Both CounterPunch.org and The New American offer valuable coverage of an important study detailing not just the self-defeating power and resource requirements pervading every level of the inefficient “green energy” chain, but which also reminds interested parties that there is not enough mineral matter to replace storable-burnable oil and gas as fuel.
Writes Selwyn Duke, of The New American:
"Many points are made when discussing the green energy agenda’s infeasibility. It has been noted that wind and solar can’t provide our energy needs, that powering the United States with wind would require an area three times California’s size. It has further been asserted that electric-car production and use actually cause more pollution than the gasoline status quo. It’s not just that electric vehicles’ manufacture creates massive releases of CO2 (not a pollutant, mind you), either; it’s also that the mining of the metals and minerals required for their production causes environmental damage. Yet there’s a kicker here, too, a point seldom made:
Even if we could more cleanly and efficiently mine the materials in question, there simply aren’t enough of them to make green energy a reality.”
Duke credits CounterPunch’s Robert Hunziker, who last year revealed details from a study by Simon Michaux, PhD, of the Geological Survey, Finland exposing what would be necessary to phase out fossil fuels in favor of so-called “renewables”.
Offered Michaux:
“The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls.”
Duke also tips his hat to American Thinker’s Robert A. Bishop, who February 18 noted:
“…copper is an integral part of a high-voltage grid system, coming up short by a shocking 3.7 billion tons. Can we dig enough open mile-deep ore pits to meet that shortfall? Improbable.”
And Bishop refers to Michaux’s analysis of lithium production requirements for the so-called “renewable” field to come close to meeting current petrochemical energy provision, not to mention any upward trend in demand.
“For example, lithium would take almost 10 millennia to achieve. In addition, these scarce minerals must be mined, transported, and processed, relying exclusively on fossil fuels, which would create more carbon emissions and deplete hydrocarbon reserves.”
Bishop also writes:
“Petrochemicals from oil and natural gas make over 6,000 everyday products indispensable to modern society…”
And both Duke and Bishop note that the Ukraine-backing US/NATO/EU proxy war tactic of blocking Russian energy has pulled the mask off the ugly reality of the collectivist “green power” agenda.
“Europe’s embargo of Russian oil and natural gas, along with the terroristic sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, is exposing the myth of green energy. As a result, Germany, the poster child for green energy, has resorted to heresy by reactivating its mothballed coal-fired power plants.”
And, like a marionette, Greta Thunberg recently pranced around one of the German coal mines, evidently adamant that Germans should continue to struggle to heat their homes. She also denies the reality of the efficiency, portability, and storage capacity of petrochemical-based energy, that far surpasses anything “renewables” can offer.
Writes Bishop:
“When Michaux presented basic information to EU analysts, it was a shock to them. To his dismay, they had not put together the various mineral/metal data requirements to phase out fossil fuels and replaced by renewables. They assumed, using guesstimates, the metals would be available.”
Which is typical of politically-connected pushers of the green agenda. They focus on their goals - one of which is control of our lives, another of which is tax-based policy that will demand “penance” from businesses and civilians who dare stray from the primrose greenie path.
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Bishop distills additional important details from the Michaux study, including the unreliable nature of wind and solar, which encounter long and unexpected periods of “intermittency” when nature doesn’t allow the utopian power generation humans desire, and he adds:
“One factor that will influence what materials and systems are used to build out renewables is the fact that EVs require a battery that is 3.2 times the mass of the equivalent of a hydrogen fuel tank. Therefore, an analysis of EVs versus hydrogen fuel cells indicates it’ll be necessary to build out the global fleet with EVs for city traffic and hydrogen fuel cells for all long-range vehicles like semi-trailers, rails, and maritime shipping.
The entire renewable build-out requires 36,000 terawatt hours to operate, meaning 586,000 new non-fossil fuel power stations of average size. The current fleet of power stations is only 46,000, meaning it’ll take 10 times the current number of power stations, yet to be built.”
How does that translate to any form of imagined supply in daily human activity?
“The new annual energy capacity of 36,007.9 terrawatt hours will supply (1) 29 million EV Buses (2) 601.3 million Commercial EV Vans (3) 695.2 million EV Passenger Cars (4) 28.9 million H2-Cell Trucks (5) 62 million EV Motorcycles (6). Hydro will also need to be expanded by 115% by 2050 and nuclear will need to double. Biomass will stay the same. It’s already at limitations. Geothermal triples.”
And those numbers don’t even include additional factors such as maintenance, problems with carrying capacity that EV truck users are experiencing, temperature drops that will wipe-out battery capacity, potential fire hazards from the batteries, disposal of the highly toxic batteries once they become unusable, rewiring for homes and charging stations, the elimination of old wind turbines – which don’t biodegrade well – and the attendant environmental problems caused to humans, birds, and other living creatures whose habitats the greenies invade with their wind farms, which usually will be built via tax cash inveigled from us by government.
Finally, kudos to Bishop for bringing to the readers an International Energy Agency overview of the amount of essential metals that would be needed many generations on, citing what would be required by 2040 for the “green fleets” that many in the Climate Cult are demanding we use. He lists Copper, Zinc Manganese, Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt, Graphite, Silicon (metallurgical), Silver, Vanadium, and Zirconium.
Unsurprisingly, the estimated requirements to run worldwide transportation and construction/farming, etc., show us that those minerals simply aren’t available.
Copper is an example:
“Current reserves of copper are 880 million tons. But 4.5 billion tons of copper are required just to manufacture one generation of renewable technology.”
And Bishop notes that these pieces of magic “renewable” tech need to be replaced every eight to 25 years, increasing the unfeasibility of these politically-founded “green” schemes.
Finally, Duke observes that even a prominent “green” activist has recognized the danger of this pie-in-the-sky command-and-control push into deprivation by “renewables”:
“Far from an exaggeration, this alarm has been sounded before. For example, former Greenpeace figure Patrick Moore warned in 2019 that if the Green New Deal were instituted globally, it could ‘result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth.’ But before they met their miserable end, he pointed out, they’d cut down every tree for fuel and kill every animal for food.”
But major political figures worldwide keep pushing this, and many of their kindred pop media spirits sing the same ritualistic song -- all to fight their trumped-up bogeyman of so-called "Anthropogenic Climate Change" that has at its heart manipulated stats and repeatedly refuted claims that the Cult members cannot support.
As the facts reveal, their political song is dissonant, unrealistic, and hubristic. And it is a ritual that will harm us all.
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