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The Ugly Reality of Renewables

We need to break our fossil fuel addiction quickly.


The global temperature spiked 1.7 above baseline in June 2023. That blasts through the 1.5 degree aspirational target set for the Paris Accord. Then, on November 17, the Copernicus Institute logged the global temperature at 2 degrees above baseline. Some have called 2 degrees warming a hell on Earth. For millions, even billions of people today, that is a reality, and summer 2023 was a harbinger of things yet to come. Indeed, forecasts for 2024 are grim.


To reach our climate goals while maintaining economic growth, some have argued that we need to shift to other forms of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal. Others caution that we cannot continue on a growth path with a different technology precisely because the problem is more than just carbon emissions, and the cause of the problem is not only fossil fuel technologies.


The problem lies in overshooting the planets ecological footprint and other planetary boundaries.


Our economy has been drawing down nature by exceeding its annual regenerative capacities for more than 50 years, exhibiting unsustainable and uneconomic growth. More growth of that economy only exacerbates overshoot. The climate crisis is merely one of many symptoms of overshoot.


So where does that leave renewable technologies?


A recent report for the Finnish Government estimated that, in order to reproduce our carbon based economy with renewables by 2050, we would have to ramp up mineral extraction and the global extractives industry by 'several orders of magnitude', and extract more minerals in the next two and a half decades than have been extracted in the entire history of mining. Even then, we would only have less than 3 - 5% of key critical minerals in existing reserves, assuming every ounce was redirected to the renewables sector. None of that includes reproduction of the economy after those renewable products/components reach the end of their useful lives which, for vehicles, can be as short as five years.


To even try to exploit those minerals for a renewable economy at the same level of energy demand as the fossil economy would generate staggering ecological and cultural devastation. Reproducing the fossil economy with renewable energy technologies at the same overconsuming level of today's fossil economy – let alone growing – is simply incompatible with life on Earth.


Yet that fact hasn't deterred governments and corporations from viewing the potentially massive mineral demand for renewables – including for electric vehicles (EVs) and the renewable industry as a whole – as an extractive industries dream, and issuing critical minerals strategies hoping to spike economic growth.


This is reflected in a constant deluge of complicit articles that argue for vastly expanding the extractivist sector, and reducing delays to mining, all to purportedly accommodate EV and renewable technology adoption goals.


The workforce, minerals and technologies to do what far too many governments and corporations aspire to do in the time that substantive action is needed will not exist. Trying to aggressively expand mining to feed a renewable sector to replace the current fossil economy at the same level – let alone growing – is disingenuous, disinforming, distracting and dangerous.


While the EV and renewable industry may delay the climate crisis, they are equally unsustainable as the fossil economy is at current levels of energy and material demand.


Viewing the climate crisis as an excess demand problem, rather than only as an energy technology problem, opens vast opportunities to find realistic and immediate solutions.


Absolutely we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables.


They key insight, however, is that it is more critical to replace overconsumption and a growing economy with much less demand.


What will this look like?


Cities need to, for instance, plan for a near future with far fewer vehicles by doing what planners have been urging for decades: plan for people, not cars, by developing our cities as spaces where walking and public transit are the natural defaults, and motor vehicle use is a mere fraction, 5% or less, of what it is today.


Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, recently warned that electric vehicles are no panacea, and better urban planning and public transit are the new reality.


Perhaps his most insightful comment echoes the problems of sprawl: “[A]ll levels of government must make the hard decision to stop expanding the road network.”1


The last thing we want is for anyone to drive fossil fuelled vehicles. The second last thing we want is for everyone to drive electric vehicles. Neither solves the crises.


When we stop looking at the land as ore, property or commodity, and start looking at the planet as a spiritual, cultural and human place of belonging, then we will treat each other with greater respect and build a better world grounded in our humility of our place in it




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