Philippa Kaur

Humans have been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Just over five years ago jbs and its then chief executive, Joesley Batista, embodied everything that was wrong with Brazilian business. Mr Batista, son of the meat giant’s eponymous founder, José Batista Sobrinho, was fleeing Brazilian prosecutors, his Italian-made yacht Why Not? in tow, over his role in a gargantuan bribery scandal. (He was eventually caught.) jbs was fending off accusations of selling dodgy meat and razing the Amazon to raise cattle (both of which it denies). Investors and customers stampeded out. “It took a lot of work to make sure what happened in the past didn’t happen again,” says Gilberto Tomazoni, who became the first non-Batista ceo in 2018. His efforts to rebuild jbs’s image—and investors’ trust—are paying off. On his watch its market value has nearly doubled, to $14bn. Last year it sold $67bn-worth of packaged food, more than any rival (see chart). On August 11th it reported revenues of 92bn reais ($19bn) in the second quarter, up by 7.7% year on year. Under Mr Tomazoni, jbs has “simplified and consolidated its ownership structure, making it more transparent to outsider investors,” explains Paulo Terra of fgv, a business school in São Paulo. It has drilled its 250,000 employees in compliance. It has also restructured its debt, selling off billions in assets to pay off creditors. That allowed it to go shopping. In 2021 jbs bought an American smoked-meat processor, an Australian hog breeder and an Italian sausage-maker. It is angling for a share of the seafood business, swallowing sellers of plant-based protein and gobbling up startups developing lab-grown meat. Geographical diversification has made the company more resilient. It controls a quarter of beef processing in America, and last year benefited from a combination of low live-cattle prices and a hunger for beef. Now that inflation has made pricey meat less appetising to Americans, dragging jbs’s beef sales there down by 4.6% year on year, it can lean more on growth in Australia and Brazil. At home in particular, a wider product range, which includes cheaper pork, poultry and fish, has helped it at a time when less diversified competitors struggle with rising prices of feed.The whiff of scandal will continue to scare off some investors. Wesley, nephew of Joesley, was recently made the global president of operations. Joesley and his brother, both of whom spent time behind bars on charges of corruption, remain a powerful force. The family’s holding company, j&f, retains a 42% stake. Some of their past deals remain under scrutiny. In America, accusations of price-fixing and worries about workers’ welfare have made meatpackers the focus of congressional probes. Criticism of its links to deforestation in the Amazon has pressed jbs to declare sustainability its “core business strategy” and to pledge to emit no net carbon by 2040. Humankind is “eating the planet”, admits Mr Tomazoni, so it needs to produce food in a new way. jbs may find it increasingly hard to sustain rapid growth. Even as sales rose, net profit declined last quarter, by 10% year on year, as drought shrank grazing lands and the cost of animal feed spiralled. Weakening demand in America will continue to squeeze profit margins in beef and pork. So will a slowdown in China, a smaller but faster-growing beef market where the middle class is eating more beef. jbs’s share price is down by 17% since its recent peak in April. Having whetted investors’ appetites, Mr Tomazoni will need to keep working hard in order to keep them sated. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

If germans were to elect their chancellor directly they would, a new poll implies, vote for Robert Habeck, the economy minister in Olaf Scholz’s coalition government. Mr Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, who are both from the Greens, regularly top such surveys. The next chancellor could well be a Green.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

One of your columnist’s favourite ways of passing a hot afternoon in Monterrey, three hours south of Mexico’s border with Texas, is with a cold bottle of locally brewed Bohemia beer alongside a plate of cabrito (roast kid). For a business writer, it is a justifiable use of the expense account. Beers like Bohemia helped make Monterrey the industrial hub that it is. The Cuauhtémoc brewery, now owned by Heineken, a global giant, was started in 1890 by members of the Garza and Sada families, who went on to become Mexico’s biggest industrialists. Lacking suppliers in the arid north, they made their own bottles, caps and packaging, giving rise to conglomerates that fuelled the country’s modernisation. Today Mexico is the largest exporter of beer in the world. Monterrey is still awash with beer. But it is also stricken by drought. This has left millions of residents reliant on leaky public pipes desperately short of water, even as the industries that employ them guzzle the stuff, thanks to higher-quality private infrastructure. The brewers say they consume less than 1% of the local water, most of which is used by farmers who have no incentive to conserve it. That has not stopped President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, never one to waste an opportunity to bash the rich, from blaming the industrialists. He has told the beer firms to up sticks and move south, where rivers still run in torrents. The industry is keeping its head down, treating this as populist rhetoric rather than a genuine threat to transplant breweries lock, stock and barrel to the other end of the country. Yet the imbroglio is illustrative, too. It shows how water shortages, combined with reputational damage and regulatory overreach, could affect many hydro-dependent industries, from food production, mining and power generation to apparel and electronics. Colin Strong of the World Resources Institute (wri), an ngo, says that though the private sector is trying to use water more efficiently, scarcity will be exacerbated by climate change, population growth and the greater water use that comes with growing prosperity. He quotes a pithy refrain common in environmental circles. “If climate change is the shark, water is its teeth.”Heat and drought are leaving teeth marks everywhere. In Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer, the driest decade on record has forced mining firms such as Anglo American and Antofagasta to reduce output this year. In recent days companies such as Toyota, a carmaker, and Foxconn, which makes iPhones for Apple, halted production in south-western China after a drought caused hydropower shortages. On August 16th the American government took unprecedented steps to reduce water consumption in states in the Lower Colorado River Basin to safeguard reservoirs crucial for generating electricity. Norway, known as the battery of Europe for its abundant hydropower, says that water shortages may force it to curb supplies to its neighbours’ grids. In Germany, the Rhine has fallen so low that it has affected the ferrying of cars and chemicals north, and coal and gas south. Across unusually rain-free Europe, grain crops have frazzled in the heat. So have cotton fields in thirsty Texas.The problem is not a lack of water per se. Climate change may make some places drier and others wetter. It is the uneven distribution of freshwater—of which fast-growing places like India are woefully short—that provide the conditions for a crisis. This is made worse by waste, pollution and the near-universal underpricing of water. Some governments, notably China’s, have created pharaonic projects to transport water to where it is needed. Others, such as Mr López Obrador’s, peddle the quixotic idea of moving demand to where the water is. The best outcome in the long term, on paper at least, is the simplest: that less of the stuff is used, and more of what is used is treated better. It is something the private sector is just starting to grapple with. Industries directly affected by water shortages have got a head start. Global mining firms are using desalination plants in Chile. Beer and soft-drinks companies, existentially reliant on clean water, have targets for improving efficiency (Heineken says it uses 2.5 litres of water to make a litre of beer in Mexico, about half the global industry average). In collaboration with the wri, Cargill, an agro-industrial behemoth, recently extended the monitoring of water use from its own operations to the farmers who supply its crops. Fashion retailers, whose suppliers are often heavy users of water and dyes in dry areas, are considering similar moves, to avoid angry flare-ups by local residents who worry about being second in line to the taps.This calls for careful stewardship. When Cape Town was in danger of running out of water in 2017, ab InBev, one of the world’s largest brewers, helped municipal authorities reduce water loss from the network. Ingenuity also helps. In Singapore, NewBrew makes craft beer out of reclaimed sewage. Andre Fourie, head of sustainability at ab InBev, says that in the future many companies will have to treat and reuse water to overcome scarcity. Last ordersThe looming shortages still do not get the attention they deserve. As a heavily subsidised raw material, water is so cheap that many ceos overlook it. A report this year by Planet Tracker and cdp, two ngos, said that about a third of listed banks do not assess water risks in their portfolios. For shareholders, it mostly comes far behind carbon emissions as an environmental, social and governance (esg) concern. It is not a risk that can easily be squeezed into oversimplified esg ratings. It is so dependent on local conditions that it requires myriad approaches. In the words of Will Sarni, a consultant, water is an enigma. “It’s a personal thing. It’s a social issue. It’s got a spiritual dimension.” He hopes new technologies that use solar power to capture moisture from the air could bring creative destruction to the supply of water. Schumpeter, Bohemia in hand, would drink to that. ■Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:Tencent is a success story bedevilled by the splinternet (Aug 11th)The Spirit deal is a missed opportunity for creative destruction (Jul 28th)Meet Keyence, consultant to the world’s factories (Jul 23rd)For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

To american executives, Rob Portman is the ideal senator. Smart, reasonable and experienced, he served as the top trade representative and budget director for George W. Bush, the Republican president from 2000 to 2008, before becoming a senator for Ohio more than a decade ago. Mr Portman has just one shortcoming: he is retiring. The party’s nominee to replace him is J.D. Vance, backed by Donald Trump, the most recent Republican commander-in-chief. Mr Vance calls big technology firms “enemies of Western civilisation” and casts elite managers as part of “the regime”, with interests anathema to those of America’s heartland. Democrats, with their leftier lean, remain companies’ most persistent headache—firms were caught off guard this month by Senate Democrats’ passage of a rise in corporate-tax rates and new restrictions on the pricing of drugs. But, in the words of an executive at a big financial firm, “We expect Democrats to hate us.” What is new is disdain from those on the right. There used to be a time, one lobbyist recalls with nostalgia, when “you would walk into a Republican office with a company and the question would be, ‘How can I help you?’” Those days are over. The prospect of Republicans sweeping the mid-term elections in November and recapturing the White House in 2024 no longer sends waves of relief through American boardrooms. Executives and lobbyists interviewed by The Economist, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Republicans as becoming more hostile in both tone and, increasingly, substance. Public brawls, such as Disney’s feud with Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, over discussion of sexual orientation in classrooms, or Republicans blasting BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, for “woke” investments, are only its most obvious manifestations. “It used to be the axis was left to right,” says an executive at one of America’s biggest firms. “Now it is an axis from insiders to outsiders; everyone seems intent on proving they are not part of the superstructure and that includes business.” Long-held right-of-centre orthodoxies—in favour of free trade and competition, against industrial policy—are in flux. As Republicans’ stance toward big business changes, so may the contours of American commerce. The close partnership between Republicans and business has helped shape American capitalism for decades. Companies’ profit-seeking pursuit of free trade abroad and free enterprise at home dovetailed with Republicans’ credo of individual freedom and anti-communism. By the 1990s even Bill Clinton and other Democrats embraced new trade deals, giving firms access to new markets and cheaper labour. As Glenn Hubbard, former dean of Columbia Business School and a top economic adviser to Mr Bush, puts it, “social support for the system was a given and you could argue over the parameters.” The 2012 presidential battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney “felt like a big deal at the time”, says Rawi Abdelal of Harvard Business School. “But in terms of the business stakes, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.” Four years later Republicans were still attracting about two-thirds of spending by corporate political-action committees (pacs), which give money to candidates in federal elections, and a big corporate-tax cut in 2017 was the main legislative achievement of Mr Trump’s term. Yet Mr Trump had campaigned on ordinary Americans’ sense that they were being left behind. Executives hoping that his fiery campaign rhetoric would be doused by presidential restraint instead had to contend with his trade war with China, curbs on immigration and dangerous positions on climate change and race. Bosses felt compelled to speak out out against his policies, which appalled many of their employees and customers. In the eyes of Trump supporters, such pronouncements cast the ceos as members of the progressive elite bent on undermining their champion. After Mr Trump’s defeat to Mr Biden, companies wondered if their old alliance with Republicans might be restored. In July 17 Republican senators voted for a bill to provide, among other things, $52bn in subsidies to compete with China by making more computer chips in America—which chipmakers such as Intel naturally applauded. This month nearly all Republicans opposed the Democracts’ $700bn climate and health-care bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (ira), which raises taxes on large companies and enables the government to haggle with drugmakers over the price of some prescription medicines. This apparent business-friendliness-as-usual conceals a deeper shift, however. The Republican Party has attracted more working-class voters—an evolution accelerated by Mr Trump’s willingness, on paper if not always in practice, to put the interests of the American worker ahead of those of the American multinational. For most of the past 50 years more Republicans had a lot of confidence in big business than had little or no confidence in it, often by double-digit margins, according to Gallup polls. Last year the mistrustful outnumbered the trusting by a record 17 percentage points, worse than at the height of the global financial crisis of 2007-09. Republican election war chests are increasingly filled either by small donors or the extremely rich. Both of these groups are likelier to favour ideologues over pragmatists, notes Sarah Bryner of OpenSecrets, an ngo which tracks campaign finance and lobbying. The result of all this is growing Republican support for policies hostile to America Inc. Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, wants companies with more than $1bn in revenue to pay their staff at least $15 an hour. His colleague from Florida, Marco Rubio, has backed the formation of workers’ councils based at companies, an alternative to unions. In March Tom Cotton of Arkansas called for Americans to “reject the ideology of globalism” by curbing immigration, banning some American investments in China and suggesting Congress “punish offshoring to China”. Republicans in Congress have co-sponsored several bills with Democrats to rein in big tech. Mr Vance, who has a good shot at joining them after the mid-terms, has proposed raising taxes on companies that move jobs abroad. Mr Trump himself repeatedly promised to lower drug prices. That Republicans opposed the ira—and other business-wary Democratic initiatives—may mean simply that they loathe Democrats more than they dislike big business. Many bosses fret that the Republican Party will advance punitive policies once it is back in power. “There is no person who says, ‘Don’t worry’,” sighs one pharmaceutical executive. “You ignore what a politician says publicly at your peril,” warns another business bigwig. That is already evident at the state level, where Republicans often control all levers of government and are therefore free to enact their agenda in a way that is impossible in gridlocked Washington. After Disney spoke out against a Florida law to restrict discussion of gender and sexual orientation in schools, Mr DeSantis signed a law revoking the company’s special tax status. Texas has a new law restricting the state from doing business with firms that “discriminate against firearm and ammunition industries”. Kentucky, Texas and West Virginia have passed similar laws barring business with banks and other firms that boycott fossil-fuel producers; about a dozen other Republican-run states are considering doing the same.Such laws present a problem for companies. In July West Virginia’s treasurer said that anti-fossil-fuel policies of some of America’s biggest financial firms—BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo—made them ineligible for state contracts. The definition of what counts as discriminating or boycotting is hazy. JPMorgan Chase, which does not lend to firms that sell military-style weapons to consumers, first said that the Texan law prevented it from underwriting municipal-bond deals in that state, then bid for a contract (unsuccessfully). In Texas, Republican lawmakers are threatening to prosecute firms that pay for staff to travel out of state for abortions, which the Texan legislature has severely restricted. Right-wing culture-warriors have always been part of the Republican Party but the line between them and their pro-business country-club colleagues has collapsed. These days, worries another business grandee, both parties see it as “acceptable to use state power to get private entities to conform to their viewpoints”. “esg is a four-letter word in some Republican offices,” says Heather Podesta of Invariant, a lobbying firm, referring to the practice, championed by BlackRock among others, of considering environmental, social and governance factors, not just returns, in investment decisions. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has blamed Larry Fink, BlackRock’s boss, for high petrol prices. “Every time you fill up your tank,” he growled in May, “you can thank Larry for the massive and inappropriate esg pressure.”Companies are adjusting to this new, more volatile political reality. Some are creating more formal processes for reviewing the risks of speaking out on a particular social issue that may provoke a political backlash, including from Republicans. The way companies describe their strategy to politicians is changing, too. Lobbying is no longer confined to the parties’ leaders in the two houses of Congress. Because politicians of both parties are increasingly willing to flout party leadership, says an executive, “you have to go member by member.” Neil Bradley, policy chief of the us Chamber of Commerce, which represents American big business, says that his organisation has had to redouble efforts to “find people who have interest in governing”. Sometimes that means supporting more Democrats. In 2020 the chamber endorsed more vulnerable freshman Democratic incumbents, who were mostly moderate, than in previous years. That prompted Kevin McCarthy, then the top Republican in the House of Representatives, to say he didn’t want the organisation’s endorsement “because they have sold out”. So far this year corporate pacs have funnelled 54% of their campaign donations to Republicans, down from 63% in 2012 (see chart). Firms’ employees have beaten an even hastier retreat, with just 46% donating to Republican candidates, compared with 58% ten years ago, according to OpenSecrets. If the result of this is divided government, that would suit American business just fine. As one executive remarks, “We might not have improvements but we won’t get more cataclysmic policies.” ■ More

Electric vehicles (evs) seem unstoppable. Carmakers are outpledging themselves in terms of production goals. Industry analysts are struggling to keep up. Battery-powered cars could zoom from less than 10% of global vehicle sales in 2021 to 40% by 2030, according to Bloombergnef. Depending on whom you ask, that could translate to anywhere between 25m and 40m evs. They, and the tens of millions manufactured between now and then, will need plenty of batteries. Bernstein reckons that demand from evs will grow nine-fold by 2030 (see chart 1), to 3,200 gigawatt-hours (gwh). Rystad puts it at 4,000gwh. Such projections explain the frenzied activity up and down the battery value chain. The ferment stretches from the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama desert, where lithium is mined, to the plains of Hungary, where on August 12th catl of China, the world’s biggest battery-maker, announced a €7.3bn ($7.5bn) investment to build its second European “gigafactory”. It is, though, looking increasingly as though the activity is not quite frenzied enough, especially for the Western car companies that are desperate to reduce their dependence on China’s world-leading battery industry amid geopolitical tensions. Prices of battery metals have spiked (see chart 2) and are expected to push battery costs up in 2022 for the first time in more than a decade. In June Bloombergnef cast doubt on its earlier prediction that the cost of buying and running an ev would become as cheap as a fossil-fuelled car by 2024. Even more distant targets, such as the eu’s coming ban on new sales of carbon-burning cars by 2035, may not be met. Could the ev boom run out of juice before it gets started? Giga-ntic promisesOn paper, there ought to be plenty of batteries to go around. Benchmark Minerals, a consultancy, has analysed manufacturers’ declared plans and found that, if they materialise, 282 new gigafactories should come online worldwide by 2031. That would take total global capacity to 5,800gwh. It is also a big “if”. Bernstein calculates that current and promised future supply from the six established battery-makers—byd and catl of China; lg, Samsung and sk Innovation of South Korea; and Panasonic of Japan—adds up to 1,360gwh by the end of the decade The balance would have to come from newcomers—and being a newcomer in a capital-intensive industry is never easy. The optimistic overall capacity projections conceal other problems. Matteo Fini of s&p Global Mobility, a consultancy, notes that gigafactories take three years to build but require longer—possibly a few extra years—to manufacture at full capacity. As such, actual output by 2030 may fall short. Moreover, manufacturers’ unique technologies and specifications mean that cells from one factory are usually not interchangeable with those from another, which could create further bottlenecks.Most troubling for Western carmakers is China’s dominance of battery-making. The country houses close to 80% of the world’s current cell-manufacturing capacity. Benchmark Minerals forecasts that China’s share will decline in the next decade or so, but only a bit—to just under 70%. By then America would be home to just 12% of global capacity, with Europe accounting for most of the rest. Americans’ slower uptake of evs may ease the crunch for carmakers there. Deloitte, a consultancy, expects America to account for just under 5m vehicles of the 31m evs sold in 2030, compared with 15m in China and 8m in Europe. Big American carmakers already have joint ventures with the big South Korean battery producers to build domestic gigafactories. In July Ford and sk Innovation finalised a deal to build one in Tennessee and two in Kentucky, with the carmaker chipping in $6.6bn and the South Korean firm $5.5bn. The same month the Detroit giant struck a deal to import catl batteries. General Motors and lg Energy are together putting over $7bn towards three battery factories in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.It is Europe’s carmakers that seem most exposed. Volkswagen, a German giant, plans to construct six gigafactories of its own by 2030. Some, such as bmw, are teaming up with the South Korean firms. Others, including Mercedes-Benz, are investing in European battery-making through a joint-venture called acc. A number of European startups, such as Northvolt of Sweden, which is backed by Volkswagen and Volvo, are also busily building capacity. Yet the continent’s car industry looks likely to remain quite reliant on Chinese manufacturers. Some of those batteries will be manufactured locally: catl’s first investment in Europe, a battery factory in Germany, is set to begin operations at the end of the year. Some packs or their components may, however, still need to be imported from China. That is not a comfortable position to be in for European carmakers. It may become even less so if the eu introduces levies based on total lifecycle carbon emissions from vehicles, including electric ones. Northvolt’s chief executive, Peter Carlsson, reckons that proposed eu tariffs on carbon-intensive imports could add 5-8% to the cost of a Chinese battery made using dirty coal power. That could be roughly equivalent to an extra $500, give or take, per pack. Such rules would boost his firm’s prospects, since it runs on clean Nordic hydroelectricity. It would also severely limit European carmakers’ ability to source batteries from abroad.What’s mined isn’t yoursThese manufacturing bottlenecks, serious though they are, look more manageable than those at the mining end of the battery value chain. Take nickel. Thanks to a big production increase in Indonesia, which accounts for 37% of global output of the metal, the market seems well supplied. However, Indonesian nickel is not the high-grade sort usable in batteries. It can be made into battery-compatible stuff, but that means smelting them twice, which emits three times more carbon than does refining higher-grade ores from places like Canada, New Caledonia or Russia. Those additional emissions defeat the purpose of making evs, notes Socrates Economou of Trafigura, a commodities trader. Carmakers, particularly European ones, may shun the stuff. Cobalt has become less of a pinch point. A price spike in 2018 prompted battery-makers to develop battery chemistries that use much less of it. Planned mine expansions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc), home to the world’s richest cobalt deposits, and Indonesia should also tide battery-makers over until 2027. After that things get trickier. Getting more of the stuff may require manufacturers to embrace the drc’s artisanal mining, the formalisation of which has yet to bear fruit. Until it does, many Western carmakers say they would not touch the sector, where adults and many children toil in harsh conditions, with a barge pole.Most uncertainty concerns lithium. A shortage is forcing manufacturers unable to get their hands on enough of the metal to cut production. For now consumer-electronics firms are bearing the brunt. But the smaller batteries in electronic gadgets only represent a fraction of demand. ev-makers, whose battery packs use a lot more, could be next. By 2026 the lithium market is projected to tip back into surplus, thanks to planned new projects. However, most of these are in China and rely on lower-grade deposits which are much costlier to process than those of Australia’s hard-rock mines or Latin America’s brine ponds. Mr Economou estimates that a price of $35,000 per tonne of the battery-usable form of lithium carbonate is required to make such projects worthwhile—lower than today’s lofty levels, but three times those a year ago. The high-grade stuff due to come from elsewhere should not be taken for granted, either. Chile’s new draft constitution, which will be put to referendum in September, proposes nationalising all natural resources. Changes to the tax regime in Australia, which already has some of the highest mining levies in the world, could deter fresh investments in “green”-metal production. In late July the boss of Albemarle, the largest publicly traded lithium producer, warned that, despite efforts to unlock more supply, carmarkers faced a fierce battle for the metal until 2030. Because building mines takes anywhere from five to 25 years, there is little time left to get new ones up and running this decade. Big mining firms are reluctant to get into the business. Markets for green metals remain too small for mining “majors” to be worth the hassle, says the development boss at one such firm. Despite their reputation for doing business in shady places, most lack the stomach to take a gamble on countries as tricky as the drc, where it is hard to enforce contracts. Smaller miners that usually get risky projects off the ground cannot raise capital on listed markets, where investors are queasy about the mining industry, which is considered risky and, ironically, environmentally unfriendly. The resulting dearth of capital is attracting private-equity firms—often founded by former mining executives—and manufacturers with a newfound taste for vertical integration. lg and catl are among the battery producers which have backed mining projects. Since the start of 2021 carmakers have made around 20 investments in battery-grade nickel, and five others in lithium and cobalt. Most of these projects involved Western firms. In March, for example, Volkswagen announced a joint venture with two Chinese miners to secure nickel and cobalt for its ev factories in China. Last month General Motors said it would pay Livent, a lithium producer, $200m upfront to secure lumps of the white metal. The American ev champion, Tesla, is signing deals left and right.Mick Davis, a coal-mining veteran now at Vision Blue Resources, an investment firm that invests in minor miners, doubts that all this dealmaking will be enough to plug the funding gap. Recycling, which usually makes up a quarter of supply in mature metals markets, is not expected to help much before 2030. Tweaks to battery designs may moderate demand for the scarcest metals somewhat, but at the risk of lower battery performance. Lithium in particular will remain hard to substitute. Technologies that do away with it entirely, such as sodium-based cathodes, are a long way off. Helter-smelterEven if the West’s ev industry somehow managed to secure enough metals and battery-making capacity, it would still face a giant problem in the middle of the supply chain, refining, where China enjoys near-monopolies (see chart 3). Chinese companies refine nearly 70% of the world’s lithium, 84% of its nickel and 85% of its cobalt. Trafigura forecasts that the shares for the last two of these will remain above 80% for at least the next five years. And as with battery manufacturers, Chinese refiners gobble up dirty coal-generated electricity. On top of that, according to Trafigura, both European and North American firms are also expected to rely on foreign suppliers, often Chinese ones, for at least half the capacity to convert refined ores into the materials that go into batteries.Western governments say they understand the urgent need to diversify their suppliers. Last year Joe Biden, America’s president, unveiled a blueprint to create a domestic supply chain for batteries. His mammoth infrastructure law, passed in 2021, set aside $3bn for making batteries in America. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed on August 12th, also includes sweeteners for the battery industry, contingent in part on mining, refining and manufacturing components at home or in allied countries. The eu, which created a bloc-wide battery alliance in 2017 to co-ordinate public and private efforts, says €127bn was invested last year across the supply chain, with an additional €382bn expected by 2030. Most of this is likely to land downstream, helping Europe and America to become self-sufficient in the production of finished cells by 2027. That is something. And it remains possible that enough discoveries of new deposits, more efficient mining technology, improved battery chemistry and sacrifices on performance all combine to bring the market into balance. More likely, as Jean-François Lambert, a commodities consultant, puts it, the ev industry is “going to be living a big lie for quite some time”. ■ More

Electric vehicles (evs) seem unstoppable. Carmakers are outpledging themselves in terms of production goals. Industry analysts are struggling to keep up. Battery-powered cars could zoom from 8% of global vehicle sales in 2021 to 40% by 2030, according to Bloombergnef. Depending on whom you ask, that could translate to anywhere between 25m and 40m evs. They, and the tens of millions manufactured between now and then, will need plenty of batteries. Bernstein reckons that demand from evs will grow nine-fold by 2030 (see chart 1), to 3,200 gigawatt-hours (gwh). Rystad puts it at 4,000gwh. Such projections explain the frenzied activity up and down the battery value chain. The ferment stretches from the salt flats of Chile’s Atacama desert, where lithium is mined, to the plains of Hungary, where on August 12th catl of China, the world’s biggest battery-maker, announced a €7.3bn ($7.5bn) investment to build its second European “gigafactory”. It is, though, looking increasingly as though the activity is not quite frenzied enough, especially for the Western car companies that are desperate to reduce their dependence on China’s world-leading battery industry amid geopolitical tensions. Prices of battery metals have spiked (see chart 2) and are expected to push battery costs up in 2022 for the first time in more than a decade. In June Bloombergnef cast doubt on its earlier prediction that the cost of buying and running an ev would become as cheap as a fossil-fuelled car by 2024. Even more distant targets, such as the eu’s coming ban on new sales of carbon-burning cars by 2035, may not be met. Could the ev boom run out of juice before it gets started? Giga-ntic promisesOn paper, there ought to be plenty of batteries to go around. Benchmark Minerals, a consultancy, has analysed manufacturers’ declared plans and found that, if they materialise, 282 new gigafactories should come online worldwide by 2031. That would take total global capacity to 5,800gwh. It is also a big “if”. Bernstein calculates that current and promised future supply from the six established battery-makers—byd and catl of China; lg, Samsung and sk Innovation of South Korea; and Panasonic of Japan—adds up to 1,360gwh by the end of the decade The balance would have to come from newcomers—and being a newcomer in a capital-intensive industry is never easy. The optimistic overall capacity projections conceal other problems. Matteo Fini of s&p Global Mobility, a consultancy, notes that gigafactories take three years to build but require longer—possibly a few extra years—to manufacture at full capacity. As such, actual output by 2030 may fall short. Moreover, manufacturers’ unique technologies and specifications mean that cells from one factory are usually not interchangeable with those from another, which could create further bottlenecks.Most troubling for Western carmakers is China’s dominance of battery-making. The country houses close to 80% of the world’s current cell-manufacturing capacity. Benchmark Minerals forecasts that China’s share will decline in the next decade or so, but only a bit—to just under 70%. By then America would be home to just 12% of global capacity, with Europe accounting for most of the rest. Americans’ slower uptake of evs may ease the crunch for carmakers there. Deloitte, a consultancy, expects America to account for just under 5m vehicles of the 31m evs sold in 2030, compared with 15m in China and 8m in Europe. Big American carmakers already have joint ventures with the big South Korean battery producers to build domestic gigafactories. In July Ford and sk Innovation finalised a deal to build one in Tennessee and two in Kentucky, with the carmaker chipping in $6.6bn and the South Korean firm $5.5bn. The same month the Detroit giant struck a deal to import catl batteries. General Motors and lg Energy are together putting over $7bn towards three battery factories in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.It is Europe’s carmakers that seem most exposed. Volkswagen, a German giant, plans to construct six gigafactories of its own by 2030. Some, such as bmw, are teaming up with the South Korean firms. Others, including Mercedes-Benz, are investing in European battery-making through a joint-venture called acc. A number of European startups, such as Northvolt of Sweden, which is backed by Volkswagen and Volvo, are also busily building capacity. Yet the continent’s car industry looks likely to remain quite reliant on Chinese manufacturers. Some of those batteries will be manufactured locally: catl’s first investment in Europe, a battery factory in Germany, is set to begin operations at the end of the year. Some packs or their components may, however, still need to be imported from China. That is not a comfortable position to be in for European carmakers. It may become even less so if the eu introduces levies based on total lifecycle carbon emissions from vehicles, including electric ones. Northvolt’s chief executive, Peter Carlsson, reckons that proposed eu tariffs on carbon-intensive imports could add 5-8% to the cost of a Chinese battery made using dirty coal power. That could be roughly equivalent to an extra $500, give or take, per pack. Such rules would boost his firm’s prospects, since it runs on clean Nordic hydroelectricity. It would also severely limit European carmakers’ ability to source batteries from abroad.What’s mined isn’t yoursThese manufacturing bottlenecks, serious though they are, look more manageable than those at the mining end of the battery value chain. Take nickel. Thanks to a big production increase in Indonesia, which accounts for 37% of global output of the metal, the market seems well supplied. However, Indonesian nickel is not the high-grade sort usable in batteries. It can be made into battery-compatible stuff, but that means smelting them twice, which emits three times more carbon than does refining higher-grade ores from places like Canada, New Caledonia or Russia. Those additional emissions defeat the purpose of making evs, notes Socrates Economou of Trafigura, a commodities trader. Carmakers, particularly European ones, may shun the stuff. Cobalt has become less of a pinch point. A price spike in 2018 prompted battery-makers to develop battery chemistries that use much less of it. Planned mine expansions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc), home to the world’s richest cobalt deposits, and Indonesia should also tide battery-makers over until 2027. After that things get trickier. Getting more of the stuff may require manufacturers to embrace the drc’s artisanal mining, the formalisation of which has yet to bear fruit. Until it does, many Western carmakers say they would not touch the sector, where adults and many children toil in harsh conditions, with a barge pole.Most uncertainty concerns lithium. A shortage is forcing manufacturers unable to get their hands on enough of the metal to cut production. For now consumer-electronics firms are bearing the brunt. But the smaller batteries in electronic gadgets only represent a fraction of demand. ev-makers, whose battery packs use a lot more, could be next. By 2026 the lithium market is projected to tip back into surplus, thanks to planned new projects. However, most of these are in China and rely on lower-grade deposits which are much costlier to process than those of Australia’s hard-rock mines or Latin America’s brine ponds. Mr Economou estimates that a price of $35,000 per tonne of the battery-usable form of lithium carbonate is required to make such projects worthwhile—lower than today’s lofty levels, but three times those a year ago. The high-grade stuff due to come from elsewhere should not be taken for granted, either. Chile’s new draft constitution, which will be put to referendum in September, proposes nationalising all natural resources. Changes to the tax regime in Australia, which already has some of the highest mining levies in the world, could deter fresh investments in “green”-metal production. In late July the boss of Albemarle, the largest publicly traded lithium producer, warned that, despite efforts to unlock more supply, carmarkers faced a fierce battle for the metal until 2030. Because building mines takes anywhere from five to 25 years, there is little time left to get new ones up and running this decade. Big mining firms are reluctant to get into the business. Markets for green metals remain too small for mining “majors” to be worth the hassle, says the development boss at one such firm. Despite their reputation for doing business in shady places, most lack the stomach to take a gamble on countries as tricky as the drc, where it is hard to enforce contracts. Smaller miners that usually get risky projects off the ground cannot raise capital on listed markets, where investors are queasy about the mining industry, which is considered risky and, ironically, environmentally unfriendly. The resulting dearth of capital is attracting private-equity firms—often founded by former mining executives—and manufacturers with a newfound taste for vertical integration. lg and catl are among the battery producers which have backed mining projects. Since the start of 2021 carmakers have made around 20 investments in battery-grade nickel, and five others in lithium and cobalt. Most of these projects involved Western firms. In March, for example, Volkswagen announced a joint venture with two Chinese miners to secure nickel and cobalt for its ev factories in China. Last month General Motors said it would pay Livent, a lithium producer, $200m upfront to secure lumps of the white metal. The American ev champion, Tesla, is signing deals left and right.Mick Davis, a coal-mining veteran now at Vision Blue Resources, an investment firm that invests in minor miners, doubts that all this dealmaking will be enough to plug the funding gap. Recycling, which usually makes up a quarter of supply in mature metals markets, is not expected to help much before 2030. Tweaks to battery designs may moderate demand for the scarcest metals somewhat, but at the risk of lower battery performance. Lithium in particular will remain hard to substitute. Technologies that do away with it entirely, such as sodium-based cathodes, are a long way off. Helter-smelterEven if the West’s ev industry somehow managed to secure enough metals and battery-making capacity, it would still face a giant problem in the middle of the supply chain, refining, where China enjoys near-monopolies (see chart 3). Chinese companies refine nearly 70% of the world’s lithium, 84% of its nickel and 85% of its cobalt. Trafigura forecasts that the shares for the last two of these will remain above 80% for at least the next five years. And as with battery manufacturers, Chinese refiners gobble up dirty coal-generated electricity. On top of that, according to Trafigura, both European and North American firms are also expected to rely on foreign suppliers, often Chinese ones, for at least half the capacity to convert refined ores into the materials that go into batteries.Western governments say they understand the urgent need to diversify their suppliers. Last year Joe Biden, America’s president, unveiled a blueprint to create a domestic supply chain for batteries. His mammoth infrastructure law, passed in 2021, set aside $3bn for making batteries in America. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed on August 12th, also includes sweeteners for the battery industry, contingent in part on mining, refining and manufacturing components at home or in allied countries. The eu, which created a bloc-wide battery alliance in 2017 to co-ordinate public and private efforts, says €127bn was invested last year across the supply chain, with an additional €382bn expected by 2030. Most of this is likely to land downstream, helping Europe and America to become self-sufficient in the production of finished cells by 2027. That is something. And it remains possible that enough discoveries of new deposits, more efficient mining technology, improved battery chemistry and sacrifices on performance all combine to bring the market into balance. More likely, as Jean-François Lambert, a commodities consultant, puts it, the ev industry is “going to be living a big lie for quite some time”. ■ More

Earlier this year it suddenly became clear what a subversive force WeChat could become. It happened on April 22nd, when Shanghai was in lockdown. A black-and-white video swiftly went viral among the 1bn-plus Chinese users of the social-media platform owned by Tencent, China’s biggest internet firm. For six minutes, as a camera panned over Shanghai’s skyline, it carried an audio montage of babies crying after being separated from their quarantined parents, residents complaining of hunger, apartment dwellers banging bins, a mother desperately seeking medicine for her child. “The virus is not killing people, starvation is,” a person cries out. It was a haunting, dystopian scene.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More