What Are the Implications of Decarbonization?

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The world has always been dependent on minerals that we know, right? Like if you use a spoon to eat your yogurt, which is made of steel or aluminum. But what we're facing at the moment with the decarbonization process and even more so with the twin transition between digitalization and decarbonization is that the demand for critical raw materials is about to explode. An electric car uses, on average, six times more material inputs than a conventional car. The level of electrification that we need for our grids requires nine times more materials than we currently rely upon for fossil infrastructure. For certain types of materials, we're facing like a 500% increase in terms of demand by 2050.

On this episode, environmental peacemaker and mediator Olivia Lazard joins Nate to unpack the relationship between mineral deposits, conflict-vulnerable zones, and high biodiversity areas to create interlocking risks to geopolitical and climate stability. Much like Olivia’s research, this conversation covers a wide variety of topics and is jam-packed with information. Will we have to plunder the planet in order to save it? Will we be able to transition to a multi-polar world order somewhat peacefully? And what can we learn from mediators and peacemakers, like Olivia, as we move into a more materially constrained future - where the whole pie is smaller?

About Olivia Lazard:

Olivia is an environmental peacemaking and mediation practitioner as well as a researcher and a fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of climate, the transition ushered by climate change, and the risks of conflict and fragility associated with climate change and environmental collapse. She has over twelve years of experience in the peacemaking sector at field and policy levels. In her fieldwork, her focus was to understand how globalization and the international political economy shaped patterns of violence and vulnerability patterns as well as formed new types of conflict systems that our international governance architecture has difficulty tackling with agility.

For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/58-olivia-lazard

To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/UNkzGKTjBWM