Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check

Description

If we just build enough wind turbines and solar panels, we’ll be able to generate all the energy the world needs and stop mining for coal, oil, and natural gas. Think of all the environmental benefits—including stopping global warming! Right? Wrong.

As Mark Mills shows in this outstanding study, replacing hydrocarbons (“fossil fuels”) with “green” machines will vastly increase, not decrease, the mining of critical minerals around the world.

For example, averaged over the battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” 5 pounds of earth—25 times as much as using an internal combustion engine.

Another example: The oil needed to fabricate the average electric car battery would power that car over 200 times as many miles if turned into gasoline instead.

And one more: 500,000 pounds of materials must be extracted and processed for every 1,000-pound lithium car battery produced. That’s 500 times the weight of the battery. All that extraction and processing takes energy—lots of it.

These are just three of many fascinating facts one learns from Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy that undermine environmentalists’ and climate alarmists’ demands to replace internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles.

In short, switching from fossil fuels to wind and solar, and from gasoline- or diesel-powered machines to electricity-powered machines, means ripping more minerals out of the earth—together with all the environmental problems associated with that—not fewer.

Sad to say, most people don’t know that fossil fuels are more efficient energy sources than wind and solar, and that the machines that use them are more efficient than the machines that use electricity. Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy offers you the facts you need to help your friends, neighbors, schoolteachers, and others understand and embrace sound energy policy.