The dirty side of clean energy

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If the world is not careful, renewables can become as destructive as fossil fuels.

The climate change debate has rekindled in recent months. Influenced by school climate strikes and social movements like Rise Against Extinction, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are finally planning a swift green energy transition under the banner of a Green New Deal.

This is welcome progress, and we need more. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that deserves our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that this will pave the way for a green growth utopia. Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there is no reason why we cannot continue to expand the economy forever.

This approach may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think again. One of them is associated with the purest energy.

Clean energy usually conjures up bright, clean images of warm sun and fresh breeze. But if the sunlight and wind are obviously clean, then the infrastructure needed to use them is not. Not at all. The transition to renewable energy sources requires a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare earth minerals with real environmental and social costs.

Yes, we need a quick transition to renewable energy, but scientists warn that we cannot continue to increase energy consumption at the current rate. There is no clean energy. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a largely overlooked report that for the first time provided a comprehensive look at the issue. It simulates the increase in the extraction of materials that will be required to build the required number of solar and wind power plants to produce about 7 terawatts of electricity per year by 2050. This is enough to provide electricity for about half of the world economy. By doubling the World Bank's numbers, we can estimate what it will take to completely cut emissions to zero, and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum and at least 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, switching to renewables will require significant increases in existing production levels. For neodymium, a vital element in wind turbines, production is expected to rise by almost 35 percent over current levels. The maximum estimates provided by the World Bank suggest that it could double.

The same is true for silver, which is critical for solar panels. Silver production will rise 38 percent and possibly 105 percent. The demand for indium, also essential for solar technology, will more than triple but could skyrocket by 920 percent.

And then there are all these batteries that we need to store energy. Keeping power going when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing will require huge grid-level batteries. That means 40 million tonnes of lithium, a staggering 2,700 percent increase in production over current levels.

It's just electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading UK scientists sent a letter to the UK Climate Change Committee outlining their concerns about the environmental impact of electric vehicles. Of course, they agree that we need to stop selling and using internal combustion engines. But they noted that if consumption habits remain unchanged, replacing the world's projected 2 billion vehicle fleet will require an explosive increase in production: global annual production of neodymium and dysprosium will rise another 70 percent, annual copper production will more than double, and production cobalt should almost quadruple - and that's for the entire period from now until 2050.

The question is not that we will run out of basic minerals, although this can indeed be a problem. The real problem is that the already existing overproduction crisis will be exacerbated. Mining has become a major contributor to deforestation, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss worldwide. Environmentalists estimate that even at the current rate of global use of materials, we exceed sustainable levels by 82 percent.

Take silver for example. Mexico is home to Peñasquito, one of the world's largest silver mines. Covering nearly 40 square miles, it is striking in scale: a mountainous complex of open-pit mines surrounded by two mile-long garbage dumps, and a tailings dump filled with toxic silt, held back by a 7-mile dam as high as a 50-story skyscraper. The mine will produce 11,000 tonnes of silver over 10 years before the world's largest reserves run out.

To convert the global economy to renewable energy sources, we need to open 130 more mines the size of Peñasquito. For silver only.

Lithium is another environmental disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce one ton of lithium. Even at current production levels, this is problematic. In the Andes, where most of the world's lithium is found, mining companies use all the groundwater and leave nothing to farmers to irrigate their crops. Many of them had no choice but to give up their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada and Tibet, destroying entire freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely begun, and this is already a crisis.

And all this is just to provide energy to the existing world economy. The situation becomes even more extreme when we start to consider growth. As the demand for energy continues to grow, the extraction of materials for renewable energy is becoming more aggressive - and the higher the growth rate, the worse it will be.

It is important to remember that most of the key materials for energy transfer are found in the global South. Parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia are likely to become the arena for renewed resource struggles, and some countries may fall prey to new forms of colonization. This happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was the land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, these were diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It's not hard to imagine that the fight for renewable energies could lead to the same violence.

If we don't take precautions, clean energy companies can become as destructive as fossil fuel companies - buying off politicians, destroying ecosystems, lobbying for environmental regulations, and even killing community leaders who get in their way.

Some are hoping that nuclear power will help us get around these problems, and of course it should be part of the solution. But nuclear power has its limitations. On the one hand, it takes so long to build and start up new power plants that they can play only a small role in achieving zero emissions by mid-century. And even in the long term, nuclear energy cannot produce more than 1 terawatt. In the absence of a miraculous technological breakthrough, the vast majority of our energy will come from solar energy and wind.

All of this does not mean that we should not strive for a rapid transition to renewable energy. We must and urgently. But if we strive for a cleaner and more sustainable economy, we need to shake off the fantasies that we can continue to increase energy demand at our current pace.

Of course, we know that poor countries still need to increase their energy consumption to meet basic needs. But fortunately, rich countries do not. In high-income countries, the transition to green energy must be accompanied by planned reductions in total energy consumption.

How can this be achieved? Given that most of our energy is used to support mining and wealth production, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is proposing that high-income countries reduce their material consumption - by legislating longer product lifetimes and repair rights, while prohibiting scheduled obsolescence and abandonment of fashion, moving from private cars to public transport, while reducing unnecessary industries and wasteful consumption of luxury goods such as guns, SUVs and oversized homes.

Reducing energy demand not only ensures a faster transition to renewable energy sources, but also ensures that this transition does not trigger new waves of disruption. Any Green New Deal that wants to be socially fair and environmentally consistent must have these principles at its core.