Greg, partner since 2017 (Toronto, Ontario)
This week in charts
Industrial robots installed: China vs Rest of the World
Trends in payrolls by high, medium, and low-median wage industries
How China cornered the market for clean tech
Late last year in Beijing, officials from several of China’s technology, trade and defence agencies were called to a series of secret meetings with a single purpose: to respond to America’s sweeping restrictions on selling computer chips to Chinese companies.
In July, Beijing announced its response: it imposed restrictions on the exports of gallium and germanium, metals used in the production of a number of strategically important products, including electric vehicles, microchips and some military weapons systems.
Matthew Funaiole, a China expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, says the move was a “shot across the bow” which caught some in Washington off guard.
“Outside of technical circles and the defence industry, it [gallium] is not a critical mineral that people were aware of,” he says.
The episode has highlighted an inconvenient truth for the west: China is by far the lowest-cost and biggest supplier of many of the key building blocks for clean technologies. The two metals are among a series of products vital to the energy transition in which China dominates.
China is responsible for the production of about 90 per cent of the world’s rare earth elements, at least 80 per cent of all the stages of making solar panels and 60 per cent of wind turbines and electric-car batteries. In some of the materials used in batteries and more niche products, China’s market share is close to 100 per cent.
China’s cornering of the clean tech supply chain has drawn comparisons to the high level of influence that Saudi Arabia enjoys in the oil market. Just as petrochemical production provides an immovable strategic buffer for the Gulf state, China’s dominance over these clean energy sectors is adding to growing geopolitical competition and has the potential to complicate the world’s fight against global warming.
Western governments are now desperately attempting to catch up with China’s ascendance to the top of the world’s critical minerals and renewable energy industrial supply chains. US president Joe Biden and his counterparts in Europe have started deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Analysts, however, diverge on how long it will take the west to extricate itself from Chinese control of large swaths of the clean tech supply chain — or if this can be achieved at all.
This week’s fun finds
Semifinals!
After an exciting inaugural season, EdgePoint Football Club qualified for the playoffs. The excitement was evident with most of the roster showing up for a holiday Monday match. After taking a 2-0 lead into half, the opposing squad tied it up in regulation to force penalty kicks. In the end it was a 3-4 loss, but it left the team with a lot to build on for the future.
Starting off the long weekend right
Oyster afficionado Jeff shucked a lot of bivalves in the kitchen to get everyone ready for the Civic Holiday!
Meanwhile, Adam and Claire also added some spicy margaritas to the mix.
Forget 10,000 steps – walking just 5,000 is enough to lower your risk of death, says science
Published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, the paper brought together data from 17 existing studies involving 226,889 people.
It’s the first to assess the impacts of walking up to 20,000 steps a day, as well as whether the risk of dying differs depending on age, sex, or where in the world people live.
The answer? The study found that the more you walk, the better – regardless of your age, sex, or the climatic conditions of your region.
In fact, the scientists found that every additional 1,000 steps a day you do on top of the minimum reduces your risk of death by 15 per cent.
These benefits keep increasing with no upper limit, according to the scientists. The data reveals that for those walking fanatics who stride as many as 20,000 times a day, the benefits only continue to build. Insufficient physical activity is the fourth biggest risk factor for death across the world, according to World Health Organization – being associated with 3.2 million deaths a year.
