Minerals such as lithium, silver, and iron-ore are used in producing and transporting oil and natural gas. But there is a minimum of environmental damage. Solar power, wind power and electric battery automobiles require continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials.
Later there's the disposal of solar panels, wind turbines and electric auto batteries, after they wear out. Compared with hydrocarbons, renewables average a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed that are needed to produce the same amount of energy.
Renewables' environmental damage includes the mining the minerals, CO2 emissions from digging up and transporting the minerals by ship, truck and rail, and disposing of the waste when these renewables wear out. Natural gas combined cycle power plants use the least amount of materials.
Add the materials required for battery storage because of the intermittent electricity produced by wind and solar farms, and for the new, often long, transmission lines to where the electricity is needed.
Consider Lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, and for storage of wind and solar power electricity. Each battery requires digging up more than 500,000 pounds of earth, causing environment damage. That's 500,000 pounds of dirt and rock per battery. Then the minerals must be transported to the richer nations from Africa, Asia or South America -- most of the materials come from outside the United States.
Energy used to mine and transport these huge amounts of materials, adds up to mining much more materials per unit of energy delivered to society. Wind power, solar power, battery electricity storage, and electric battery automobiles, are NOT clean energy.
A related video produced
by Prager University:
https://bit.ly/35G7stE