Whatever your views are on ‘net-zero’ policies, our job as commodity market investors is to assess the risks and opportunities of any investment, irrespective of our own political or ideological perspectives.
It’s with that introduction that I believe we are close to getting a signal as to how governments will look to temper demand for the metals essential for a net-zero energy transition – copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, etc.
A fast transition to electric vehicles will of course require enormous amounts of these metals, and given the bottlenecks to production, the impact on prices may be so strong that this acts to dramatically slow the speed at which the net-zero energy transition takes place.