Extracting Renewable Energy from the Planet

This election year, several key issues dominate voters’ concerns. Illegal immigration across unsecured borders by migrants, criminals, human traffickers, and terrorists. Anti-police policies, decreased law enforcement, and rising crime. Unprecedented prices for food, clothing, housing, and other necessities.

Parental Roles in Education and Childhood Gender Transition. The threats to our republic and democracy from unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who use their power to persecute, prosecute, silence, and even imprison opponents and control our lives.

Equally important is control over energy – the driving force of our civilization, jobs, health and prosperity.

Will America shut down coal, gas, and nuclear electricity generation until it has enough reliable replacements? Will we have electricity when we need it, or only when it is available, especially after we are forced to convert gasoline cars and gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters to electric models?

What will families do? pay for all that electricity and everything we eat, drink, build and use? Where will we get the plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other products made from oil and gas that they want to lock in the ground? What will happen to our jobs, our health, our standards of living – and our personal choices about where we live, what we eat, what kind of car we can drive and how far we can fly to our vacation destinations?

We are told that a major energy and economic transformation is underway – and it is necessary to avert a “climate crisis.” In reality, the crisis exists in computer models, headlines, and politicized science, but not in actual temperature and weather records.

In reality, there is no energy transition. In 2023, wind and solar generated 2.7% of the world’s primary energy; 81.5% came from fossil fuels. Between 1965 and 2023, North America and Europe reduced their use of fossil fuels almost in half; but during the same period the rest of the world consumed seven times more than those two regions reduced their use. Emissions have increased even more as China, India and other developing countries require minimal pollution controls on power plants and vehicles.

In reality, moving to an all-electric, fossil-fuel-free economy would mean that millions of acres of America’s wild, scenic and farmland would be covered in wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines and warehouses filled with batteries that could spontaneously burst into flames.

In fact, we don’t know if they exist enough available metal and mineral deposits on planet Earth to extract all the raw materials needed to produce the turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, electric vehicles, transformers and other equipment that an energy transition would require – just in the United States, let alone the entire world.

We don’t know how many billions of tons of rock would have to be mined, processed, and disposed of; how many millions of acres would be affected; how many millions of tons of toxic air and water pollutants would have to be emitted; what human rights would be violated to obtain these metals and minerals.

One of the most basic and important metals for the energy transition is copper. Average global ore concentrations (0.04%) mean that miners would have to remove about 40,000,000 tons of overlying rock and extract, crush, and process almost 25,000,000 tons of ore to obtain 110,000 tons of copper—enough for the first 30,000 megawatts of President Biden’s offshore wind plan.

Worse, mining is essentially banned in the United States—and the Biden administration has vetoed world-class mines that could meet the U.S.’s copper (and other metals) needs for decades to come. And the problem isn’t just President Biden or the Biden administration. It’s governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer and countless activists and mostly Democratic politicians who support these policies.

Recent studies question whether mining companies can produce enough copper just to meet the electric vehicle needs of people—much less wind and solar power; let alone a full U.S. (or global) energy transition. Again, it’s all about copper.

The International Energy Agency’s 2022 report examines the demand for essential metals and minerals in the energy transition. On the edge wind installations, as stated in the report, require nine times more materials than combined cycle power plants to produce the same amount of electricity. At sea Wind installations require fourteen times more. (These IEA figures do not include materials for transmission lines or emergency power for periods of no wind or sun.)

The IEA says its projections are “very dependent” on how quickly and rigorously the world actually tries to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in energy generation and use; which wind, solar, battery and other technologies dominate; and whether countries also try to use low-emission (natural gas) or zero-emission (batteries) equipment in mining, materials processing, manufacturing and transporting wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, vehicles and other technologies.

However, the IEA estimates that demand for aluminium, copper, cobalt, graphite, iron, nickel, lithium, rare earth metals, concrete and other green energy materials is set to increase increase dramatically by 5, 20, 40, 50 or more times the current global requirements until 2040.

The agency says there are numerous “challenges” standing in the way of actually obtaining these materials, including finding mineable deposits, land use, water scarcity and pollution, air pollution, management of toxic mining waste, corruption and bribery, safety of workers and local residents, and child labor.

Meeting these challenges will require “systematic approaches”, “institutional development and the rule of law”, “inclusive legal frameworks”, “responsible” and “robust” pollution and waste management frameworks, “sustainable practices”, “international coordination”, “capacity building and knowledge sharing”, greater “transparency” and ultimately “international governance of minerals”, the IEA says.

The IEA assures us that all of these actions will contribute to the development of “sustainable and responsible supply chains that contribute to a low-carbon economy” around the world.

But will these pious conditions survive collisions with the real world? Developing nations see coal, oil, and gas as the key to jobs, modernity, and prosperity. China, Russia, and their allies see the West’s fixation on climate change and green energy as opportunities to control U.S. and EU supply chains, geopolitical options, and military-economic capabilities.

The largest wind energy project in the US will soon include 1600 square miles (1.25 times Delaware) New Mexico to generate 3,500 MW about 30% of the year. Arizona’s Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant generates 4,200 MW from 6 square miles almost 24/7/365.

Bloomberg’s research team says the world will need at least $200 trillion to stop global warming by 2050. Others estimate it will be $275 trillion!

How can we stop this economic and environmentally devastating madness once and for all?

Sure, smart voting decisions are essential. But state and local governments should pass laws requiring utilities to explain how they will generate replacement wind and solar power on windless winter nights before they close a single coal, gas or nuclear plant — or approve a single wind or solar project. (These are just a few actions they can take.)

They should also demand detailed information about where the raw materials will come from, how much they will cost, and the human rights and environmental costs – to local and state communities… and to our planet.

America’s jobs, health, standard of living, and right to choose a home, car, and food depend on it.

Photo: Stephan Mosel. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.