Visual Capitalist Elements

What percentage is "A good portion" ? Gold mining dates back to ancient civilisations. Our best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history. Interestingly, about two-thirds of this gold has been extracted since 1950. This massive increase in production has been due to advancements in mining technology and the discovery of new gold deposits. * https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold 200 Years of Global Gold Production, by Country - https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-gold-product… Between 1500 and 1650, the Spanish imported 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from the New World ... * https://www.quora.com/How-much-gold-did-the-Spaniards-take-from-South-… What's your estimate for the tonnage of gold "hoarded since biblical times" ?

And as a follow on for anyone curious about "can't you just store it and make bank" Australia now leads the world in per capita grid storage. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery-stor…

Lithium-ion batteries have fallen in price at least 40% since you bought your car in 2018 (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteries-ke… Assuming there's some correlation between that decline and the replacement price you're facing, which is unfortunately not a given, it would be worth it to hold out as long as you can. We can only dream of a day when battery packs are a standardized commodity, and as easy to change as motor oil. But modern industry is far too extractive.

>It's already cheaper than anything else and getting even more cheaper. Cheap but a lot of folk don't follow through. China accounted for some 50% of the coal capacity under construction in 20 countries last year. China (75%) dominates the solar business but opened more coal power plants last year than at any time in the last seven years. At the same time their solar accounted for only 3.5% total energy consumption. 'It's already cheaper than anything else'. Is this a prediction? If so when will it become a reality because at the moment it's the reverse of the truth for most locations. https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-scrambles-add-coal-fired-pow… https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-dominance-solar-panel-sup…

Millenia like in with trees, that a forest fire can return it to the atmosphere in a whim? How stable are those calcium carbonates regarding how the oceans can change on temperature, acidity or even life, to name just a few factors? And it should be able to address more than this (https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-scale-of-fossil-fuel-product… amount of carbon yearly (and that is not the volume of the calcium carbonate, but the source carbon, it could be far bigger). Keeping the fuel underground is the best capture technology. It will keep being safely there unless a suicidal species dig around for retrieving and burning it.

> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel. 2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/ For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf). Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/energy-2023… that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat. So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days! The transition is possible now, it will…

Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on this. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2. The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2. Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak). However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.

Lithium-Ion density has basically doubled over the last decade. And the cost has dropped by 2/3. See figure 2 here: https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-n… and the data here: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/charted-lithium-ion-batteries-ke… (Both of these are a couple of years old. I'm sure there's newer data out there that looks even beter.) Newer batteries chemistries are slowly arriving, but they mostly aren't replacing Li-ion because Li-ion is getting better all the time. Except in specific circumstances. Like the Sodium-Ion ones that work far better at low temperatures and entered mass production two months ago: https://carnewschina.com/2026/01/22/catl-unveils-worlds-first-mass-pro…

https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-in-h1-2025-up-… https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-already-makes-as… https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-entered-a-ne… https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-chinas-battery-recyc…

Why do they show a picture of polluted India with people wearing masks and have some kind of skin thing going on, and then go on to show a heat map of PM2.5 rates across the USA, where the most polluted areas are nowhere near as polluted as non-western cities/countries [1]. Why do we never talk about the fact that the post polluted areas are not at all in the European civilization block, i.e., they are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Chad, and the DR of Congo. So they should also have the highest rates of dementia if this research holds, right? This all just seems like gaslighting lies, manipulation, and abuse. [1] https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-air-pollution-levels-arou…

Based on some back of the envelope math, if the US met 100% of its electricity needs with solar, it'd take about 1.6% as much area as the US currently has farmland (22k sqmi vs 1.4mm sqmi). Considering some solar is on non-arable land, and how much excess corn the US grows (enough that some is turned back into fuel), and that 1.6% ballpark, the idea that it's problematic that we're turning some farmland into solar doesn't pass the sniff test. Do you have any more info about that being a problem? https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States

There is a lot of empty practically free land in the world. Also, it is estimated that it would take about ~7 million acres to power the US entirely with solar. The US currently uses about 40 million (!!!!) acres for corn for ethanol. Land is just not a problem, at all. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/#:~… https://frontiergroup.org/resources/ethanols-outsized-place-us-energy-…

> Solar is growing [...] and is now at twice the capacity of coal power in China I didn't get that from the sources I could find [1][2]. Solar made up only a few percent of China's energy mix while coal makes up the vast majority. Can you clarify? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China [2] https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-chinas-energy-transi…

Hmm the the first source I found said 60 kg but now found others saying a lot less like only 6 kg. https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla-batteries… https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-key-minerals-in-an-ev-batter…

That is significantly more land than the USA would need to power the entire USA with solar power. Why so much land? (That is 34k miles^2 when we would only need 22k at most, new solar generations could potentially get that amount down to 10k). https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/A-Sol…

Other expensive materials in the cathode, manufacturing costs, and the anode are most of the major costs. A visualization: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-…

I wonder how the economics of drilling will work as we hopefully get away from fossil fuels for energy/transport to curtail global warming. (If carbon capture at the source of the emissions worked it'd be less of a problem but that seems to not be easily feasible.) Like, we'll need less of the products of fractional distillation that we currently burn, but will continue to need the rest not only for plastics, bitumen, paint and other chemicals, see e.g https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-products-and-fue… I wonder if the the parts of the distillation used for fuel can be reprocessed for the other applications somehow, and the overall amount of oil drilled then reduced..?

Here is a nice infographic of one years mining output for perspective https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/All-t…

Transition to solar is a challenge. Solvable probably, but transitions are hard. This explains it well: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-solar-power-duck-curve-expla…

Given the increasing duck-curve [https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/the-solar-power-duck-curve-expla… of solar energy production, this makes sense to me, economics and efficiency concerns aside.

The Tesla Model 3 has a base price of $47K. Tesla's gross margin was 33% in Q1 2022. So estimate of manufacturing cost is ~32K (probably somewhat higher as base model probably has lower margin). The battery is 50kwh. Price of a battery in 2021 was $132 / kwh (1). So the battery accounts for $6600 of that manufacturing cost. Even if they could get the batteries for free, and assuming the same gross margin that would drop the manufacturing cost to $25.5K and the price to $37K. So it seems like reducing battery cost is not going to get EV's to mass market. Am I missing something here? 1. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-…

> Can you provide the source? In the WTO's broader medical goods category, Germany actually exported slightly more than the US in 2022 ($202.6 billion versus $189.6 billion), so such a huge difference in a few years? Sure, these are my sources. World Bank (2023): https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/year/2023/tra… Observatory of Economic Complexity (2024): https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/medical-instruments > China accounted for approximately 44.2% of the 104 new molecules in 2025, compared with 26.9% for the U.S. and 15.4% for Europe. Source for this? My source was Citeline's 2026 annual review at https://pulseforinnovation.org/by-the-numbers-citelines-rd-annual-revi… which states: > Findings from Citeline’s latest report, Pharma R&D Annual Review 2026, highlight the continued U.S. leadership in the life sciences ecosystem... The U.S. leads all other countries, currently advancing over 11,600 medicines – more than half of medicines in development worldwide. > I will just give 3 examples In general, I was referring to "major industries" in the sense of economic categories, as defined by (for example) the UN: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/seriesm/seriesm_4rev4e.pdf Here shipbuilding is considered to be part of "manufacture of other transport equipment." I admit my wording was a bit imprecise; if you are going down to the level of specific products like…

Gold has a pretty stable value over long periods of time; the famous quote is: > an ounce of gold in Roman times bought a nice suit, and today, an ounce of gold buys a nice suit. Consequently it's the standard safe store of value investors flee to when the world is in upheaval, a role it has played since well before Roman times. Its price being high is a standard indicator of investors fearing miserable times ahead. See, for example, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-haven.asp or https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/flighttoquality.asp. If it appears to you that "gold is pretty much always appreciating", that's a function of your perspective, similar to the phenomenon where, sometimes, when you're standing on railroad tracks, a faraway train looks bigger and bigger and bigger if you just stand there and watch. In this case what is happening is that the value of whatever you're using to measure the gold's value, probably dollars, is depreciating. Gold's value is pretty volatile in the short term, though, so in fact most of the time gold is not at an all-time high, even measured in dollars. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/File:Price_… for example, you'll see that gold didn't reach its high of 02011 again for about 9 years, and didn't reach its high of 01980 again for 27 years, until the subprime mortgage crisis in 02007. To me it looks like the recent periods that gold has reached a nominal all-time price…

The problem with the "nice suit" metaphor is that the cost of clothing has actually plummeted since the height of the Roman Empire. Also, they didn't wear suits. The reason why money printing doesn't immediately translate into lowered dollar value (and thus, higher gold prices) is that other goods and services are getting cheaper around it. If supply is flexible then the price of some goods won't change much, while things with fixed supply will skyrocket in price. That's why we basically didn't see much inflation in the 2010s despite printing shittons of money and having a zero-interest rate policy for most of it. All that money went straight into equities and real estate. Likewise, there are also goods like oil that are part of basically every supply chain, so when the price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up. Owning gold will not hedge against this kind of inflation. "BuT tHe SuPpLy Of GoLd Is FiXeD!" you say. Yes, but oil has something stronger than a fixed supply: centralized supply. Every oil producing nation in the world is part of a large supply-restricting cartel that has proven to be frustratingly resilient to all the usual things that are supposed to break cartels. They even managed to bring American shale oil producers to heel (because fracking is too expensive to be economic in a cheap oil environment). As a result, the ratio of gold to oil prices is very volatile[0], way moreso than you'd expect from something sold as an inflation hedge. Because,…

> America solved it in the 1800s with commodity money; the US dollar was worth as much at 1900 as it was at 1800 What? No it wasn't. The value of gold relative to commodities or industrial products wasn't stable over that interval. It would be ridiculous if it had been. Not only were we in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, the California gold rush had just started a two-century boom in the quantity of gold [1]. > there weren't any financial collapses in the 1800s comparable in magnitude to the Great Depression or Global Financial Crisis Free banking was a constant drumbeat of bank failures, inflation and scams [2][3]. (Also financial crises [4].) If you want a country that didn't have a civil war in the 19th century to go off, grab a copy of Bagehot's Lombard Street [5]. It's written by arguably the world's first modern central banker. He battles credit crises, bank runs, inflation, et cetera. All while Britain was firmly on the gold standard. [1] https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-gold-product… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_central_banking_in_the_United… [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking [4] https://home.treasury.gov/about/history/freedmans-bank-building/financ… [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street:_A_Description_of_the_Mon…

You can look a market summary here: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/70-years-of-global-uranium-produ… and an article here: https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/marches-financiers/putsch-au-n… Basically Niger already dropped a lot as a source worldwide due to production costs. Areva even has a mine with permits to exploit in Imouraren which they don't actually exploit because uranium prices are so low that it's not economical to keep the mine opened. There's been talks to shut down all the remaining mines even before the coup. The prices paid by Areva were also increased by 50% during Hollande terms (https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/energie-environ… for political reasons and pushed the mines not too far from closing economically.

Other supplementary info: Steel Ind. Summary, 2021: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/exec%20sum-March%202… World Steel Production, Last 50 Years: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/50-years-of-global-steel-product… Steel Crisis and Aftermath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_crisis World Steel Production since 1800's: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343071585/figure/fig1/AS:9164… How Steel Production Trends with GDP: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Steel_produc… Current Numbers, 2023: https://worldsteel.org/steel-topics/statistics/steel-data-viewer/ Above, Charted Geographically: https://worldsteel.org/steel-topics/statistics/annual-production-steel…