Sometime during this century, it is highly likely that worldwide depletion of natural resources will force an entire reorganization of social and economic structures, perhaps violently.” — Walter Youngquist, ‘Our Plundered Planet’. We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050.
That’s the message in a number of recent important reports and books. They underscore a number of problems with the renewables illusion, including the complexity of the task, the toxicity of rare earth mining and the scarcity of critical minerals.These grounded realists, including the French journalist Guillaume Pitron and the Australian geologist Simon Michaux, all have three basic messages:There are dramatic limits to growth. Truth and reality are not linear. And the world needs a better plan to avoid collapse other than replacing one unsustainable fossil fuel system with another intensive mining system powered by even more extreme energies. In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path.
‘Doubling down on the wrong thing’ For largely ideological reasons many greens and “transitionists” have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes. In so doing they have ignored much basic geology, energy physics and even geopolitics. As a consequence many imagine the construction of millions of batteries, wind mills, solar panels, transmission lines and associated technologies, but they downplay the required intensification of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals you’ve probably never heard of such as dysprosium and neodymium. One of the great lies of modern technological society is that of endless mineral abundance. Urban consumers, who have little knowledge of energy realities underpinning their existence, have swallowed the idea that digital gadgets and automation will somehow detach society from the physical world and allow us to do more with less, leading to a dematerialization of society. But that’s a wholesale fiction long debunked by the likes of the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil and the late geologist Walter Youngquist. The average North American citizen not only consumes 1.3 million kilograms of minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime but has no idea where they come from or at what cost.The current global mining footprint is already “unsustainable” if that plastic word has any meaning left. In his book Extraction to Extinction the British geologist David Howe politely notes that current mining operations have now become their own geological force, scraping , sorting and collecting more dirt, rock and sediment than the world’s rivers, wind, rain and glaciers every year. But you can’t build solar panels, wind mills or electric cars without mining more copper, lithium, iron and aluminum along with the rare earth technology metals that only appear in small concentrations. That means vastly more destructive scraping and digging of ocean floors, rainforests and tundras on a scale inconceivable to most environmentalists.
Already the industrial global machine that serves our shop till you drop culture has dug up more materials and metals than the globe’s total living biomass. In other words our machines, cellphones, buildings, cars, asphalt roads, concrete, plastic, gravel and bricks started to outweigh the world’s plants, fungi, animals and bacteria by 2020. If we continue on this extractive course the pile of human mined materials on this groaning planet will triple global biomass by 2040. Will it really matter if we reach net-zero emissions by extinguishing the last remnants of biodiversity in the process, asksthe U.S. physicist Tom Murphy in a recent essay. He considers the current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies a dangerous course. “It’s doubling down on the wrong thing: propping up and accelerating the machine that’s eating the planet alive. Barrelling forward on renewable energy is the last thing Earth’s critters would vote for, and would be considered one of the more disruptive decisions we could make.”Murphy is far from alone in that assessment. After the U.S. renewables skeptic Alice Friedemann tabulated the mining costs of rare earth mineral mining needed for renewables, including enormous tailing ponds, poisoned groundwater, radioactive waste and volatile geopolitics, she flatly concluded, “Our quest for a more ecological growth model has resulted in intensified mining of the Earth’s crust to extract the core ingredient — rare metals — with an environmental impact that could prove far more severe than that of oil extraction.”....read on-there's much more https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/
And that's happening already in Alberta, Canada!.........Alberta’s Strange Double Standard on Green Energy. Solar and wind face tough rules, while fossil fuels Projects are banned on prime agricultural land, unless both crops and livestock can coexist with the wind turbines or solar panels. A ban on projects in 35-kilometre zones around what the government defines as “pristine viewscapes” has blocked wind project construction in those regions. The entire length of the Rocky Mountains is included in these buffer zones. Remember that!
Then there are the bonds or securities required by developers for reclamation costs. These stringent rules would make sense if they were consistent across the energy and resource board. They’re not. The Danielle Smith government seems to think renewables development presents a threat far greater than other, more established industries. There is a need for consistent regulation within the energy sector. Renewable energy should not be developed in sensitive ecosystems, or in areas with high biodiversity. However, these restrictions must be applied fairly across all sectors, including the oil and gas industry,” the statement said.
Unlike renewables, oil and gas is allowed on all agricultural classes in the province, according to the statement. That permission exists in spite of the huge amount of land and sacrifice of soil and water linked to oil and gas development.“It can take decades to remediate soils that are contaminated by oil and gas, during which the land cannot be used for farming,” it said.“ Decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure is also a major concern, with cleanup costs estimated to be as high as $130 billion, while barely any security has been collected. Mandatory security requirements for renewable energy development must also apply to the oil and gas sector,” the statement said. Reviving the coal mines......Another industry treated with a gentle hand is coal. Despite its record of alarming environmental impacts, recent provincial willingness to open back up development on seemingly canned coal projects indicates a concerning ignorance to how harmful it can be for Alberta citizens. The categorization gives exemption to the ban on coal mining, meaning companies can continue with applications to mine in the area.....read on https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/