Expanded mining and construction to meet Green New Deal goals will cause significant environment devastation

A new Heartland Institute Policy Brief details how the expansion of mining operations for the rare earth minerals needed to scale up “renewable” energy sources to meet the goals of the “Green New Deal” (GND) would cause significant global environmental devastation.

In “How the Green New Deal’s Renewable Energy Mining Would Harm Humans and the Environment,” author Paul Driessen explains how if the GND were enacted, an attempt would be made to replace all electricity generation in the United States from fossil fuel and nuclear sources with that generated from wind or solar sources. To replace all these sources, Driessen makes a “conservative” estimate that almost 19 billion solar panels would need to be constructed and installed, covering an area roughly the size of New York and Vermont combined. He also cites a study from researchers at Harvard University that estimates the amount of land needed to power the country by wind energy would be equal to roughly a third of the continental United States.

To dramatically ramp up wind and solar electricity generation to this extent would “necessitate an unprecedented worldwide expansion in mining,” says Driessen. “And those mining operations would rely primarily on fossil-fuel-powered heavy equipment, since battery-powered equipment for enormous industrial operations does not exist.”

These mining operations would also involve “removing and crushing hundreds of billions of tons of rock and ore, causing major habitat losses and widespread pollution,” according to Driessen. “It would also create serious human health impacts, especially in countries that do not have modern equipment and health and safety protections.”

Among these mining operation would be those for rare earth elements (REE) such as dysprosium, indium, neodymium, and tellurium, which are necessary to produce wind turbines or photovoltaic solar panels. However, mining a single ton of these REEs, according to Driessen, produces up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater, and a ton of radioactive waste. More than 70 percent of the world’s REEs are either mined in China, a totalitarian communist dictatorship with a dismal environmental and human rights record, or by companies under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Other materials needed to be mined to produce solar panels and wind turbines, as well as to produce the anticipated battery backups systems for these “renewable” sources, include lithium, cobalt, and copper. To store a week’s worth of electricity for the entire country when wind and solar aren’t generating it, Driessen estimates would require “two billion half-ton battery packs similar to those used in Tesla automobiles.” Each of these batteries would require at least 26 pounds of lithium.

The cobalt needed for these batteries is mostly mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 40,000 children currently labor in mining operations for pittance wages in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Copper mining would also have to be dramatically expanded to meet this new GND demand, even though it takes roughly 125,000 pounds of mined, crushed, and refined ore to produce 1,000 pounds of finished copper.

Although the United States has proven reserves of these commodities, environmental policy at both the state and federal level have closed off most of these deposits from mining. Therefore, Driessen argues, enacting the GND would increase our dependence for these minerals on China and “other countries that regularly disregard workplace safety, child labor concerns, land reclamation, and pollution controls.”

“Wind and sunshine are certainly clean and renewable energy sources but,” Driessen concludes, “the technologies required to harness these intermittent, weather-dependent energies to benefit humanity require raw materials and mining operations that are anything but clean, ‘green,’ renewable, sustainable, or ethical. This fundamental reality can no longer be ignored. GND technologies rely heavily on mineral extraction in someone else’s backyard, often in less-developed countries, where other people and their children do the dirty, dangerous work of providing essential raw materials while suffering from environmental and human degradation.”