Visual Capitalist's Elements section turns energy, metals, and climate data into charts on solar, batteries, EVs, gold, and nuclear power.
Commenters cite its charts for figures such as falling lithium-ion battery prices, historical gold mining totals, and grid storage capacity by country.
> Can you provide the source? In the WTO's broader medical goods category, Germany actually exported slightly more than the US in 2022 ($202.6 billion versus $189.6 billion), so such a huge difference in a few years?
Sure, these are my sources. World Bank (2023): https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/year/2023/tradeflow/Exports/partner/WLD/product/901890 Observatory of Economic Complexity (2024): https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/medical-instruments
> China accounted for approximately 44.2% of the 104 new molecules in 2025, compared with 26.9% for the U.S. and 15.4% for Europe.
Source for this? My source was Citeline's 2026 annual review at https://pulseforinnovation.org/by-the-numbers-citelines-rd-annual-review-underscores-importance-of-life-sciences-ma/ which states:
> Findings from Citeline’s latest report, Pharma R&D Annual Review 2026, highlight the continued U.S. leadership in the life sciences ecosystem... The U.S. leads all other countries, currently advancing over 11,600 medicines – more than half of medicines in development worldwide.
> I will just give 3 examples
In general, I was referring to "major industries" in the sense of economic categories, as defined by (for example) the UN: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/seriesm/seriesm_4rev4e.pdf Here shipbuilding is considered to be part of "manufacture of other transport equipment." I admit my wording was a bit imprecise; if you are going down to the level of specific products like…
The problem with the "nice suit" metaphor is that the cost of clothing has actually plummeted since the height of the Roman Empire. Also, they didn't wear suits.
The reason why money printing doesn't immediately translate into lowered dollar value (and thus, higher gold prices) is that other goods and services are getting cheaper around it. If supply is flexible then the price of some goods won't change much, while things with fixed supply will skyrocket in price. That's why we basically didn't see much inflation in the 2010s despite printing shittons of money and having a zero-interest rate policy for most of it. All that money went straight into equities and real estate.
Likewise, there are also goods like oil that are part of basically every supply chain, so when the price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up. Owning gold will not hedge against this kind of inflation. "BuT tHe SuPpLy Of GoLd Is FiXeD!" you say. Yes, but oil has something stronger than a fixed supply: centralized supply. Every oil producing nation in the world is part of a large supply-restricting cartel that has proven to be frustratingly resilient to all the usual things that are supposed to break cartels. They even managed to bring American shale oil producers to heel (because fracking is too expensive to be economic in a cheap oil environment).
As a result, the ratio of gold to oil prices is very volatile[0], way moreso than you'd expect from something sold as an inflation hedge. Because,…
> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/
For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).
Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/energy-2023-united-states.png
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will…
Gold has a pretty stable value over long periods of time; the famous quote is:
> an ounce of gold in Roman times bought a nice suit, and today, an ounce of gold buys a nice suit.
Consequently it's the standard safe store of value investors flee to when the world is in upheaval, a role it has played since well before Roman times. Its price being high is a standard indicator of investors fearing miserable times ahead. See, for example, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-haven.asp or https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/flighttoquality.asp.
If it appears to you that "gold is pretty much always appreciating", that's a function of your perspective, similar to the phenomenon where, sometimes, when you're standing on railroad tracks, a faraway train looks bigger and bigger and bigger if you just stand there and watch. In this case what is happening is that the value of whatever you're using to measure the gold's value, probably dollars, is depreciating.
Gold's value is pretty volatile in the short term, though, so in fact most of the time gold is not at an all-time high, even measured in dollars. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/File:Price_of_gold.webp, for example, you'll see that gold didn't reach its high of 02011 again for about 9 years, and didn't reach its high of 01980 again for 27 years, until the subprime mortgage crisis in 02007. To me it looks like the recent periods that gold has reached a nominal all-time price…
> America solved it in the 1800s with commodity money; the US dollar was worth as much at 1900 as it was at 1800
What? No it wasn't. The value of gold relative to commodities or industrial products wasn't stable over that interval. It would be ridiculous if it had been. Not only were we in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, the California gold rush had just started a two-century boom in the quantity of gold [1].
> there weren't any financial collapses in the 1800s comparable in magnitude to the Great Depression or Global Financial Crisis
Free banking was a constant drumbeat of bank failures, inflation and scams [2][3]. (Also financial crises [4].)
If you want a country that didn't have a civil war in the 19th century to go off, grab a copy of Bagehot's Lombard Street [5]. It's written by arguably the world's first modern central banker. He battles credit crises, bank runs, inflation, et cetera. All while Britain was firmly on the gold standard.
[1] https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-gold-production-by-country/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_central_banking_in_the_United_States#1837%E2%80%931862:_%22Free_banking%22_era
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
[4] https://home.treasury.gov/about/history/freedmans-bank-building/financial-panic-of-1873
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street:_A_Description_of_the_Money_Market
Out of curiosity, I decided to do some napkin math on this.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us-solar/) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.