THE UGLIEST PLACE I’ve ever been is the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which is essentially Mordor. Some years ago, at the height of the battle over a project called the Keystone Pipeline, which had its origin in this hell, I joined Indigenous leaders from the area for what they called a “healing walk” across the region. For a very long day we hiked the roads north of Fort McMurray, trudging past vast “settling ponds” where the sludge from the mines combines with water in a toxic stew; any bird that landed on the surface would die, and so cannons fire day and night in an effort to scare them away.

We covered the tiniest fraction of the war zone, which may be the single largest scar humans have ever inflicted on the planet’s surface — you can spend bleak hours on Google Earth just scrolling across the endless miles of damage. My companion for part of the sad trek was Dr. Martin O’Connor, recently fired from his post as a doctor for causing “undue alarm” by pointing out the incidence of rare cancers amid this grim scene; he’d been showing me the “man camps,” the dorms where miners stayed after they arrived for two-week stints in this barren outpost, and whose occupants have been regularly implicated in the abuse of local women.

I’d been fighting the Keystone Pipeline mostly because of my fears for its effects on the climate — as the NASA physicist James Hansen had explained, Canada’s plan to quadruple output of the world’s dirtiest oil would mean “game over for the climate.” But now I had another set of reasons.

And that means that in turn I have no small sympathy for those who groan at the suggestion that a transition to using the power of the sun will require yet more mining.

We need lithium, copper, rare earth minerals like neodymium — these are the elements that allow sunlight and wind to be translated into energy we can use. There is no way to make them appear magically; they will have to be gouged and scraped from the face of the Earth. That gouging and scraping will produce tragic stories — indeed it already has. Kids have died in the “artisanal” cobalt mines of the Congo. As one miner told a reporter for National Public Radio, “Sometimes we are afraid because if you look at the ceiling [of the tunnel], you will see that it is already very fragile. The ceiling is already damaged. So, if we don’t make repairs, at some point when you’re down there, things are going to fall on you. And this can result in either a broken leg or a broken hand, or your skull will be fractured. Collapses are very frequent. We miners die a lot.”

These fears — for the damage that mining does to places and to people — underlie much of the antipathy to the green energy transition you find among progressives.

I think these fears — for the damage that mining does to places and to people — underlie much of the antipathy to the green energy transition you find among progressives who are otherwise keen to tackle the climate crisis. And I think, as we shall see, that they need to be taken seriously. But it’s often expressed in other ways, including with claims that we shouldn’t even try to make such a transition because there’s no way we’ll find the necessary minerals.

Andrew Nikiforuk, for instance, is a left-wing Canadian journalist that one publication described in a headline as a “nicer” version of Bill McKibben. “Neither mining nor technology are green or clean,” he wrote; they will produce “more destroyed landscapes, debased watersheds, and displaced rural communities,” and all for naught because “the global economy doesn’t have the metals, rare earth minerals, energy, time, or money to make this transition.”

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because much of the rhetoric echoes the “peak oil” scare from 20 years ago, when a (noisy) school of thought emerged insisting that we were about to run out of fossil fuel, that we’d need to find 10 new Saudi Arabias by 2030, and so on. They convinced plenty of people. But in fact, they were wrong — geologists discovered vast new oil fields, and they figured out how to frack existing wells to produce new flows; the world is awash in oil and gas. Humans are good at finding stuff, and the Earth is a big place with a lot to find.

Which is why, for instance, the price of lithium, after soaring in the early part of this decade, has come sharply down in recent years — the quantity of lithium reserves and resources, which is to say known deposits the companies think they can mine, grew by a remarkable 52 percent between 2021 and 2024, with Argentina, the US, and Canada in the lead of new discoveries.

Meanwhile in California’s Salton Sea, firms are figuring out how to distill lithium from the liquid brines of that infernal lake; the first extraction plant went online in 2024, and governor Gavin Newsom said that California might soon be the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” (Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, chemists said in 2024 that they had learned to extract lithium from oil field runoff, and were constructing a commercial-scale pilot plant for what the kingdom called white gold.)

In other words, we’re not going to run out of lithium, or graphite, or any of the other minerals that are useful for this transition; a 2023 paper in the journal Joule looked at 75 different scenarios for a green energy transition and ran the numbers for 15 different minerals. For most, demand through 2050 amounts to less than 15 percent of global reserves. The Earth, the eight-person team concluded, “should suffice to meet anticipated demands.”

We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it. And if we don’t find it, I predict we’ll figure out a way to use something else. Because that’s always what’s happened. A few years ago, for instance, a number of commentators said that the expansion of wind power might come to a screeching halt because of a shortage of the light balsa wood used for the cores of turbine blades — in fact, there was rapid deforestation underway in the parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon where the trees grew best. So turbine companies figured out a synthetic polymer foam for the blades: “Experts cite its higher temperature resistance and its comparative ease of recycling.” It now accounts for more than half of new blades.

ALL OF THIS is a way of saying that renewable energy relies less on resources than it does on brainpower; hence its footprint, while far from negligible, will be much, much smaller than extracting and burning fossil fuel — which, after all, is the comparison that counts.

If you think about it for just a minute, you’ll get the unnervingly simple point. Yes, you have to mine lithium to build a battery. But once you’ve mined it, that lithium sits patiently in the battery doing its job for a decade or two (after which, as we shall see, it can be recycled). If you mine coal, on the other hand, you immediately set it on fire — that’s the point of coal. And then it’s gone. And then you have to go mine some more.

Here’s how Bloomberg did the math in 2023: “Annual demand for transition metals will grow fivefold by mid-century,” they calculated. “Yet that doesn’t mean we need to extract more stuff. In fact, we need less. While EVs and clean energy infrastructure will mainly consume electricity and require lots of metal, the total amount of materials the world mines will fall.”

How much? According to a large-scale report from the Energy Transitions Commission, “All the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone.”

Read that sentence again. Or look carefully at these numbers from The Economist: China’s two biggest producers of polysilicon — the basic ingredient of a solar panel — each had a production capacity of 370,000 tons in 2023. Altogether, China has facilities capable of producing seven million tons of the stuff a year in its construction pipeline. Seven million tons of polysilicon, turned into solar panels and when pointed at the sun, would add 3.5 terawatts of power to the world’s supply each year, and they would go on collecting that sunshine for decades. Again, that’s millions of tons of polysilicon. By contrast, the world mines eight billion tons of coal a year, and an equivalent weight of oil and gas. At the moment, something like 12 percent of the world’s fossil fuel is used just to produce, refine, and transport fossil fuels, a job the sun and wind do for free.

“All the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone.”

Over time the numbers become truly remarkable: If you ship someone a ton of coal, they can generate about two megawatt hours of electricity. If you ship them a ton of solar panels, over the subsequent quarter-century they’ll generate about 1,000 megawatt hours — that’s 500 times as much. And those numbers will get steadily better, because we’ll get steadily better at every part of the cycle — that’s what a learning curve is.

To give just one example: Rivian, the EV maker, was using a lot of copper wire in its vehicles. Then, in 2024, they announced a redesign — each car and truck would now need 1.6 miles less wiring. Companies announce new battery designs almost daily, and in every case they use less stuff, or — just as importantly — different stuff. Still worried about finding enough lithium? Good news: Novel batteries are emerging that rely on sodium instead. (They’re already installed in some Chinese EVs.) And how much sodium is there? It’s the sixth most common element on earth, with about 3.09 sextillion pounds.

Worried (as you should be) about that artisanal cobalt mining? New designs are substituting all sorts of things for cobalt — as Bloomberg analyst Jenny Chase said in 2024, demand is lower than expected even as the supply has increased with the opening of new, better-regulated mines. You can tell what’s happening by looking at prices. In 2024, even as the boom in solar and wind power accelerated around the world, the price of cobalt fell to a 10-year low.

IF WE’RE SKILLED at finding enough stuff to build out the clean energy transition, we’re getting even better at the other end: figuring out how to recycle and reuse the stuff that’s wearing out. Truthfully, recycling solar panels and wind turbine blades is not a huge headache — not yet at least — because not many of them have yet worn out. That hasn’t stopped clean energy opponents from making it an issue.

A few minutes searching online will find you pictures of piles of discarded blades, and as The New York Times reported, these sites (there are three in the American West) “have a spooky nickname: wind turbine graveyards.” (The spooky “fossil fuel graveyard,” by contrast, is the entire atmosphere, which it’s harder to take a picture of.) The same article, from the fall of 2024, reported that the solution is already in sight: a slight reformulation of the recipe for the foam in the blades, developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which utilizes “inedible sugar extracted from wood, plant remains, used cooking oil, and agricultural waste” and can be easily recycled.

In the meantime, old blades are being used for utility poles, or in bridge construction; they can also be “shredded into filler or added to cement production. A seven-ton blade that is ground and sent through a cement furnace can replace five tons of coal.” (Even the nacelle, which is the technical name for the compartment that sits at the top of the turbine and houses the generator and the gearbox, can be recycled; the European wind giant Vattenfall is lowering decommissioned ones to the ground and refitting them as small but sturdy houses.) As for photovoltaic panels, as Bloomberg’s Chase wrote last year, “Sometimes the media gets extremely carried away with a particular ‘dark side of solar’ narrative.” She cited a Los Angeles Times piece headlined “California Went Big on Rooftop Solar. Now That’s a Problem for Landfills.” Which, when you actually read the story, found that the state’s landfills had been presented with 335 panels in 2021. Not 335 tons. 335 panels.

We’re talking about spending the next 30 years extracting about 5.8 percent of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars.

On the list of the world’s environmental problems, then, dealing with cleantech waste is not that big. Especially compared with, say, fossil fuels. Coal and oil and gas can’t be recycled because they’re burned up, but they do leave behind carbon dioxide, which is melting the poles and burning the forests. And when you burn coal, you also leave behind some ash. Like, 110 million tons a year in the US alone, which is enough to fill about 1,000 coal ash pits.

And talk about actual “spooky graveyards”: One study found that 91 percent of these coal ash deposits were leaking toxic chemicals into nearby rivers and streams. These coal ash pits have been filling for a century or more, so they’re essentially invisible to us, literally a part of the landscape (and usually in poor communities of color). But it sure makes turbine blade recycling seem like less of a problem. Indeed, by one reckoning, a person who got all their electricity from wind over 20 years would produce about nine kilograms of blade waste; if they got their power from coal, they’d produce that much waste every six weeks.

Still, there’s no reason to create even a small problem if you can avoid it, and with most of the detritus from the clean energy transition, that shouldn’t be a problem. Think about batteries, for instance. There will soon be hundreds of millions of EVs on the road, and even if their batteries last far longer than originally anticipated, that still, eventually, will produce a problem. Or, actually, an opportunity: It turns out that even when an EV battery is old enough that the range of a car starts to drop noticeably, it’s still got plenty of life, and so there’s an emerging industry in taking them out of sedans and putting them next to solar farms.

It happens first in the places that are poorest, and where recycling is a way of life. Solar minigrids across Africa employ such “second-life batteries.” But the same thing’s happening everywhere: There’s an Irish company, for instance, called Range Therapy (the opposite of range anxiety) that is repurposing old EV batteries from “crashed and end-of-life vehicles” and selling them to homeowners. Instead of a Tesla Powerwall, Dubliners can buy a Range Wall or a Range Trailer, “a mobile clean energy source tailored for farms and businesses.”

Eventually the batteries degrade enough that they can no longer be used as batteries and need to be recycled for their component parts, and luckily the stuff inside them — lithium, cobalt, and so on — is valuable enough that people have been hard at work figuring out how to make that recycling happen.

What does all this add up to? A 2024 report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we’d have done all the mining we’d ever need to do for battery minerals; we’d just take them out of service and recycle them, over and over again.

That seems like an unlikely claim — after all, we’re only getting 95 percent of the minerals back — but remember that with each passing year we learn to build batteries with less lithium, less cobalt, less nickel; improving that efficiency by 6 to 10 percent a decade is enough to offset the recycling losses, and we’re doing far better than that already.

“Such a closed-loop supply system means we can continue to derive value from battery minerals for centuries. Over the next 20 years we will gather minerals not just to power the energy system of 2050 but also through to 2100 and beyond,” the report says.

Summarizing the Rocky Mountain Institute report, futurist Cory Doctorow put the 125 million tons of minerals we’ll need between now and 2050 in context: “It is one-seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we’re talking about spending the next thirty years extracting about 5.8 percent of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that and we satisfy our battery needs more or less forever.”

This combination of recycling and increasing efficiency makes for a kind of mind-blowing virtuous cycle. Consider the roof of my house. I was an early adopter of solar panels, putting them up beginning about a quarter-century ago when they were still expensive — but if someone spending his life fighting climate change wasn’t going to spend the money, who was? I’ve added to those original panels three more times over the intervening decades, and each time they’ve been cheaper and more powerful. The original ones are still working fine (and indeed it was recently reported that Europe’s oldest solar installation, atop a Swiss university lab, is still going strong after 35 years) — but when they need to be recycled, they will be like small mines themselves.

SO YES, WE CAN mine enough minerals for this transition. Which doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should do. Andrew Nikiforuk, the nicer Canadian version of me who was insisting that we couldn’t find enough minerals, also insisted that therefore we needed to make our lives smaller.

Responsible leaders, he said, “would advocate for fewer cars altogether, shorter transportation networks, and localized economies. They would make cities smaller and more walkable, and ban yachts, cruise ships, private jets, and SUV vehicles, whether with battery or combustion engines, because they represent a decadent waste of materials and energy.” Which makes sense to me. Those are mostly things I’ve worked on. But they’re hard — we’ve just fought and perhaps won a battle to stop the expansion of the main private jetport in Massachusetts, for instance, but it was in deep-blue Massachusetts, and all we stopped was the expansion — the original jetport is still there. So hopefully a clean energy transition will buy us some time to do these things.

A more difficult question than “Can we do this?” is “Can we do this fairly?” And there, I fear, the answer will always be more ambiguous.

China opened its largest solar farm yet in June 2024 — 3.5 gigawatts, producing enough electricity to power all of Luxembourg or Cameroon or Laos (or Vermont or Alaska), one more sign that the country is peaking its carbon emissions years ahead of schedule. But it was built in what the Chinese call Xinjiang and the local Uyghur Muslims call East Turkestan — a colonized place. Local activists saw the solar farm as just one more way to extract value from their land, after oil and gas and cotton and indeed the silicon in many of the cells in the panels. “The solar plant is just the latest manifestation of those atrocities,” one Uyghur activist told the website Atmos. “I believe anyone who praises China’s pretentious commitment to green energy while failing to address the severe human rights abuses driving the industry, it amounts to complicity in the government’s crimes.”

I’ve never been to Xinjiang, but I have been to Tibet, where the Chinese are building the world’s highest-altitude solar farm, and where the ongoing repression of the Buddhist population is sad and sickening. And I’ve been to Inner Mongolia, on the great plains around the city of Ordos, where 5.9 million panels, enough to power two million households, came online in November 2024. But this too is colonized land — in 2020, angry protests broke out over Beijing’s decision to stop teaching in Mongolian because, as a government website explained, of the “inherent excellence of Chinese culture and advances to human civilization.”

This, of course, is not a uniquely Chinese problem. American colonization is old enough that we no longer need to ban native languages — they were all but squashed long ago. And when Americans go looking for, say, lithium, they often land on contested soil. A big mine at Thacker Pass in Nevada, for instance, won the approval of one local tribe, but several others opposed it vociferously, on the grounds that it would wreck a sacred spot — indeed the site of a massacre of as many as 50 Native Americans in the mid-19th century. Indigenous groups appealed to the White House, but with little success.

I think Indigenous groups have the right to say no to these kinds of developments, even where the laws are ambiguous — having been sacrificed in the last few industrial revolutions, it’s right to let them exercise real sovereignty this time around. But I’m realist enough to know my opinion won’t carry the day, not in the US, not in China, and not in lots of other places. There’s real harm that will come to real places and real people as we build out this new energy future. And so, for me, the question becomes how that harm compares with the ongoing harm of our present system.

Remember, nine million people a year die — one death in five — from breathing the particulates spewed out by fossil fuel combustion. Remember, every tenth of a degree Celsius that we raise the temperature moves another 100 million people out of a normal human climate, which has to be the greatest colonizing scheme of all time. We should work hard to temper the tragedies that come with every kind of extraction. But my guess is that stealing the sunlight of Inner Mongolia will, over time, do less damage than stealing the coal. My guess is that, for Indigenous communities that wanted such things, the advent of lithium mining offers them the chance to extract some serious concessions from the government, as Alaska’s natives proved a generation ago when they took control of much of the state’s fossil fuel territory.

But these are only guesses, and this is not really how morality works. In a fair world, the people of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia and Thacker Pass would get to make these decisions on their own, and decide for themselves what happens next. But we don’t live in a fair world — we live in a world that’s very rapidly tipping toward hell, a hell that will be hardest on precisely the people with the least power. Only moving fast can head off that hell, but moving fast means, inevitably, carelessness. It’s a hard call; I’m so scared of the climate crisis that I may bend too far.

Which is one way of saying I’m lucky to live in Vermont, a place with almost nothing of any value beneath the soil — our only large-scale mining is granite, for tombstones and monuments. There are a few quarries in one small corner of the state, and I remember asking one of the executives of the mine how long they could keep digging. “At present rates?” he said. “About 5,000 years.” We’re not going to have to make any hard choices about digging stuff up where I live, or indeed most places. Which is not to say we’re not going to have to make some hard choices.

Reproduced with permission from W. W. Norton & Company.

Listen to our Terra Verde interview with Bill McKibben on this issue.

Learn about Sun Day — a national day of action on September 21, 2025, celebrating the power of clean energy.