Readers with gray hair are acutely aware that they have spent their entire lives in a hurricane of explosive change.  I was born in Michigan, and spent my first 18 years in West Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit.  In 1950, it was home to 8,720 people.  In 2020, there were 65,888! 

Great Acceleration

When my grandparents were born in the late 1800s, there were 1.3 billion people on Earth.  When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today, just during my lifetime, the mob has more than tripled, zooming past eight billion.  We continue growing like a voracious planet eating swarm.

In 2000, J. R. McNeill published Something New Under the Sun, a fascinating (and shocking) book on the environmental history of the twentieth century, when cultures blind drunk on gushers of cheap oil spurred a population explosion.  In his 2014 book, The Great Acceleration, McNeill narrowed his focus to the catastrophic changes that have occurred since 1945 — perhaps the most destructive era since the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

This explosion was propelled by a fossil fuel bonfire that enabled industrial civilization to sharply increase food production.  Look at this mind-blowing graph [Here].  The curve of energy consumption closely corresponds with the curve of population growth. 

William E. Rees, writing in 2023, noted a daunting factoid: “Half the fossil fuels ever consumed have been burned in just the past 30-35 years.”  (As much as 90% of it has been burned since the early 1940s). 

Fossil energy is not renewable, and the remaining reserves are shrinking every day.  Currently, this bonfire has propelled a turbulent joyride of titillating decadence.  Humankind has far exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity in countless ways.

Bill McGuire is a professor emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London.  He wrote Hothouse Earth, and was a contributor to the 2012 IPCC report.  McGuire warned that “there is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown.”  In today’s snowy regions, winters will be brief or go extinct, and summers will get toasty.  We’re gliding toward a world “that would be utterly alien to our grandparents.”

The other night was a full moon.  It stirred some powerful feelings.  Once upon a time, that same moon shined down on the woolly mammoths.  It made Neanderthals smile.  It glowed upon our ancient tree-dwelling ancestors, and on the age of dinosaurs.  It lit the night when there was no life on Earth.  The moon remembers so much.

Global Energy

It’s vital to comprehend the major limitations of renewable energy.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an organization that focuses on global energy consumption.  Their 524-page World Energy Outlook 2022 report revealed some daunting statistics.

First, a vocabulary lesson.  “Primary energy consumption” measures total energy demand.  “Final energy consumption” is a subset of primary — it’s just the amount of energy consumed by end users, such as households, industry, and agriculture.  It is the energy which reaches the final consumer’s door and excludes that which is used by the energy sector itself.

With regard to global final energy consumption, 80% of it is provided by fossil energy, and 20% is provided by electricity — and about 95% of this electricity is currently generated with nonrenewable fossil energy.  In addition to this, the GND plan also requires that the global fleet of cars, trucks, trains, etc., must be switched to “clean, green, carbon-free power.”  It can’t.

Vaclav Smil warned us.  “We are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”

It’s absolutely impossible to radically decarbonize our current way of life because electricity can’t provide the power needed for many processes that are fundamental to life as we know it.  The concrete, steel, and other essential components of solar panels, wind turbines, hydro dams, and electric vehicles cannot be made with electricity.

Alice Friedemann discussed critical shortcomings of the renewable energy fantasy.  “All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F (1426°C).”  There is no known way to make cement with electricity.

Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Vaclav Smil agreed.  Sharply cutting back, or ending, the use of fossil energy, would blindside our party.  For example, he mentioned cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia.  He calls them “the four material pillars of modern civilization.”  The GND does not explain how the four could be produced solely with renewable electricity.  They also don’t explain how trucking, shipping, rail transport, and flying could largely be carbon-free in a decade or so, if ever.

Smil reminded us that the large-scale production of highly potent synthetic ammonia fertilizer led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yields.  More food could feed more mouths.  Of the eight billion people alive in 2022, he estimated that the existence of 40 to 50 percent of them was only made possible by the bigger harvests enabled by ammonia fertilizer, a product made from natural gas (fossil energy).

The steel industry is dependent on coking coal and natural gas, and its emissions contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases.  Smil wrote, “But steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO₂ emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because its global output is nearly three times that of steel, its production is responsible for a very similar share of emitted carbon.”

Cement is made of limestone and clay.  Concrete is made of cement, water, sand, and rock.  Andrew Logan wrote, “After water, concrete is the most consumed material on Earth.”  Making high-performance concrete requires heating calcium carbonate, a process that releases CO₂.  Additional CO₂ is released by the kiln, which burns fossil fuel to generate a temperature of 2,700°F (1,482°C).  This intense heat cannot be generated by using electricity. 

Jonathan Watts noted that the four biggest causes of CO₂ emissions are coal, oil, gas, and concrete.  He called concrete “the most destructive material on Earth.”  Its global production has increased 25-fold since 1950. 

Smil’s bottom line: “With current technologies, and for the foreseeable future, you simply cannot make cement, steel, plastic, or ammonia absent fossil fuels.”  Fossil energy is essential for making potent fertilizer, manufacturing farm equipment, and operating the machines.  It enables the processing, packaging, refrigeration, and distribution of the nutrients that keep countless folks on life support. 

Nonrenewable Mining

Fossil energy is essential for manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, pavement, power transmission grids, and on and on.  All of them are made of materials extracted from the Earth.  The mining, crushing, hauling, and smelting of mineral resources are extremely dependent on fossil powered technology.

Walter Youngquist mentioned an old geologist saying, “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”  The GND dream seems to assume that the planet’s reserves of strategic minerals are essentially limitless — a cookie jar that never empties, no matter how fast we eat them, century after century. 

The dream involves an extensive redesign, replacement, and expansion of most of the global infrastructure used for power generation, distribution, and consumption.  The dream envisions that every nation on Earth, from the richest to poorest, will eagerly cooperate to complete the transition within 20 or 30 years.  Seriously?

Frik Els was thrilled by the GND optimism.  He is the editor of Mining.com, a news source for the mining industry.  He praised the efforts of frontline GND proponents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, calling them “mining’s unlikely heroines.”  Why?  Because the GND would be a multi-trillion-dollar godsend for mining and manufacturing corporations, and their lucky stockholders.

Vaclav Smil provided an illuminating example.  A typical lithium car battery weighs about 990 pounds (450 kg), and contains lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, steel, aluminum, and plastics.  To make just one battery, extracting those ingredients would require crushing and refining 40 tons of specific ores.  To access and fetch those 40 tons of ore-bearing rock, 225 tons of worthless rock would first have to be moved out of the way.  Folks, that’s one battery for one car! 

In 2021, Simon Michaux wrote a 1,000-page report for the Geological Survey of Finland, a government bureaucracy.  It documented the results of a study done to determine if it was possible to replace fossil energy with electricity generated by renewable methods, on a global scale. 

In 2019, the global transport fleet included about 1.41 billion cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles, of which 1.39 billion used Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) technology.  To shift the fleet to Electric Vehicle (EV) technology would require 1.39 billion batteries to store their electricity.  Also, the world’s gas stations would need to be replaced with charging stations that can deliver renewable energy. 

As mentioned, making batteries requires enormous amounts of mineral resources.  The Geological Survey of Finland wondered if there were adequate mineral resources on Earth to make 1.39 billion batteries for vehicles (282.6 million tons of batteries).  Their study concluded: “No, not even close.” 

Batteries typically have a working lifespan of only 5 to 15 years.  Michaux warns that current mining production, and existing mineral reserves, are insufficient to manufacture even the first generation of renewable technology.  “What are the theoretical options for running industrial systems on renewable energy?  The geologists can’t think of any.”

Christopher Ketchum noted that a full-scale U.S. transition to renewable energy technology would require a massive surge in the production of critical metals.  Estimates predict that this could increase demand for them by 700% to 4,000%.

Alice Friedemann noted the heavy impacts associated with renewable energy.  “Mining consumes 10% of world energy.  Wind, solar, and all other electrical generating machines rely on fossil-fueled mining, manufacturing, and transportation every step of their life cycle.”

Jon Hurdle wrote about recycling solar panels.  “Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.” 

Seibert & Rees noted that renewable energy devices have limited lifespans.  Solar panels and wind turbines last an average of 15 to 30 years, DC inverters last 5 to 8 years, batteries last 5 to 15 years.  Unfortunately, the materials used to create the highly complex physical infrastructure for the entire system are not made of magic fairy dust.  Nor are the bodies, motors, and batteries of electric vehicles.  They have their roots in strip mines, smelters, chemical plants, toxic waste dumps, oil refineries, and on and on. 

Many tons of steel and concrete are needed to manufacture and install each wind turbine.  To make a solar panel, you need stuff like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  To create the computer hardware needed to operate the grids, you need to fetch stuff like platinum, rhenium, selenium, gold, strontium, tantalum, gallium, germanium, beryllium, yttrium, and pure silicon.

Another essential component of modern living in a world of eight billion is extensive networks of well-maintained roads.  Walter Youngquist noted that in the U.S., there are more than 2 million miles of paved roads and highways.  About 94% of these miles are asphalt — a material that is 90% crushed rock, and 10% bitumen (a sticky black byproduct of petroleum refining).  “Asphalt is easy to put in place, and far less expensive in terms of energy expended and cost of materials than concrete.” 

In 2007, the American Concrete Pavement Association reported that about 500 million tons of asphalt are placed in the U.S. each year.  Doing this consumed 1.45 billion gallons of diesel fuel (5.488 billion liters).  Asphalt typically needs resurfacing every 8 to 10 years. 

Concrete can last 30 to 40 years before resurfacing, and it’s strong enough to better carry the weight of heavy loads.  About 60% of U.S. interstate highway system pavement is concrete.  Fossil energy is absolutely required for the production of asphalt and concrete.  This energy is nonrenewable, and so is our way of life.

[Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It’s finally getting into the home stretch, maybe four more to go (or fewer).  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time).

 Author

Richard Reese lives in Eugene, Oregon. His primary interest is ecological sustainability, and helping others learn about it. He is the author of What Is Sustainable, Sustainable or Bust, and Understanding Sustainability and is currently working on a new book titled Wild, Free & Happy.  Reese' blog wildancestors.blogspot.com includes free access to reviews of more than 196 sustainability-related books by a variety of authors both contemporary and historical, plus a few dozen of his own rants.