its first interest payment on its massive debt. (Bloomberg $)

2 Inside FTX’s shadowy PR influence campaigns
A new filing reveals an undisclosed network of powerful political figures. (The Intercept)
+ Things are getting even messier for the collapsed crypto exchange. (NY Mag $) 
+ FTX’s victims are still furious. (The Atlantic $) 

3 The US has stopped allowing companies to export to Huawei
It’s just the latest in a series of China-related sanctions. (BBC)

4 The race for AI supremacy is heating up
But whether American or Chinese labs will come out on top is anyone’s guess. (Economist $)
+ Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? (MIT Technology Review)

5 You don’t necessarily need a headset to enter the metaverse 
Our everyday reality is edging closer to dystopia each day. (The Atlantic $)
+ Kpop could help to improve the metaverse’s image. (NYT $)

6 Celebrity voice deepfakes have been co opted to spew racist hate 
This sadly felt inevitable. (Motherboard)
+ AI voice actors sound more human than ever. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Boeing has made its last ever 747
Once a symbol of accessible travel, it’s likely to end up carrying cargo. (NYT $)
+ Hydrogen-powered planes take off with a startup’s test flight. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Social media has a dark obsession with being #kind
Is it really a good deed if you’re filming it for clickbait? (The Guardian)

9 Spanish-speaking livestreamers are seriously hot right now
Twitch is booming across Latin America, creating new opportunities for gamers. (Bloomberg $)

10 Dogs love gobbling AirTags
Tracking your furry friend isn’t without its hazards. (WSJ $)

Quote of the day

“I could press the red button, close my laptop and get under my blankets for a couple hours.” 

—Phoebe Gavin, a former executive director of talent and development at news site Vox, reflects on the upsides of being laid off over video call rather than in person to the Wall Street Journal.

The big story

A private security group regularly sent Minnesota police misinformation about protestors

July 2022 

When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis on June 3, 2021, the city was already in a full-blown policing crisis. George Floyd had been murdered by a member of the police force the previous May. As protests reignited all over the city, the cops couldn’t keep up.

Into the void stepped private security groups, hired primarily to prevent damage to properties. But the organizations often ended up managing protest activity—a task usually reserved for police, and one for which most private security guards are not trained.

One company, Conflict Resolution Group (CRG), regularly provided Minneapolis police with information about activists that was at times untrue and deeply politicized. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley & Sam Richards

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ This one-page calendar is seriously blowing my mind.
+ I love that actors are rehearsing Shakespeare inside dystopian video game Fallout (thanks Will!)
+ Quick—I need an emergency photo of a bear, stat!
+ Can you believe these impressive plants are carved from wood?
+ Ambient tunes are massive right now, and I can see why.

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This study only focused on technologies that generate electricity. It didn’t include all the materials that would be needed to store and use that electricity, like the batteries in electric vehicles or grid storage. 

Demand for battery materials is expected to explode between now and 2050. Annual production of graphite, lithium, and cobalt will all need to be ramped up by more than 450% from 2018 levels to meet expected demand for electric cars and grid storage, according to a 2020 study from the World Bank.

Even considering battery materials, the basic takeaway is the same, Wang says: the world’s reserves of the materials needed for clean energy infrastructure are sufficient for even the highest-demand scenarios.

Getting them out of the ground will be the tricky part. Increasing production of some materials, especially those needed for batteries, will present social and environmental challenges.

“There is an underappreciation about what needs to happen in mining,” says Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.

Take copper, for example: the world has mined about 700 million tons of copper since we started mining thousands of years ago. We’ll need to mine another 700 million tons just in the next three decades, Papathanasiou says, in order to meet climate targets. It’s not an issue of reserves: the minerals are there.

The problem is that mining, whether for fossil fuels or for renewable energy, can cause significant environmental harm. In the western US, for example, proposed mines for materials like copper and lithium could force Indigenous people from their lands and cause pollution.

Then there’s the labor issue. In some cases, materials today are mined by workers in unfair or exploitative working conditions. Despite efforts to ban child labor, it is still prevalent in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Polysilicon processing in China has been linked with forced labor.

Figuring out how to get the materials we need to build a cleaner future without destroying people or environments in the process should be a major focus of the renewable energy transition moving forward, Papathanasiou says. “We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short.”

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Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders set a goal to keep global warming under 1.5 °C, and reaching that target will require building a lot of new infrastructure. Even in the most ambitious scenarios, the world has enough materials to power the grid globally with renewables, the researchers found. And mining and processing those materials won’t produce enough emissions to warm the world past international targets. 

There is a catch to all this good news. While we technically have enough of the materials we need to build renewable energy infrastructure, actually mining and processing them can be a challenge. If we don’t do it responsibly, getting those materials into usable form could lead to environmental harm or even human rights violations. 

To better understand the material demands of reaching climate targets, the researchers looked at 17 of the key materials needed to generate low-emissions electricity. They estimated how much of each of those substances would be needed to build cleaner infrastructure, and compared them to estimates of how much of those resources (or the raw materials needed to make them) are available in geologic reserves. Geologic reserves include the total material on the planet that can be recovered economically.

Most renewable technologies require some bulk materials like aluminum, cement, and steel. But others also need specialty ingredients. Solar panels run on polysilicon, while wind turbines need fiberglass for their blades and rare-earth metals for their motors. 

Material requirements vary depending on what kind of new infrastructure we build—and how quickly we build it. For the most ambitious climate action scenarios, nearly 2 billion tons of steel and 1.3 billion tons of cement could be needed for energy infrastructure between now and 2050. 

Production of dysprosium and neodymium, rare-earth metals used in the magnets in wind turbines, will need to quadruple over the next several decades. Solar-grade polysilicon will be another hot commodity, with the global market predicted to grow by 150% between now and 2050. 

But for every scenario the team examined, the materials needed to keep the world under 1.5 °C of warming account for “only a fraction” of the world’s geologic reserves, says Seaver Wang, co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Joule this week.

There will be consequences for digging into those reserves. The researchers found that emissions impacts from mining and processing these crucial materials could reach a total of up to 29 gigatons of carbon dioxide between now and 2050. Most of those emissions are attributed to polysilicon, steel, and cement.

The total emissions from mining and processing those materials are significant, but over the next 30 years they add up to less than a year’s worth of global emissions from fossil fuels. That up-front emissions cost will be more than offset by savings from clean energy technologies replacing fossil fuels, Wang says. Progress on cutting emissions from heavy industry, like steel and cement, could also help reduce the climate impact of setting up renewable energy infrastructure.

This study only focused on technologies that generate electricity. It didn’t include all the materials that would be needed to store and use that electricity, like the batteries in electric vehicles or grid storage. 

Demand for battery materials is expected to explode between now and 2050. Annual production of graphite, lithium, and cobalt will all need to be ramped up by more than 450% from 2018 levels to meet expected demand for electric cars and grid storage, according to a 2020 study from the World Bank.

Even considering battery materials, the basic takeaway is the same, Wang says: the world’s reserves of the materials needed for clean energy infrastructure are sufficient for even the highest-demand scenarios.

Getting them out of the ground will be the tricky part. Increasing production of some materials, especially those needed for batteries, will present social and environmental challenges.

“There is an underappreciation about what needs to happen in mining,” says Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.

Take copper, for example: the world has mined about 700 million tons of copper since we started mining thousands of years ago. We’ll need to mine another 700 million tons just in the next three decades, Papathanasiou says, in order to meet climate targets. It’s not an issue of reserves: the minerals are there.

The problem is that mining, whether for fossil fuels or for renewable energy, can cause significant environmental harm. In the western US, for example, proposed mines for materials like copper and lithium could force Indigenous people from their lands and cause pollution.

Then there’s the labor issue. In some cases, materials today are mined by workers in unfair or exploitative working conditions. Despite efforts to ban child labor, it is still prevalent in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Polysilicon processing in China has been linked with forced labor.

Figuring out how to get the materials we need to build a cleaner future without destroying people or environments in the process should be a major focus of the renewable energy transition moving forward, Papathanasiou says. “We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short.”

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