"... the invisible elephant in the room with a Green New Deal, whether implemented by federal or state governments, is the staggering quantity of stuff that needs to be mined in order to build all the green machines, and where that mining and processing happens.
... The one million electric vehicles (EVs) now on U.S. roads ... account for just 0.5% of America’s cars but contain ... more cobalt than one billion smartphones.
... fabricating a single EV battery, each of which weighs about 1,000 pounds, requires digging up roughly 500,000 pounds of materials. That’s more than a 10-fold increase in the cumulative quantity of materials (liquids) used by a standard car over its entire operating life.
... EVs use twice as much copper as conventional cars, and global demand for nickel to make batteries is forecast to rise 1,500% in the coming decades.
Overall, the global push for EVs will drive a 200%
to 8,000% increase in demand for an entire suite of “critical” energy
minerals.
... two decades from now, barely 10% of the
world’s petroleum use will be eliminated if the optimistic forecasts ... are realized and there
are 500 million EVs on the world’s roads.
... solar panels and wind turbines also entail using an average of 10 times more primary materials to produce the same energy output compared to hydrocarbon machines.
The world is literally about to embark on the biggest increase in mineral and metal mining in history.
... the U.S. is 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals and imports over half its needs for another 28.
China ... supplies about 90% of rare-earths for the world.
On the cobalt front, China has also quietly gained control over more than 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt refining, without which the raw ore is useless.
Russia is a massive nickel producer. The list of dependencies is long, and it rarely includes American sources.
In early October, the Chinese government advanced legislation to be enacted in 2021 that will “allow” banning exports of “strategic minerals” to companies and nations that China considers a national security threat.
Meanwhile, America doesn’t need to source foreign minerals right now since imports account for 90% of U.S. solar panels and 80% of the key power components of wind turbines. Asian companies utterly dominate global battery production.
... the International Energy Agency (IEA), a reliable booster for Green New Deals in all their forms. ... forecasts the world’s use of both natural gas and petroleum will return to the pre-COVID peak within a couple of years and then even creep higher for nearly two decades.