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They haven’t even been announced yet, but the idea that they will has sent prices soaring.
China, Canada, Mexico, steel, aluminum, cars, and soon, copper. That’s what the market has concluded following a Bloomberg News report last week that copper tariffs would arrive far sooner than the 270 days President Trump gave the Department of Commerce to conduct its investigation into “dumping” of the metal.
Copper has been dubbed the “metal of electrification,” and demand for it is expected to skyrocket under any reasonable scenario to contain global temperature rise. Even according to a U.S. administration that, at best, neglects climate change considerations, copper is an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience,” as the Trump White House said while announcing its investigation into copper imports.
The effort to boost domestic production of copper did not start with this White House, but it has historically run into the same problems that beset the mining industry: New production can take decades to begin, even after you find the minerals you’re looking for underground. And if demand is not assured — if, for instance, subsidies for electric vehicles filled with copper disappear — then investing in new production could lead to bankruptcy, whereas holding back on new capacity would, at worst, mean forgoing some profits.
The Trump administration and the broader energy and foreign policy community have been, in general, obsessed with rocks — critical minerals, rare earths, and other minerals that are indeed “critical” to much of the economy but are not listed as such. Copper sits somewhere between these categories — while it does not appear on the United States Geological Survey list of critical minerals, which ranges from aluminum and antimony to zinc and zirconium, it does appear on the Department of Energy’s list of “critical materials.”
These lists guide federal data collection efforts, and that data can then get used to guide policymaking. Being on these lists doesn’t guarantee that a related program will get funding, but it does mean that the data is there to draw from should someone need to make a case for why their program should get funding.
This gap between the lists has been a target for Congress, especially for legislators in the Southwest, where much of America’s copper is mined. The discrepancies in the list is essentially a matter of focus for the Energy and Interior Departments — with Energy naturally focused on what’s especially important for energy infrastructure. Getting consistency between the lists, which are only a few years old, will “increase transparency within our federal agencies, ensuring all of our nation’s critical resources are developed, traded, and produced equally, and strengthen our supply chains,” Mike Lee (R-Ut), a sponsor of the Senate version of the legislation, said in a statement.
Trump’s executive order asking for the investigation sought to speed up permitting for new mines — and they’ll need all the help they can get. S&P calculates that the average copper mine takes over 30 years to develop. Rio Tinto and BHP’s Resolution Copper project in Superior, Arizona — which the companies hope will produce 20 million tons of copper — has already sucked up some $2 billion of capital while producing zero copper after about 20 years of legal and political opposition. A proposed copper-nickel mine in Minnesota has alreadyabsorbed around $1 billion worth of investment and is still wrangling over the more than 20 permits it needs.
But for the Trump administration’s strategy of tariffs and expedited permitting to actually work for American copper end users, it will have to lead to an expansion of smelting and recycling, in addition to mining.
Reuters reported last year that the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Mexico would re-open an Arizona smelter, but that has yet to happen (it’s currently a Superfund site). A copper mine in Milford, Utah said last week that it was expanding to meet rising copper demand.
The smelting sector is dominated by China. “The United States has ample copper reserves, yet our smelting and refining capacity lags significantly behind global competitors,” the White House said in its copper executive order in February. China’s dominance, “coupled with global overcapacity and a single producer’s control of world supply chains, poses a direct threat to United States national security and economic stability.”
The United States produces around 1.2 million tons of copper annually from its mines and imports around 900,000 tons, according to the United States Geological Survey. Some of that domestically mined copper — around 375,000 tons worth — ends up being exported for smelting, according to the Copper Development Association.
While the United States is near the top of national copper production (well behind the world leader, Chile, but comparable to other large-scale copper producers such as Indonesia and Australia), it has a meager copper refining industry, with only two active smelters producing around 400,000 tons of copper a year — a fraction of China’s refining capacity — leaving American industry reliant on imports.
The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years. More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.
That goes not just for copper — it also includes the metals that are mined alongside it. First Solar, the U.S.-based solar manufacturing company, has benefited from tariffs on solar panels put in place during the Biden administration. But while First Solar has been a winner in the renewable energy trade conflict, it is still sensitive to the global trade in commodities. That’s in part because it is also a major consumer of tellurium, a mineral that’s a byproduct of copper mining, and which was the subject of expanded export Chinese export controls announced early last month.
“We have, over the past decade employed a strategic sourcing strategy to diversify our tellurium supply chain to mitigate a sole sourcing position in China and are undertaking additional measures to mitigate dependencies on China for certain products containing to tellurium,” Alexander Bradley, First Solar’s chief financial officer, said in the company’s February earnings call. “While we continue to evaluate [whether] there will be any operational impact from China's decision, this latest development emphasizes the urgent need for the United States to accelerate the strategic development of copper mining and processing of its byproduct materials, including tellurium.”
Electric vehicles are another major user of copper among climate technologies, with EVs having on average around 180 pounds of copper in them, according to the Copper Development Association. Tesla — which will soon be hit by auto tariffs — has been actively trying to reduce its copper consumption. Meanwhile Rivian, one of Tesla’s primary domestic competitors, announced last year that it would cut its production targets dramatically due to what turned out to be a supplier communication snafu for a copper component of its motors.
“We’re very bullish on copper prices,” Kathleen Quirk, chief executive officer of Freeport-McMoRan, which runs a number of U.S. copper mines (and a smelter, to boot), said at a financial conference in February. With boosts in demand coming from “power generation, new power generation investments, multibillion-dollar investments in infrastructure and energy infrastructure, it's going to be very positive for copper.”
Copper prices paid by American manufacturers have been rising for the past five months, according to the monthly PMI survey. Prices in New York reached record highs last week, hitting almost $12,000 per ton as the industry tried to beat the almost-certainly-inevitable tariffs, according to an ING analyst report released last week.
The actual imposition of the tariffs would constitute a “further upside risk to copper prices” — in other words, prices will continue to climb, according to the ING analysts. “The U.S. copper rush could leave the rest of the world tight on copper if demand picks up more quickly than expected,” the ING analysts wrote.
Copper futures have shot up this year by around 25%, leading to profits for those who mine it — especially in the United States.
From the perspective of Freeport-McMoRan, the market gyrations so far have generally been to the upside, with the premium on copper in the U.S. “helping us from that perspective of generating higher revenues for our U.S. price copper,” Quirk said at the conference. But the domestic copper industry as a whole does not see tariffs as the sole way to increase copper production.
“The U.S. will need an all-of-the-above sourcing strategy to secure a stable supply for domestic use. This must include increased mining in the U.S., increased smelting and refining in the U.S., enhanced recycling, keeping more copper scrap within U.S. borders, and continued trade with reliable partners to maintain the flow of critical raw material feedstocks for domestic use,” Copper Development Association chief executive Adam Estelle told me in an emailed statement.
And tariffs can come in faster than new mines and smelters can be built or their capacity expanded. American mining projects have been mired in decades of permitting delays and negotiations with local communities not because there isn’t a market opportunity for new copper, but because it just takes a very long time to open a mine.
Even as she was celebrating Freeport-McMoRan’s robust outlook, CEO Kathleen Quirk noted that “at the same time, it's become more and more difficult to develop new supplies of copper.”
That goes especially for industries related to renewable energy, where copper finds itself into grid equipment, solar panels, and wind turbines. Even so, they’ve been wary of talking about an impending tariff directly.
A number of trade groups, including the Zero Emission Transportation Association, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, and the Solar Energy Industries Association, hailed an executive order aiming to accelerate critical minerals production released March 20. When I asked about copper tariffs, however, a ZETA spokesperson referred me to an earlier statement decrying trade conflict with Canada and Mexico, saying that “imposing tariffs on allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico — both of which play a significant role in the North American automotive supply chain — will increase costs to consumers and make it more difficult to attract investment into our communities.”
Meanwhile, NEMA’s vice president of public affairs, Spencer Pederson, told me in an emailed statement that “any new trade policies must provide predictability and certainty for future domestic investments and businesses.”
Other manufacturing-centric industries that use copper aren’t thrilled about the prospect of tariffs, either. A spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers referred me to its recent survey showing that the top two concerns among its members were “trade uncertainties,” feared by more than three quarters of respondents, and “increased raw material costs,” which worried 60% of respondents. While NAM is broadly supportive of many Trump administration goals, especially around extending the 2017 tax cuts, it has called for a “commonsense manufacturing strategy” which includes “making way for exemptions for critical inputs.” That runs against the Trump administration’s preference for big, obvious tariffs.
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.