Climate Change is Coming for Your Supply Chain

That will make your life less safe and more expensive.

Photo by J Yeo on Unsplash

One small town in North Carolina provides the quartz needed to produce much of the world’s solar panels, computer chips, and other electronic products that keep the world economy humming.

Check that, provided much of the quartz needed.

Spruce Pine, North Carolina, population 2,194, is one of the only places in the world that produces high-quality quartz.

Hurricane Helene damaged two mines in Spruce Pine that produce the highest quality quartz in the world. If you are wondering how a town with a population of just over 2,000 people can support two mines (Sibelco and The Quartz Corp.), join the club.

But Hurricane Helene knocked both of these mines offline. As of this writing, two weeks after Helene, no dates have been set for the opening of the mines.

That could be a big problem for a number of industries, and the world economy. We could get a little unintentional degrowth, at least over the short term.

Brief geology interlude.

Quartz is a mineral formed when silicon and oxygen atoms combine to form silicon dioxide (SiO2). It is our most common mineral. The oxygen and silicon atoms join together to form tetrahedrons (three-sided pyramids), which stack together to build crystals. If you have bought a cheap piece of quartz because you thought it looked nice or were told it had healing properties, that was likely not the high-quality quartz out of Spruce Pine.

The quartz from Spruce Pine is unique because it is highly pure, with few contaminants. When making silicon wafers, solar panels, and other electronics, every impurity in the crystals can disrupt the circuitry of the semiconductor. Spruce Pine quartz is cheaper to mine and process because it requires less refining.

Other sources of quartz exist – quartz is everywhere – but supply chains would have to be rerouted, and scaling up other mines to produce inferior quartz will take time and add costs. Your average computer chip, solar panel, and fiber optic cables will all cost more if Spruce Pine doesn’t come back online, and quickly.

What happened?

Spruce Pine received 24.12 inches of rain from Helene, according to the National Weather Service. The state of the quartz mines is still unclear.

 According to a recent story at cnbc.com, TECHCET CEO Lita Shon-Roy, who has studied the quartz supply chain for more than two decades, issued a dire warning about the importance of the Spruce Pine Mines.  

“If something were to happen to these mines, it could put the entire industry on its ear, period. There’s no other capability.”

For a bit of perspective, the global semiconductor industry is a $600 billion industry.  

China, the leader in producing solar panels, gets the majority of the quartz for its solar panels from Spruce Pine. The global solar panel industry is in the middle of a boom. The global solar power market size was valued at USD 253.69 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 436.36 billion by 2032.

It’s not just quartz.

Of course, quartz isn’t the only supply chain in shambles after Helene. Baxter International, A health care and medical device company announced that it must close its largest plant in North Carolina due to flooding and destruction caused by the hurricane.

The plant, located in North Cove, 60 miles northeast of Asheville, manufactures IV fluids and peritoneal dialysis solutions. It is the largest manufacturer of such solutions in the U.S. Some procedures at hospitals around the country are being delayed or canceled in anticipation of the shortage of some of these materials.

With Hurricane Milton hitting land on the Florida coast as I write this, expect more shortages. Hurricane Milton could cause up to $175 billion in damages. On top of the estimates of about $160 billion from Hurricane Helene, that is about $325 billion in damages from just two storms in less than a month.

As I wrote earlier this week, in 2023, there were 28 weather and climate-related disasters in the U.S. This surpassed the previous record of 22 in 202. These disasters caused a total of ONLY $92. 9 billion in damages. 

This trend isn’t going the other way.

Inflation ahoy.

These disasters are only going to increase in the coming years. Hurricanes are just the most expensive disasters, but heat waves, wildfires, flooding, famine, and armed conflict over resources will make this a more dangerous world, where it will be harder to get the essentials we now take for granted.

Suzie Kerr, chief economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, says it best.

“If we ignore it and don’t do anything about climate change, it will become a staggering cost. And it will have a huge impact on not only grocery bills, but many other aspects of our ordinary lives.”

Helene is the canary in the quartz mine.

Degrowth is the answer. If we need less and use less, our lives will cost less. The alternative is to continue on a path that will not only leave us less safe but will also bankrupt many of us, making life as we know it unaffordable.

If climate change coming for your very life doesn’t motivate people, maybe climate change coming for your wallet will.