Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to Dry Powder.

One year ago, I had a conversation with my friend Dan Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize winner and vice-chairman of S&P Global, about a set of looming international challenges. Today, I’m sharing my latest dialogue with Dan, this time focused on the shockingly critical role that one raw material—copper, of all things—is set to play in everything from global finance to the environmental crisis, to the economic wars to come.

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One year later, we had coffee at my house in Nantucket and chatted about a new set of clear and present dangers: the U.S.’s economic war with China; Vladimir Putin’s European machinations; and the race to penetrate markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But before we even got to any of that, Yergin was focused on, of all things, copper. So much so, in fact, that I was reminded of that famous scene in The Graduate during which Benjamin Braddock’s family friend lectures him poolside at the cocktail party, “One word: plastics.” After all, Yergin and his colleagues at S&P Global have just completed an intensive eight-month study of copper and the role it will play in the evolution of energy consumption by increasing the use of electricity and decreasing the use of fossil-fuels. The problem is that in order to meet the world’s 2050 net-zero emission targets, according to Yergin...