Green. Dr. Green.

“As the global economy is accelerating the move towards net zero, and developed markets are also ramping up their efforts to tackle climate change, there is a high likelihood that copper demand will remain less cyclical. Going forward, Dr. Green may be a better name for the red metal than Dr. Copper!”

This extraordinarily witty comment comes from Bank of America, which argued in August that the link between copper demand and economic growth had weakened in recent years due to, yes, the energy transition.

While BofA analysts no doubt congratulated themselves on their wit to echoes of canned laughter, however, one implication of this supposedly weaker link between copper demand and economic growth seems to have gone unnoticed. But not by everyone.

The mining industry has been warning for more than a year now that supply is going to fall short of demand. The warnings are based on forecasts confirming the divorce between copper demand and economic growth — because the transition will need enormous amounts of copper and it is, presumably, entirely disconnected from GDP trends.

The latest repeat of that warning came just this month, when mining industry executives said there were not enough new mines being started to provide the necessary supply, per demand forecasts. And there probably won’t be new mines being started any time soon. Because, awkwardly, prices are down because of, well, economic growth issues.

The FT reported this week that copper prices have shed 4% since the start of the year. That’s despite constantly repeated transition commitments, EP votes on increasingly ambitious energy mix goals, the IRA, and rising EV sales.

Prices are down because global GDP forecasts are quite pessimistic and while I’d like to see the faces of those BofA analysts who tried to be witty and hear what they have to say about those price movements, I’d much rather see the faces of the leaders of the climate crusade when they heard what miners had to say about supply.

“Now it’s not just price. It’s these other factors that really are going to limit how quickly we can develop supplies,” Freeport-McMoRan’s Kathleen Quirk said at the FT Mining Summit last week. “What may end up happening is that this [energy transition] gets extended out longer.”

The other factors appear to include cost inflation and labour shortages. And that’s on top of longer-standing challenges, notably the consistent decline in ore grades. In short, there is not enough copper for the transition and getting it to be enough would be quite a challenge for reasons totally having to do with economic growth trends. Also the central bank policies that affect those trends. What’s a crusader to do?

Well, it appears that for starters, a crusader can forecast ample supply. This is what the International Copper Study Group did last week, when it reported that next year will see copper production exceed demand by close to half a million tonnes. That should be good news for the transition. As long as it happens.