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Welcome to Mythbusting Monday.
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to Mythbusting Monday. (Are you wondering about something? Tell Dot … and I’ll investigate to reveal if it’s true, sorta true, or outright false.) Today we explore the persistent allegation that mining for the materials we need for a renewable energy transition is worse than burning fossil fuels. Myth? Or not?
This critique falls under the “if a solution isn’t perfect, it’s not worth considering” category — and it’s one that Dot hears a lot. Many of our climate solutions aren’t perfect, including clean energy, which relies on mined materials. And, if we hew at least somewhat closely to our Paris Agreement goals, the demand for these minerals — mostly copper, cobalt, and lithium — is only going to grow. But is mining for these worse than extracting (not to mention burning!) oil and gas and coal? Let’s dig in:
It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison when weighing the relative impacts of mining for rare earth minerals, copper, and lithium vs. extracting fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal). Methods for extracting and processing clean energy components are notably different from those used for fossil fuels. They’re even wildly different from each other. The amount of damage they do is related to the volume of materials extracted, the total carbon emissions from the extraction process, the longevity of the materials extracted, the type of harm created, and the impact on human health.
But this much is clear: There’s no end in sight to the damage caused by extracting fossil fuels, because as soon as we burn them, we need to extract more. Conversely, extracting what we need for renewable energy causes a fixed amount of damage, since what we’re extracting is needed only as we’re building out the necessary solar panels, turbines, and batteries. Once built, they will generate the energy we need. Of course, we must do our best to ensure ethical and environmentally responsible extraction and processing. Are we there yet? Nope. But it’s getting better (and it’s already far better than fossil fuel extraction). Distilled.earth shows you the math here.
There’s promising work being done to recycle the materials used in batteries, which are key to our transition. As Bill McKibben reports, “A 2024 report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we’d have done all the mining we’d ever need to do for battery minerals; we’d just take them out of service and recycle them, over and over again. Each year we learn to build batteries with less lithium, less cobalt, less nickel; improving that efficiency by 6 to 10% a decade is enough to offset the recycling losses, and we’re doing far better than that already.”
He cites futurist Cory Doctorow, who put our expanding need for these battery components (125 million tons of minerals we’ll need between now and 2050) into context: “It is one-seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we’re talking about spending the next 25 years extracting about 5.8 percent of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that and we satisfy our battery needs more or less forever.”
This is a myth that will likely persist (thanks to powerful oil and gas propaganda), even as we see the growth of clean energy and even as we see the growing cost and precarity of an economy built on fossil fuels. But, extracting and processing what we need to transition to clean energy is most definitely better for the planet and human health, making any claim to the contrary a myth.
And happy Earth Day!
Truthfully,
Dot
A bill or piece of paper in your fridge door seal indicates whether it’s wasting energy. And don’t forget to clean those coils!
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