On the Matter of Mining

The late Wayne Dyer a self-help author and motivational speaker once said, “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about. The quote also works in the reverse, as in, “The highest form of ignorance is when you accept something you don't know anything about.” Acceptance of the theory of climate change fits very much into the latter.

My father toiled much of his life in the underground gold mines of northeastern Ontario, Canada. Like many, he sacrificed several hours each day in a dark, dank, and somewhat precarious environment. It was what he could do to support his immigrant family. I don’t believe he always enjoyed his work, but as the provider, he took pleasure in giving my mother his paycheck every couple of weeks.

Mining, whether underground or open pit, manual or mechanical, provides humanity with the essential raw materials to produce the goods we rely on daily to survive, subsist and succeed. Should the progressive eco-politicians, the self-styled, self-deputized saviors of our planet decide to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar, the key ingredient in any manner of success is brought about by mining and lots of it.

I do not believe there is currently sufficient technology, in any manner, to replace fossil fuels without nuclear power and additional advancements in non-fossil fueled energies, but irrespective mining will be the key. I do not even believe there is a sufficient need to replace fossil fuels, but that’s because, unlike the ‘propagandists’ and powerful, I am merely reasonable and not looking to be placed among the powerful.

Not including steel and plastics, the average Tesla battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 44 pounds of manganese, 60 pounds of nickel, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum. Not including overburden, mining would excavate and then process 500,000 pounds of mineral-bearing earth to produce one single EV battery.

This is for one single car, thus can you imagine the requirements for batteries to hold and sustain the intermittent electricity produced by solar panels and wind turbines? As shown in the recently released research study entitled, “Energy Storage Conundrum”, the costs are unreachable – for many countries, it would consume more than their entire Gross Domestic Product.

Mining naturally, is construed as a dastardly, dishonorable activity by the unqualified, inexpert greenie. Paradoxically, there is essentially nothing in wind turbines or solar panels that can be manufactured without that immoral intrusion of mining or oil

While the activist greenie assumes mining is merely for the acquisition of gold and silver rings and the gems to place into them, they had better be thinking as well about rare earth elements and the absolute need for them to satisfy their militant, but unwarranted, climate campaign.

China has or controls a huge monopoly of these rare earth mines and has already threatened to curb their export to the west. Without rare earth minerals, there would be no batteries, no digital equipment or instrumentation, and certainly no storage for renewable energy production. In other words, it would immediately advance the death of any reliance, in any manner, on renewable energies.

The United States has one single rare earth minerals mine, the MP Minerals Mine located in Mountain Pass, California about 55 miles south-south-west of Las Vegas, Nevada. In Canada, Appia Energy Corporation is currently drilling for rare earth elements at Alces Lake located 23 miles northeast of Uranium City or 525 miles north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, but there is no mine in Canada producing rare earth minerals at the current time.

You certainly don’t hear about this from the progressive eco-politicians who just instill more and more alarm about traditional fossil fuels. Rare earth elements also play quite harshly in the continuing saga of unreliability and unpredictability in renewable energies

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