Fossil Power Uses 360 Times More Stuff Than Renewables
The vast scale of fossil fuel mining tears out the heart of the Earth. A renewable energy system can live lighter on our planet. That's hopeful.
Imagine radically different energy systems powering our lives.
In the fossil fuel system, every day corporations dig and drill and frack for coal, oil and gas, ship it around the world, then burn it. They build a coal-burning power station - a giant furnace, and then day after day, decade after decade, shovel coal in and burn it. Every day the hungry beast needs more coal in its belly.
In the renewable system, once the turbine or panel is built, there’s nothing to ship, nothing to burn, and barely any fucks to give. The sun shines day after day for free. The wind blows without us needing to drive it around in a truck. If it’s cloudy in one place, it’s sunny somewhere else. If the wind lulls, it starts again. Electrons are created when the turbines spin and when sun shines on solar panels and they can be stored in batteries. Don’t ask me how. I’m a campaigner, not an engineer. It’s pretty much magic.
There is a colossal difference between these two systems when it comes to impacts on the Earth. And this time I’m not even talking about atmospheric pollution.
I don’t believe in a techno-fix. I think creativity, connection and collaboration are as critical as technology in solving the climate crisis. But there are a few stats that recently blew my mind and I thought you might be curious about them too. Here’s the first.
A new, renewable energy system would use 360 times less material from the Earth than the polluting fossil fuel system.
It’s all laid out in this hyped report from Rocky Mountain Institute, The Renewable Revolution: It’s exponential, global, and this decade. They cite International Energy Agency figures that a renewables system will need 43 million tonnes of minerals by 2040. That’s a lot? Well, not compared to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels that corporations dig out of the earth every year.
It’s true that we’ll need more of certain minerals to build out the renewables system. But according to Rocky Mountain Institute, it’s less than you might think.
“Battery minerals are not the new oil,” they say. “Even as battery demand surges, the combined forces of efficiency, innovation, and circularity will drive peak demand for mined minerals within a decade — and may even avoid mineral extraction altogether by 2050. These advancements enable us to transition from linear extraction to a circular loop, with compounding benefits for our climate, security, equity, health, and wealth.”
Fossil fuel transport needs oil, oil, oil, oil, oil every year. Efficient, electric transport will need a one-off surge of mineral demand – which is still 17 times less than just a single year of oil – and then transport can move to a largely circular economy into the future.
There are a few different ways to calculate the stats about overall resource use, but the upshot of it all is that we can live lighter on this beautiful planet and enjoy our hot showers and cold beers at the same time, especially if we get smart about design, efficiency and recycling.
“The total amount of mining that’s going to be needed for wind, water, solar, compared to [the] fossil fuel system, is much less than 1% in terms of the mass of materials,” says Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson.
All mining, no matter which system it supports, should meet strong standards for environment, labour, cultural heritage and consent. And with renewables, there will be way fewer giant, gaping holes in the ground. For people and country, that matters.
A sacred fire of resistance
Last year I travelled to the Adani coal mine in central Queensland. Standing on an embankment at night, on my right I could see a sacred fire burning in a ceremonial bora ring. People danced barefoot on the red sand, their gentle, human voices laughing, singing and calling to each other.
On my left was the mine. I was shocked by its massive floodlights and rumbling machines. I don’t know why I had expected the mine to be dark and quiet in the middle of the night. Of course they dig coal 24 hours. I couldn’t fully see into the mine, but I could see the tops of multistory machines lurching about and hear the rumbling, screeching, crashing and booming as they dug rocks and earth.
On 26th August 2021, Wangan and Jagalingou cultural custodians had lit the fire, beginning a ceremony, Waddananggu, that lasts until this day. The fire has never gone out. It is a flame of resistance. Their ongoing presence signifies their care for their ancestral homelands, the strength of their culture, and their rejection of the mine.
I’d seen a coal mine before, at Hazelwood. It was just a huge hole in the ground, right by the highway in Morwell. I saw it burning like actual hell, when it caught fire and polluted the lungs of the local community for 45 days. But I’d never seen a remote coal mine like this. The scale was gob-smacking.
Excavators at the Adani Carmichael mine are more than three times the weight of a Boeing 747. Three dozen people could stand in the bucket claw. There was a literal mountain of overburden. Not a pile, but a mountain.
Standing on the embankment watching this scene, with the violence of the mine on one side, and the beautiful humans dancing on the other, made me howl into the wind and sob.
The heart of the land
Wangan and Jagalingou people say the mine tears the heart out of the land:
The scale of this mine means it would have devastating impacts on our native title, ancestral lands and waters, our totemic plants and animals, and our environmental and cultural heritage. It would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate important springs systems. It would potentially wipe out threatened and endangered species. It would literally leave a huge black hole, monumental in proportions, where there were once our homelands. These effects are irreversible. Our land will be “disappeared”.
Adani claim to “manage cultural heritage” on the mine site, but how do you manage sacred waterholes, stone knapping sites, and ancient birthing trees when machines that big turn country inside out?
Country is not impacted. It’s obliterated. The people who are most connected to the land are its last line of defence.
And if Adani had their way, the mine would have been six times bigger. It was originally planned to be the largest coal mine in Australia, and one of the largest in the world, exporting 60 million tonnes of coal every year, for a hundred years.
We campaigned for years to stop the mine, mobilising groups all over the country, running legal cases, stopping a one billion dollar public handout right before the Queensland election, and targeting government decision makers, banks, contractors and insurers. Dozens of companies disassociated themselves from the project. It was delayed by years. Adani were forced to scale back the mine to 10 million tonnes a year.
I guess that counts for something. We won a lot in that campaign. But we lost. One day the machines will go silent, the sacred springs will breathe a sigh of relief, and the birds will realise they don’t have to shout any more. When, I don’t know. But change is coming. And maybe it will be faster than any of us realise.
The dinosaurs and all that rubbish
When I was a little kid, I was mesmerised by the book, The Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish. A man stands on a polluted Earth and dreams of going to a star he can see in the sky. He cuts trees, burns coal and makes piles of waste to build a rocket. He flies to the star.
While he’s away, the dinosaurs wake up. They are disgusted by the mess. They stomp on all the roads and factories and slag-heaps and chuck them into volcanoes. The Earth becomes green and beautiful again, full of wondrous creatures. The man arrives at the star and finds it barren (just like Apollo astronauts when they finally arrived at the moon).
The man sees a beautiful planet and decides to go there. When he arrives, he is astounded, not realising this gorgeous place is the same Earth he left. The dinosaurs give him a stern, but compassionate, talking to. This time, they say, the Earth belongs to everyone.
Compounding lightness
If the renewable system means we don’t need to dig up fossil fuels anymore, we also don’t need to ship them around. And here’s the second gob-smacking statistic that might make you hopeful that when change kicks in, it can compound in positive ways.
Bill McKibben first alerted me to the fact that forty percent of global shipping is shipping fossil fuels around.
As coal, oil and gas use reduces, and the sun and wind just come through the air without the need for pipes, trucks and containers, we simply won’t need all of these ships, or the fuel that powers them.
“A further 15% of bulk [shipping is]… raw iron ore, steaming to the same global ports, especially ones in China, where the coal ships are running,” writes Michael Barnard. As new technologies to process iron ore into new steel with green electricity scale up, this shipping will reduce too.
Steel is the most recycled material in the world. It stays strong when recycled. Barnard says we can hugely increase steel recycling using scrap metal, powered by electric furnaces running on renewable energy.
“Right now the USA happens to be leading in using scrap steel to meet new demand with 70% penetration of electric arc furnace. Europe is only at 40%. Other countries will rise to the level of the USA. Fossil fuel infrastructure will increasingly be fed into scrap steel furnaces.”
We are moving from heavy, fiery molecules to light, obedient electrons; from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun. The renewable revolution continues the long arc of energy history: efficiency beats waste, technologies beat commodities, and economics beats ideology.
– Rocky Mountain Institute
It's a fundamental change in how we interact with our planet. Renewables can leave the ancient forests of stored sunlight safe under the ground, protecting the heart of the land.
The transition to renewable energy is not just a shift from polluting power to cleaner sources, but a shift from digging up stuff that is expensive, heavy, scarce and hoarded by a monstrously rich minority to capturing flows that are free, light, abundant, and accessible to 90% of the world.
Instead of digging up rocks and earth, let’s harvest light and air.
Great piece! Bring on the magic!!