From: “Alice Friedemann via groups.io” <alice_friedemann=yahoo.com@groups.io>
Date: May 25, 2026 at 7:02:39 PM EDT
I like Bill’s Big Picture View of the bell curve that goes up and then plunges, Says it all.
Meanwhile I’m drilling down with a microscope on everything, so here is the view from the poisoned mining ground of life.  The first 2 pages of a 5 page mining chapter I’m working on.  I am just so appalled that the Hormuz strait has generated so many headlines about how clear this has made it that we need to Electrify Everything Now with Clean and Green Renewables!

Add manufacturing energy to mining energy and they account for over 40% of total final global energy consumed and over a third of greenhouse gas emissions with fossil fuels and fossil electricity (Aramendia 2023, CEEC 2021, DOE 2007, EIA 2019, IEA 2018, IEA 2020). Which industry shows no sign of being able to quit, even if they wanted to.

 

EVs have 6 times more metal than conventional cars, and wind, solar, and nuclear from 6 to 15 times times more metal per MW than coal or natural gas plants (IEA 2022c, WNA 2024).

 

The additional mining for renewable energy production will affect 37% of the earth, 50 million sq km, 19.4 of earth’s 57 million square mi (minus Antarctica), based on an S&P Global Market Intelligence database of commercial legal mines (Sonter 2020).

 

Though some researchers questioned if that large an area would be affected. Tang (2023) used satellite images and found far less land, suggesting that somewhere from 1 to 25 million km2 was more reasonable.  But then again, Sonter (2020) left out illegal artisanal and small mines, which have a disproportionate impact on deforestation and release of mercury, cyanide, arsenic, heavy metals, and siltation in biodiverse regions (Ladewig 2024, Stanimirova 2024).

 

The key word is affecting. A mine may be one square mile, but the nearby land is covered in  millions of tons of tailings and waste rock, processing & milling buildings, crushing and storage area, maintenance shops, warehouses, administrative offices, parking lots, living areas, laboratories, septic systems, wastewater treatment plant, emergency and stormwater ponds, filtration facilities, central pumping station, diesel generators, diesel, lubricant, antifreeze, and gas tanks, hazardous waste storage facility, hauling and digging trucks, roads, railways, pipelines, pumphouses, powerlines, conveyor belts, derelict equipment, trash, workers lodgings, exploration drill pads, dikes, ditches, fire station, sulfuric acid production plant (for copper, lithium, uranium, and nickel). And that’s not all folks, check out the 3,576-page NorthMet Minnesota copper-nickel environmental impact statement (NorthMet 2015). Hoo boy is there a lot of stuff going on to get that copper ore and ship it out.

 

Now add on the roads, rail spurs, and land opened to more development, cattle, farming, and wildlife hunting in the future.

 

Still don’t believe that much area is affected? Over 80% of mines are on the surface: open-pit bauxite, iron, copper; strip-mined coal, phosphate fertilizer, gypsum; hard rock sand, gravel, limestone quarries, and coal blast off mountaintops. That doesn’t let underground mines off the hook, but they do less damage to air, land, and water.

 

Surface mines are dust making ecosystems from exploded rocks, 200-ton haul trucks on unpaved roads, ores crushed into dust, onsite smelting and refining, and the millions of tons of powdery remains left behind in tailings.

 

Sulfuric acid, heavy metals, and ore processing chemicals leak and flood into waterways and groundwater. Pollution from metal mines affects 479,200 km/300,000 miles of rivers, 164,000 km2/63321 sq mi of flood plains, and increase deforestation (Stanimirova 2024) within 70 km/43 miles of mining sites. No wonder 7.8% of vertebrate species (4642 of 59,803) of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are threatened in many in the world’s most biodiverse hotspots with deadly effects (Dehkordi 2024).

 

Nickel is especially destructive because of surface deposits in old growth tropical rainforests. To get at the nickel, millions of acres of forest are scraped off, and soil erosion into the ocean kills marine life, mangroves, and coral reefs (Hyman 2026),

 

Copper is the most essential metal, and there may not be enough of to make a transition. Though the Northmet copper mining company is here to save the day to strip off 400 million tons of rock and 225 million tons of ore by blowing up 300,000 tons of rock every few days for 20 years. This is just one of several mines proposed in this wilderness and wetland area of Minnesota and Canada with significant Lake Superior, and Mississippi river water sheds (SBW 2021). After the mine closes the waste and tailings will leach sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, nickel, and methylmercury, requiring centuries of maintenance and water pollution monitoring treatment (Levang 2021, CDCNIOSH 2023, EPA 2000, Hufty 2019). Nobody believes that, which has slowed approval down. But stay tuned. Trump erased Biden’s 20-year Minnesota mining ban and has gotten rid of other pesky regulations (CBS 026, USDOI 2025, WH 2025).

 

Renewable advocates like to point out that just 7 million tons of minerals are mined for low-carbon technology a year, while the volume of fossil fuels extracted is a whopping 65 billion tons (15 billion tons of oil, coal and natural gas, 13 billion tons of coal tailings, 36.8 billion tons of CO2) (Ritchie 2024).

 

But metal rock waste and tailings waste from mining adds up to 100 billion tons a year (Tenviro 2025). Or more. Most mining companies do not report the tons of waste rock, tailings, or releases from tailings dam failures (Whieldon 2024).  Globally, there are 223 billion tons of reported mine tailings held in about 35,000 active, inactive, and abandoned tailings areas (Bowker 2016, LePan 2021, WTMF 2020).

 

Tailings dams are a sludge of dust and the toxic chemicals used to leach metals out of the rock. They are stored behind “permanent dams” that are failing at alarming rates from natural disasters like floods, storm surge, wildfires, and hurricanes, perhaps even more in the future as climate change increases (Bowker 2015, GAO 2019, WTMF 2020, Okewale 2023).

 

Hou (2020, 2025) did a survey of world soils and found 14-17% of world cropland, a non-renewable resource, exceeds agricultural thresholds for one or more of arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead, lowering crop production, harming human health, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and ecosystems. In China, mining, industrial waste, and coal manufacturing has ruined over 20% of China’s arable land with heavy metals, pesticides, and untreated sewage, and in 1999 over 700 million people did not have safe drinking water, with half of water so unsafe it was not even suitable for agriculture (Gini 2024, Chen 2014, Delang 2017, PEBI 2016 LAFF, Wu 1999).