The Energy Security Case for Automobile Demand Reduction in the Transition to Net Zero

Energy security has traditionally dealt with technical risks to a systematically stable system, and with the preparation for acute shocks to oil and gas supply. But two wrenching forces of transformation – that the energy system has to be torn down and remade within a single generation to avert catastrophic climate change, and the shift towards an increasingly fractious multipolar order – are creating a far wider canvas of threats and opportunities. Subjects long considered marginal to ‘energy security’ will move to its centre. I explore one such subject, with reference to the United Kingdom: automobile demand reduction as a solution to energy insecurity. What is the nature of this relationship? On the one hand, there is a gaping shortfall between the current mining production capacity of critical minerals integral to lithium-ion electric vehicles (LEVs) – lithium, phosphate, graphite, nickel, cobalt, manganese – and future demand, with the IEA forecasting that lithium demand will jump more than 40-fold between 2020 and 2040. But ramping-up mineral capacity involves moving rightwards up the supply cost curve through potentially volatile price increases, the ratcheting up of competition for control of raw materials between the United States and China, and the expansion of harms to local communities and environments that historically have been endemic to mining. On the other hand, given existing policies for both phasing-out and reducing the tailpipe emissions of internal combustion vehicles (ICVs), it has been established that there is no plausible way to make transport emissions consistent with a Paris-aligned pathway without demand reduction. This itself is an energy security solution in three regards: by reducing ICV use, it can reduce exposure to volatile international fossil fuel markets; by reducing LEV use, it can ease pressure on a stretched electricity grid; and by preventing the overshoot of the carbon budget for road transport, it can prevent disruptive and costly re-adjustments to offset that excess through a commensurate saving in another sector. But crucially, it can also help reduce the risks and harms involved in the ramp-up of critical mineral production. In this paper, I explore the size, timescale and geography of these synergies, using the UK as a case study, before surveying what forms of demand reduction could be pursued – material efficiency and substitution, downsizing, modal shifting, destination shifting, recycling – and what scope there is for multilateral action given that critical mineral demand reduction is a global public good. I also reflect upon what this tells us about the need to critically rethink 'energy security' in the transition to net zero.