The continued growth and development of our economies comes with significant attendant environmental impacts. Across the globe, raw material usage for both energy generation and manufacturing alike has increased exponentially, and the growth is likely unsustainable. Hurricanes, massive forest fires, and unprecedented flooding have become increasingly recurrent phenomena in the past few years, likely caused and/or exasperated by the impacts of climate change. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, generated by the sectors shown in Figure 1a, are proven contributors to climate change. Fortunately, the minerals, metals, glass, and ceramics industries embraced these challenges as opportunities to drive groundbreaking work in their fields. For example, they developed clean energy technologies to address electricity and heat production, building, industry, transportation, and other energy categories, tackling a total of 76 percent of the total global greenhouse gas emitting sectors.¹ These technologies, however, also require material consumption; understanding their use and supply is key to ensuring overall sustainability.

A greener, safer world

Clean energy technologies are vital for addressing climate change not only in developed countries but also in developing countries, which will continue to increase their material and energy consumptions and emissions as they reach lifestyle parity with developed nations. According to the World Resources Institute, the per capita greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries are on average approximately four times those of developing countries.³ It is of paramount importance to provide developing countries the opportunity to progress, and clean energy technologies can help them to potentially leapfrog currently industrialized nations by avoiding having their energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels.