This is the eleventh of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode looks at various reasons why renewable energy and recycling are not our way out of the predicament modernity has set out for us. It’s just a doubling-down that can’t really work anyway.
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself as a recovering astrophysicist, and the topic of this episode (why renewables aren’t the answer) as part of our effort to put modernity into context. I see this topic as a bit of a tangent to the main thread, but one that I think needs to be addressed.
A Past Enthusiast
I have a much more intimate relationship with solar energy than your average bear—or even the average “energy transition” advocate. Besides knowing the semiconductor physics inside out, as a hands-on guy I have experimented with various off-grid configurations of panels, built my own curve-tracer to explore partial shade effects, tried different battery chemistries, learned the ins and outs of four different charge controllers, tried different inverter types, performed extensive monitoring and analysis, etc. Plus, living an off-grid lifestyle connected me more viscerally to weather trends, and my energy haul (and expenditure) becomes more personal. I wrote a Physics Today article in 2008 on getting started, and various Do the Math posts (e.g., here, and here) relating to my experiments. Figure 13.15 in my textbook came from my system.
You could say that I have been an enthusiast, and have acquired a fair bit of knowledge and lived experience in the matter. My default starting position was that solar power was bound to be a huge part of our answer to things like climate change and peak oil. Well, it turns out that narrow solutions work perfectly for narrowly-defined or recognized problems. I will try to broaden the perspective in this piece, which has some overlap with A Climate Love Story and Inexhaustible Flows.
Cost of Climate Change Dominance
A primary focus on climate change means the solution becomes artificially straightforward: eliminate CO2 emissions. Solar, wind, EVs, and done! We are attracted to simple stories and tidy solutions like ants to sugar.
But elimination of climate change and CO2 makes only a small dent in the list of causes for the ecological nosedive presented in Episode 7, so that the sixth mass extinction steams right ahead even in a stabilized climate. Of course, we’re dealing with all the elements on the list all at once, and climate change just makes everything worse.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a climate change denier. Some people only have one box for anyone who does not put climate change at the top of the list. If that’s you, please find more boxes. To me, the larger and more pervasive denial is that climate change is the main problem to be cracked—and via technology, of course.
But even on technical grounds, renewable energy fails to get us out of our mess. I won’t even address here the fact that electricity from renewables can’t obviously satisfy our manufacturing and transportation needs, because that’s not even the appropriate goal, for me.
Materials Demand
A very important and real concern is that all renewable energy technologies require a lot of non-renewable materials. This is because they tend to be diffuse, low density sources energy, necessitating large amounts of “stuff” to capture and convert. Below is a figure that represents data from the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review (Table 10.4).
In terms of concrete, steel, copper, glass, and aluminum (not counting the fossil fuel mass itself), renewable energy requires an order-of-magnitude more material per unit of electrical energy delivered than does fossil fuel combustion. This translates to never-ending mining, manufacturing, pollution, and all the associated ecological costs. It’s not a build-it-once-and-done game.
Renewable energy is therefore not actually renewable, since it depends crucially on non-renewable materials. If becomes essentially irrelevant that sun and wind keep coming “inexhaustibly” when the weakest link is non-renewable, and therefore dictates the story. An analogy would be saying that fossil fuel combustion requires oxygen, whose supply is effectively unlimited, so fossil fuel combustion is unlimited? Not at all! One has to look at the limiting factor, not single out the one part of the system that is not a limitation (like sunlight or wind). It’s evident, right?
A solar panel made of something that regrows itself (like plant matter) using elements in ecological circulation would satisfy me in terms of renewability. I’ve just managed to describe a leaf, minus the electricity.
The Genius of Life
This is part of what is so remarkable about life. It has figured out how to do all the amazing things it does based on a small set of elements found in common circulation on the surface of the earth. No mining is required. Recycling is essentially perfect, utilizing a vast web of life to carry out the entire process—from microbes to fungi to worms to insects to birds, etc.
In an earlier post called Inexhaustible Flows, I quantify the elements involved in life, which for this abbreviated treatment can be represented via this figure.
The four labeled elements that comprise 96% of our mass derive from air and water! The carbon comes from plant matter that grabbed it from airborne CO2. Nitrogen is “fixed” out of the air by plants and bacteria before ending up in our bodies. This is a truly incredible trick, huh? Imagine making our clunky cars, computers, submarines, cities, or solar panels out of mostly air and water. Yet life manages it.
The other elements amounting to any significance are calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium: all in broad circulation. As I mentioned, the recycling program is essentially 100% efficient, and goes for millions upon millions of years.
Life does not have much truck with elements that require mining like copper, aluminum, silicon, gold, nickel, cobalt, neodymium, lithium, silver, lead, titanium, and so forth. Our sad inventions use the wrong stuff, don’t last long, leave a waste stream that is not useful (and in fact often harmful) to life, and will not persist on ecological timescales. Where is the true genius, I ask you?
Recycling Limitations
One common reaction to the figure above showing the heavy material demand of renewable energy is: yeah, sure, but you only have to do it once and then it’s recycling from there on out.
First, don’t dismiss the massive initial build-out. You can’t recycle what’s not already in place, and we’re talking about an enormous material outlay to provision modernity with its desired power from renewable resources. In fact, the current “breakneck” pace of solar energy installation is still an order-of-magnitude smaller than it would take even to hold steady at today’s energy appetite based on routine attrition of hardware after a few decades. The effort would require new mines, new deforestation, new waste, new manufacturing and associated pollution, and new habitat loss (and threat of extinctions) from situating these massive infrastructures.
Second, saying the word “recycling” is not a “get out of jail free” card: nice try. In the real world, retrieval is not perfect. Some stuff gets destroyed/scattered, trashed, stored, or otherwise is unavailable for collection. Then not all the collected material will be recoverable. Even an unprecedented, fantasy-level 90% end-to-end recovery results in less than half the original resource after just 7 cycles, and less than 10% after 22 cycles. It’s not indefinite. It prolongs, but does not solve the issue, on strictly technical grounds (leaving aside ongoing ecological erosion for now).
Turbines and panels last a few decades before requiring replacement, which means that recycling peters out on the timescale of a few centuries at best. Compared to the time our species has been on the planet, or even the time since our agricultural departure from ecological living set us on this path, a few centuries is hardly anything. Because it depends on “exotic” (mined) materials, modernity will starve itself in relatively short order even if everything else went swimmingly—which it isn’t.
What Do We DO with Energy?
This is the real question at the heart of the matter. We use energy to cut down forests, clear land for agriculture, mass-murder plants and animals with herbicides and pesticides (I’m not being melodramatic: “-cide” means murder, as in homicide, suicide, and genocide), build cities, highways, dams, cars, gadgets. We use energy to mine materials, spew the tailings, manufacture goods, and release all manner of chemical contamination that the community of life has no provision to process. What we do with energy is produce all those “Likes” from the previous episode, manifestly tangling us into a raft of Dislikes.
The plants and animals know what we do with energy. We dominate the planet and drive ecological health into the ground. They are not cheering ambitions of an energy transition to solar, wind, and electric vehicles. To them, the damage is every bit as bad no matter the engine: the pressure does not let up. The sixth mass extinction barrels on.
The driving attitude is: it’s all ours, dammit! We own the world and can do anything we want with it for our short-term gains. I mean, GDP won’t take care of itself, will it?
You see, it doesn’t matter what form our energy technology takes. What matters is our cultural attitude that sets the agenda. It’s our intent and disregard for the community of life. The next episode will address the related matter of human supremacy.
Intent Matters
Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, put it this way (paraphrasing, and emphasis mine):
If a man is coming at you with a hammer, clearly intent on doing you harm, the technology he holds is of secondary importance to you. Instead of a hammer, it could be a gun, knife, bat, mace, or staple gun. The thing that matters most to you is his intent to do you harm.
As we rush at the community of life clutching our technology, we show every appearance of an intent to do it harm. It won’t matter whether we destroy the living world with fossil fuels or solar panels: we are more than capable of getting the job done either way. Before we get too far along, though, I suspect that the deteriorating web of life will create cascading failures that end up making humans victims, too, and pulling the power cord to the destructive machine. Only then would some people accept that ecological ignorance—paired with technological capability—has dire consequences.
Obligatory Titanic Metaphor
One of my favorite Onion headlines is World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg. The Titanic’s main problem wasn’t that it had a coal-fired engine belching CO2 instead of a sleek bank of lithium batteries charged by solar panels. The problem was the full-steam-ahead, invincible, hubristic attitude of “owning” the ocean. It was the intent, not the technology. Ramming the iceberg wasn’t the coal’s fault. “Renewable” drive would be just as capable of meeting the same fate.
Switching the engine powering modernity to a different technology does not fundamentally alter the situation.
Imagine this conversation on the bridge of the Titanic:
First Mate: Sir, we’re heading straight for a giant iceberg whose encounter even this ship can’t withstand. Oh, and for some reason our engine is slowing and we’re losing steam.
Captain: OMG: if we lose steam, we won’t make it to New York in record time. All hands to restore speed!
Ummm. Did you hear the first part? We’ll break a different kind of record by ignoring the more fundamental peril. Losing speed is the best thing imaginable in this circumstance.
Cease What, Exactly
Of the activities listed above that we use energy to do, tell me which ones we plan to cease under renewable energy. Will we stop cutting down forests, stop clearing land for agriculture, stop murdering plants and animals, stop building cities, highways, dams, cars, and gadgets? Will we stop mining materials, spewing the tailings, manufacturing goods, and releasing all manner of chemical contamination into our living world? Will we stop pursuing the “Likes” that are responsible for all the Dislikes (last episode)?
Sure, eliminating CO2 emissions and reining in climate change would be a great victory, but it doesn’t get us out of trouble. The intense ecological pressures would still be in place.
I mean, think about it: isn’t the whole point of renewable energy to be able to keep doing these things—business-as-usual—but without CO2 emissions? Isn’t the point to keep modernity fully powered? Just be aware that doing so keeps our boot on the throat of the community of life so it can’t breathe. Doing so keeps the sixth mass extinction basically on track, uninterrupted—though perhaps not as quickly or warmly.
Ask yourself the question this way: do the plants and animals cheer heartily to learn that we have a plan to steam along using a snazzy new engine? I don’t see why on Earth they would.
Closing and Do the Math
As usual, I close with an announcement of the next topic (human supremacy), and encourage viewers to also become readers of this written companion piece.
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Your discussion about 'intent' is very telling. It's as though we are willfully ignoring our best interests and plunging ahead toward self destruction. I keep going back to McGilchrist's notion that we as a society are behaving as though we have collective right brain damage. Have you ever heard of Tikopia, in the Solomon Islands? From Wikipedia — Tikopians practice an intensive system of agriculture (which has been compared to permaculture), similar in principle to forest gardening and the gardens of the New Guinea Highlands. Their agricultural practices are strongly and consciously tied to the population density. For example, around 1600, the people agreed to slaughter all pigs on the island, and substitute fishing, because the pigs were taking too much food that could be eaten by people. Tikopians have developed rituals and regulations that have — for 3,000 years — strictly kept their population within the carrying capacity of their tiny island.
How do they manage to behave like sane people?
Yes, I am familiar with Tikopia and the amazing job they did exercising restraint to live sustainably—until Christian missionaries came in and told them their practices were abhorrent, at which point the island suffered a population boom and ecological destruction.
But it's not as isolated as we are led to believe. Many Indigenous cultures had explicit policies and stories to prevent overtaxing the local ecology, thinking in the long term.
I do need to reflect on the paradox that I stress our intent, while contending that we didn't intend any of this to happen. We're not really in control, but actively participating in an unfolding. I suppose the resolution is that our present focus elevates humans above the rest, so that our actions ignore and damage the foundation upon which we depend. We're collectively unable to find the restraint needed to avoid all the unintended consequences.
Tikopians have the advantage that on a tiny island the limits to growth are obvious to all. Anyone trying to accumulate more than their fair share, or damaging the community's means of sustenance, will quickly get corrected.
Correct, and at a population of 1,200 people, everyone knew each other—so that actions were held accountable. In contrast, we live in a Culture of Strangers, so that our actions are essentially anonymous.
I don't know how you could spell it out any more clearly. It will be interesting to see if anyone attempts to object.
I've had many arguments with people on this and related subjects.
The thing is, they just can't let go. They simply refuse to believe human ingenuity (which, in many ways, got us into this mess in the first place) won't save the day.
I suppose it's just too difficult for them to reject the story of 'progress', in which they've been immersed their whole life.
They choose the blue pill.
It seems to me that the central delusion rests on how we perceive our own brains, imbuing our experience with far more than is actually going on. It seems like the world fits in our heads, while it's only a crude mental model. If you think the whole universe can fit in your head, then you feel very empowered to manipulate it in any way that suits you. The hierarchy needs to be inverted: the world does not belong to us, but we to it. Our ingenuity isn't the driver: our brains are a tiny subset of the ingenuity of life—fundamentally incapable of grasping the whole in all its complexity. Episode 13 will touch on this a bit.
"A crude mental model." Yes. The map can never come close to depicting the reality of the territory it re-presents!
Of course the map is not the terrain – and science is only part of the map.
Tom's challenge to modernity is Orwell's challenge stated in Animal Farm that, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Our power with technology makes us wonder whether humanity is more equal than animals, flora, or minerals. Does technology mean ecocide? Is there a technology that avoids ecocide? What technologies best serve humanity that is One with ecosystems?
As a thought experiment we might compare the "being" of a newborn infant to the "being" of the Andromeda galaxy. Both have "being," so how do we compare being-itself? There are spiritual awarenesses that make it obvious a newborn infant and a galaxy share the same "being." They are ONE.
We only see outwardly as clearly as we see inwardly and we only see inwardly as well as we see outwardly. The difference between science and spirituality is whether we're examining outwardly or inwardly. A technology that is One with ecosytems is a technology that sees the outward and inward as One.
If we're unable to practice restraint that avoids unintended consequences, it's because we're not seeing the outward and inward as One. Seeing them as One is something we learn if we chose, but it's a choice that starts with sidelining ourselves.
Yes, our brains are subsets of the ingenuity of existence, of life, where our brain can make a choice to see and live in Oneness or only in itself. Similar to a graduate degree program, it takes about 6-10 years to learn the discipline of seeing inward-outward as One.
Unfortunately, many environmental movements have adopted “renewable” (rebuildable) energy as the ultimate solution. Mineral ore grades have been declining through history as we use the best first. Copper grades in some locations have gone from 2-3 % in the 1970’s to less than 0.1 % today. At the same time, we are processing finer grained ore minerals. Both factors require larger volumes of rock waste and more energy and chemicals for extraction and processing. No large copper mine can operate without diesel trucks driving 24/7. And think about the fossil energy in milling the rocks. Earth’s mineral deposits are probably insufficient for a full energy transition to replace use at today’s level and as you say it requires extensive ecological destruction. Renewable energy is just business as usual by alternative means. It won’t happen, and that is actually good news for Nature.
I'm reading Material World by Ed Conway right now. It's a fascinating (and infuriating) book that makes clear the massive and catastrophic impact that extracting various materials as on the natural world, including the materials required for "renewable" (really, rebuildable) technology.
It's infuriating because Mr. Conway is absolutely enamored with human engineering, modernity, and believes that despite the obvious catastrophic impacts he's writing about that we "need" this way of life. He's fully bought into modernity and "green", which is remarkable given he's written a book about how utterly unsustainable it all is.
Anyway, for anyone interested in materials, it's a good read if you can try not to throw the book into the river because of all the human supremacy.
How many of us would like to jump ship or even know how that is possible at this point? Get the life boats ready.
Yes, the human societies which have endured have have been part of an system where the energy collection and storage was self-replicating, biodegradable, and did not require mining and manufacturing for its existence. Alice Friedemann, in "Life after Fossil Fuels", thinks that we will become a "Wood World " again when the fireworks show ends.
Re. Silicon, it is a significant component of bamboo and other grass. A major component of most rocks, though.
https://www.bio-conferences.org/articles/bioconf/pdf/2024/13/bioconf_icbs2024_06006.pdf
And even though the sun and wind are renewable, solar panels and wind turbines do "steal" energy that would otherwise be used by the Earth.
Wind turbines change the wind on the leeward side significantly, which can change the temperature, and, in offshore wind turbines, change upwelling that is critical to marine ecosystems.
Solar panels "steal" photons that would otherwise hit the Earth and supply energy to plants and soil and other processes we can only guess at given how little we know about how the natural world actually works.
And of course dams, so often described as "renewable energy", kill rivers, eradicate riparian zones, increase the temperature of the water, prevent fish from swimming upstream, catch sediment that would otherwise "feed" estuaries, etc.
None of this is "renewable" or "clean" in any way as you correctly identify. Thank you!
And dams he erate a huge amount if GHGs, particularly CH4 from rotting matter, in some instances more GHGs the a coal fired power station.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whoops-dams-and-reservoirs-release-tons-greenhouse-gases-180960645/
I am constantly dumbfounded by scientists who think a renewables transition is the answer. It is not even a way to halt climate change. Not only are there other drivers of GHG emissions than fossil fuel burning but, to my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated how those so-called renewables can be built (including the mining, refining, manufacturing machines needed for the mining and refining, the construction, reconstruction and recycling) using only energy from renewables. Renewables infrastructure is not emissions free. And your point about recycling is further strengthened by the fact that modernity requires growth (usually thought to be at least 3% to pay back debt with interest), so even 100% recycling (an impossibility as you've indicated) would still require all that destructive activity in the future).
So even if humans managed the first ever transition to a new energy source, the climate problem would not be solved. The fact that such a transition seems impossible (or at least hugely unlikely) seems to have passed by the climate science community who, by and large, are strong supporters of an unproven energy transition.
And all in service of saving "master" modernity…it's not about ecological health.
Humanity has used fossil energy and technology to create modernity and thereby support an ever-increasing population, now totalling more than 8 billion people.
This has created a predicament: the very thing that supports our huge population will destroy the biosphere, eventually to include most of us. We can't keep 8 billion alive without modernity and modernity will eventually kill almost all of us by destroying the climate, poisoning the earth with our waste and destroying biodiversity.
The rational implication of this predicament is that the sooner most of us humans die, the better for the planet and all future generations of humans. But considering the fact that not many will volunteer for suicide, what is to be done?
Should modernity be sabotaged, perhaps by a clever hacker taking down the internet or a rogue biologist inventing a synthetic virus that kills most of us? Would the greater good justify such a thing? Perhaps.
I suspect that, in the end, modernity as usual will just keep on going until it runs out of energy or until a war or financial accident shuts down the global market economy on which modernity depends.
Given this prospect, what kind of triage can be applied to pre-collapse modernity to save as many people as possible but in a manner that regenerates the biosphere and limits harm to the climate? Perhaps consideration of possible triage protocols could be your 19th installment.
One distinct possibility that appears to be in its beginning stages is that young people see an impossible situation in front of them and elect not to have children for a multitude of reasons. It is possible that we will depopulate ourselves in reaction to the hardships and defuse the situation before slamming hard into the wall. At least, this is something I would prefer to see happen. And dramatically falling birth rates are setting us up for it (see https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/).
Missing from the deal is that the fall in male fertility is actually the consequence of microplastic pollution. This leads to the "depopulation paradox." But this paradox is no joke; the mortality levels will shoot up if no fossil-fuel-powered medicine exists.
I could easily believe that decline in TFR is *a* consequence of microplastics, but would caution against simplifying it to be *the* consequence. A multitude of factors operate at once. Many of the rapidly increasing fraction of people deciding not to have kids would not list microplastics as a factor, for instance. Nothing about our population boom was ever sustainable, so: yes, lots of things will change on the inevitable backside of fossil fuels and population growth.
I can understand this point of view of reducing the birth rate. Indeed, my daughter chose to not have children. However, as the years passed, she realised that she had a deep desire for children and has now decided to have at least one. Something I never thought would happen. This is just one example, of course, but there is an innate drive to procreate. Societies of all kinds need children.
Of course, societies won't try to consider the situation rationally but, given that nature deals with overpopulation of other species (when it used to occur) by increasing the death rate, not decreasing the birth rate. Shouldn't we really be reducing medical interventions, which have been responsible for doubling the average life span (a big driver of population overshoot)? No-one will elect to do that but I often wonder if medical interventions other than pain relief (much of this could be using natural substances) were discontinued, then there would be a reduction in population to a less damaging level without wreaking havoc on societies with unbalanced demographics.
Indeed. I like to ask, "just what do you think you're trying to save?"
Yes. And you'd better not deviate from the narrative. Witness the pile-on that Seibert and Reese received for their "Through the Eye of a Needle" paper that made some of the same points that Tom makes here.
https://www.realgnd.org/eye-of-the-needle
Thank you for publishing this series.
This is sort of a picky question but I think it is an important one in light of all the claims being made by intermittent alternative energy promoters. In the graph of materials used per TW of generating capacity do you know if the intermittency of the "renewable" power sources is taken into account and the amount of materials needed increased to be the equivalent annual generating capacity?
It doesn't really matter though, it just increases the direness of the situation that we are in slightly.
I think that a huge problem in the world is that people in politics have brains that operate in a way that is not capable of understanding scientific principles and they avoid anything to do with science throughout their education. They are under the impression that the solution is simple because they are being mislead by the hucksters and salespeople promoting their snake oil style solutions to transitioning away from fossil fuels.
My understanding is that the DoE numbers reflect actual utility-scale installations, none of which (especially in 2015) had any storage to speak of. So, yes, the bars get taller if including storage. On the other hand, new practices can reduce the bar height as well. Whatever the case, it will remain true that collecting and converting diffuse energy will require substantial amounts of non-renewable materials that are not magically fully recyclable, so that "indefinite" energy requires indefinite mining and associated ecological harm.
As to the other point, scientists are every bit as guilty for simplistic thinking. Most "progress" in thinking is done by shedding complexity and context until the predicament becomes a problem, until the complexity becomes straightforward, until the tangle becomes tractable. Only by then it's not representative of the original full context, so the "solution" is an attractive misfire.
The Schernikau materials graph is deceptive in part because fuel is material as well, and it does not account for post burning damage or residual harm. Nevertheless I think your premise is true: solar and wind are not solutions, though they are better overall than fossil, nuclear, or even hydro. The only viable solution is to use less energy, eliminating the most harmful first as we build down (degrow?) to a lower energy throughput world. The US, which should proceed first and fastest, needs to cut back by at least 80%. The rest of the world can be proportional to that, but all should seek to eliminate fossil fuel use, even if they increase energy use via renewables. Shrinking material use is central to this, which means making do with a lot less energy and a lot less stuff at every level. This is not an acceptable stance to the beneficiaries of the present system (which includes a lot of people like me) but it will happen whether we degrowth voluntarily or not.
Another deceptive aspect of the materials bar chart is that at 0.5% ore grade, every kg of copper required 200 kg of mined material (similar stories for other materials), so the bars are not as tall as they maybe should be. But you're right to look past distractions in an impossible comparison and simply acknowledge that renewable energy comes with a large material footprint in an absolute sense, so that drastic reduction is the only viable path out of the present. I believe the path has to go much farther, but it starts via major reductions—as you say, voluntary or not.
"solar and wind […] are better overall than fossil"
As the article explains, solar and wind require huge amounts of materials – which must be mined, processed, transported, built and maintained *all using fossil fuels*.
Therefore, the cost, in terms of energy and materials, is much more for 'renewables' than it is for gas or coal power stations.
So, in the agregate, and despite all the hype from various 'stakeholders', they are actually worse.
There’s much gloom and doom about living in a world without fossil fuels with the implied suggestion that life for humanity will be nigh impossible. Perhaps for some, but it’s worth remembering that past civilisations constructed many incredible testaments to hard work and ingenuity. Pyramids. The Great Wall of China. The Taj Mahal, & etc. all done without the use of FF. Most, if not all the ‘gifts’ modernity has given are for our own convenience or enjoyment – but they are not essential for our survival.
Agreed. The amount of material that must be extracted from the Earth to build them is astronomical and rarely accounted for in the materials analysis.
To make steel requires carbon atoms, typically from coal. Recycled steel can be made into new steel in an electric arc furnace, but typically is only a portion of new steel made because existing steel is still in use, and because of growth. The majority of a wind turbine and associated infrastructure (steel reinforced concrete bases onshore, and massive steel bases offshore, install and maintenance machinery, etc.) The most mined metal on earth is iron ore for new steel.
Silicon for solar panels also requires carbon atoms, typically from metallurgical coal and wood. And of course lots of quartz to supply the silica.
The intense heat required to make both is usually supplied by coal (and primarily in China so that Americans get to ignore the emissions on our own balance sheets).
The immense harms done by mining, refining, and the toxic tailings produced by mining and refining can never be made "clean" or "renewable" in any way.
The resulting technologies must be fixed and replaced, are intermittent, are low density energy converters compared to fossil fuels, and thus have a very low EROEI. If the entire supply chain was properly accounted for, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a negative EROEI, but most analysis excludes at least some of the supply chain impacts. Far worse than fossil fuels in overall impact.
Instead of attempting to build all this industrial machinery in a vain attempt to replace fossil fuels for the electric portion of our energy use, it would be far better to start rationing fossil fuels as a way to force humanity as a whole to dramatically downsize. This would, of course, require the entire world to do so at once, because otherwise, the multipolar trap / energy and materials arms race prevents any one country from taking the initiative. I don't see that happening.
Therefore it seems likely we'll continue to extract and destroy until collapse comes for us all and the many species and ecosystems we are destroying along with ourselves.
Unfortunately I have to agree with your conclusion. I wonder just how many missed opportunities we’ve had though. I helped develop a cryosurgical unit in the late 1980s that used LN2 as the cryogen. Its boiling point is -196C so it’s stored in pressurised safety vessels. Introduce a latent heat source – like a metal rod at room temp and the LN2 reacts violently. Just the same as water when exposed to high temperatures.
The CSU won a Design Council award presented by Prince Charles in 1989 – but what impressed him more was the working model of a steam engine that we had converted to run on nitrogen gas which powered a small dynamo and 60W light bulb. A 20 litre storage ‘dewar’ held enough LN2 to run the nitrogen engine continuously for three days. Unlike steam engines, you don’t need FF to provide a heat source for boiling the liquid – and the waste product is nitrogen gas which was distilled from the air in the first place. LN2 currently costs $0.13 litre to produce – but it requires electricity to compress the air.
We thought it had potential, especially for the marine industry – where seawater can provide the heat source – however we discovered that the National Coal Board had a 50 year closed patent protection order on the technology already, which prevented any further development.
Obviously, the energy required to produce the liquid nitrogen will always be greater than the energy output of this 'invention'.
Thanks again for a really interesting blog-post. But I have a question. You show a diagram over how much raw material is needed in order to get a certain power from wind, water and the sun compared with electricity from gas, coal and nuclear power plants. Now to my question. In the diagram shown in the written version you show the amount of raw materiel used per TW but in the video you talk about the amount of raw material per delivered TWh. The y-axis shows in both cases raw material per TW.
I thought I knew the difference between power and energy and I think that it doesn´t make sense to compare the amount raw material used with the amount energy delivered.
However, of coarse I can be wrong and if that is the case I would very much like learn why I am wrong. Have I been asleep during some lessons when I was at the engineering school?
The diagram came from people who don't pay attention to units. It should be TWh. That's what is in the DoE original table. Energy makes more sense than power to me for this purpose, as it's a total amount accumlated over the lifetime of the materials involved.
link to this was posted to.r/solarpunk I wonder what Tom may thing about such prognosis?
https://rmi.org/insight/the-battery-mineral-loop
"Accelerating the trend along six key solutions — deploying new battery chemistries, making batteries more energy-dense, recycling their mineral content, extending their lifetime, improving vehicle efficiency, and improving mobility efficiency — means we can reach net-zero mineral demand in the 2040s.
At that point, end-of-life batteries will become the new mineral ore, limiting the need for any mining altogether. We have enough to get there; our known reserves of lithium, cobalt, and nickel are twice the level of total virgin demand we may require, and announced mining projects are already sufficient to meet almost all virgin demand.
Accelerated progress means we only need to mine a cumulative 125 million tons of battery minerals.
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Guess living into said +25 years far future will tell us if such optimism was even partially founded … Because obviously business embrased this energy transition narrative (because groooooowth!) it has good ininciative to use long tradition of using most optimistic numbers to paint itself GOOD…..
Like you Tom I went off grid 20 years ago with a small solar system, and Pb Batts. It made me realise it could be done but with a life nothing like modernity (we were on a 2kW off grid sysyem, cycled, no car, no generator backup etc) and you're on point about much more intune with the weather
Before that I worked as an engineer in a mine, and left that in the '90s becase of the horrendous enviomentlal damage it brings, that was a Cu and Au mine. I oft complained at the degredtaion the world brings for fiooary like a wedding band and ear rings. (most Au is used in jewellery)
What's happened since is the realisation that even our (parter and I) minimalist child free lifestyle was still not possible in a world of 8-10 billion.not sire what tje number would be bit I'd think pre modernity human population is a reasonable guess-tinate. Even then, Britain expanded hungry for resources, they'd cut down all their trees for their ships. A read on the is the book The Golden Spruce.
You'd think this would bring depression but the opposite. I think Hannah Ardent pointed out she wasn't here to provide solutions but to observe becase as you point out there are none.
We observe and endure.
I have a fond hope that the peoples in the higlands of New Guinea will prevail and wonder what happened to all this silver birds high in the sky.in some future decade.
Gerry McGovern on Mastodon does a great job of highlighting some of the stuff you bring up here and gets lots of pushback re the wonders of modernity based on entitlement and not reality.
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green
Thanks for this great series !
Thanks for the mention. 🙂 Funny, I had just read this truly excellent piece by Tom and was also enjoying the great comments, and was intending to make a comment here to say thanks to Tom for his profoundly important, decent work.
In recent years, I've been trying to get some sense of the total costs to our environment of materials like aluminum, copper, etc. Often, the mining waste is pretty much ignored, and as other commenters have pointed out, this waste is growing on multiple fronts, with one of them being ore grade decline. These costs while physically very visible in poor communities, are economically invisible, externalized from the Global North to the Global South. I'm currently writing a book about three sets of communities in Ireland, Spain and Brazil, who have had to live with the consequences of mining. It's nothing but the same old story, I'm afraid.
And now come the righteous mining oligarchs, telling the Indigenous and poor that they must sacrifice them one more time, but this time it's for a good cause: saving white people's lifestyles. Old colonists with new lies, as one Indigenous said.
The tech cult have just taken words like "renewable" and "green" and made them into a license to keep on consuming.
As you say, we "observe and endure", and bear witness, and where we can, resist.
Setting aside "intent" for a moment, let's consider a small gedankenexperiment:
IF we could get renewables up and running AND society was marginally more thermodynamically efficient at self-sustaining extraction of energy from renewable sources than the biosphere, and photosynthesis in particular.
THEN by simple competition for energy resources society would eventually replace the entire biosphere.
The anti-corollary to this argument is to observe that after approximately 1 billion years of evolution, the biosphere, underpinned by photosynthesis, is probably about as optimally efficient at self-sustaining energy extraction as possible.