Humanity is in the midst of profound change, transition and crisis. Not really news, you might say; this has been the case for Homo sapiens ever since they appeared on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the pace and magnitude of our transitions and crises have greatly increased with more than 8 billion people alive today, all of them striving to live comfortable, energy-intensive modern lifestyles.
Rapidly advancing technologies supported by cheap and readily available energy over the past two centuries have facilitated our transitions and eased our crises. Who would have imagined in the 19th century that by 2025 there would be 8 billion people in the world, millions living in more comfort than the aristocrats in Queen Victoria’s England or King Louis Phillipe’s France? Technology has brought us modern housing, healthcare, travel, interesting work – and enough leisure time to enjoy the finer things.
But it is not just technology that has woven this magic. Technology requires natural resources to shape the things we need and demand. Wikipedia defines natural resources as “resources that are drawn from nature and used with few modifications … [including] sunlight, atmosphere, water, land, all minerals along with all vegetation and wildlife.” That is a pretty wide-ranging definition, but it underscores the point that humanity would never have escaped the caves without the ability, through technology, to harness a range of natural resources.
This idea seems pretty obvious – so why do I feel the need to write about natural resources?
Because many people today focus on the technologies to address our crises and transitions, and forget that technologies need natural resources to actually work. Even if they remember to consider natural resources, they typically do not think about where those resources exist in sufficient quantity and quality to service hungry technologies.
As a result, there is no end to the self-proclaimed experts explaining that solar and batteries can power the world, that we are heading into the “hydrogen economy”, or that we should just continue to burn coal, oil, and gas to power the world.
These people are all wrong. They are focused on the features of their favourite tech, and they have failed to adequately consider the natural resources required to make it work.
Four categories of natural resources
Ask people about “natural resources”, and they will talk about oil or minerals, or perhaps forests full of trees. However, the natural resources we depend upon encompass so many things that it is hard to classify them. But that will not stop me from trying.
Consider these four categories of natural resources:
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- Subsurface energy resources – oil, natural gas, coal, and geothermal heat
- Other subsurface resources – minerals (critical and non-critical)
- Water and land resources – oceans, lakes, land for food, forests, housing, and transportation
- Resources above ground – solar and wind energy
Obviously, there are many ways to think about and classify natural resources, but these four categories allow us to think about how different and diverse our resource base is, while realizing that natural resources have a lot of things in common when we consider how best to exploit them.
Natural resource access is critical
Throughout humanity’s history, wars have been fought for many reasons, and access to and control of natural resources is often one of the key factors. Before modern technology, land and water resources to support agriculture were front and centre, although access to minerals such as iron and copper ores was sometimes in the mix.
Control of subsurface resources has become much more important as resource-hungry technology has become more central in our lives. Today, access to energy resources plays a central role in conflicts, particularly in the Middle East and Ukraine. Even where war has not been declared, there can be huge geopolitical tensions, such as over China’s control of many mineral resources critical to advanced energy technologies such as wind, solar, and chemical batteries. One can argue that Donald Trump so charmingly covets Canada as the “51st state” because of our natural resource wealth, not because of our maple syrup, Nanaimo bars, and hockey superiority.
Even today, access to and control of natural resources means different things when considering the four categories. It is great to have subsurface resources beneath your feet in your own territory, but countries lacking access to key subsurface resources can set up business arrangements with friendly neighbours to extract and transport them to where they are needed. As an example, Japanese companies have invested heavily in Canadian subsurface energy resources to ensure adequate supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil for consumers in Japan.
But if you are counting on land and water resources, or resources above ground – lots of sunshine to generate solar electricity, or lots of flowing water for hydro power, you must be where the resource is located. You cannot import sunshine or enough water to drive turbines. You can import food and wood products, but not farmland, forests, or geothermal heat for that matter.
A deeper dive into natural resource access
Over my next few articles, I will develop these ideas by diving deeper into natural resource access. Each of the four categories comes with a different set of challenges, some of which have readily apparent solutions, and some which remain very challenging in our world as it is structured today.
A central theme, however, is that access to natural resources is critically important for the well-being of people in every nation. The Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Tesla) might dominate stock markets, but none of them is anything without the raw materials, electricity, and fuels that enable their technologies.
Humanity’s progress is driven by technology – but our world would grind to a halt without adequate natural resources to support those technologies.
(Brad Hayes, BIG Media Ltd., 2025)
