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Short abstract:

How can economists contribute to public debate about the future of critical materials? By looking at two studies conducted by the European Commission and the French electricity grid operator, we show how economists value natural resources differently and thus raise different public concerns.

Long abstract:

By developing models that focus on the circulation of money for the sake of growing national economies, economists have contributed to make material and energy resource needs invisible (Mitchell, 1998). This paper refines the notion of invisibility by highlighting different versions of economics that explicitly take materiality into account, yet with consequences for the kind of public issues made visible or invisible. We investigate the 2023 EU Critical Raw Materials Act and a study of material needs for energy transition conducted in 2022 by RTE, the French electricity grid operator. The two initiatives associate economic and technical expertise and state explicit transition objectives, yet they do in different ways. The Act anticipates European demand for critical materials, seeks to diversify the EU's sources of materials supply, and encourages member states to use their own resources. RTE tackles the material dependence on resources while insisting on sobriety and the responsibility of the French state about resource use. As they define different roles for econometrics, geology, and other expert contributions, these two approaches produce different ways of economizing minerals as resources, and eventually perform two different economies, namely a European economy that must grow at all costs and a French economy that must become 'sober'. By analyzing these two studies as valuation tools that problematize public concerns, we discuss the invisibility effects of economic knowledge.