Copper is the New Oil: The Geopolitics of the Grid
Examining the supply chain bottlenecks at the heart of the post-carbon energy transition.
Words by
Sarah Chen — Stanford University
The barrel has dominated geopolitical writing for half a century. The next half-century belongs to the cathode.
Chile and the Democratic Republic of the Congo together control resources whose strategic weight rivals that of the Persian Gulf in 1973. The diplomatic vocabulary has not yet caught up.
Refining, not extraction, is where the genuine chokepoint sits — and refining capacity is overwhelmingly concentrated in a single jurisdiction.
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