by Mark Keenan
The environmental movement used to be about protecting nature: clean rivers, clean air, fewer toxic chemicals and less destruction of the countryside. Now we are apparently going to save nature by digging up enormous quantities of it.
As the Trump administration reverses elements of the previous administration’s wind and solar policies, perhaps Americans should ask a question that has been strangely absent from the energy debate: Just how “green” is green energy?
The “green transition” requires an enormous expansion of mines, mineral-processing plants, battery factories, transmission lines, solar farms, wind farms, and an extraordinary amount of industrial machinery. Much of that machinery still runs on fossil fuels and most likely will continue to do so. There is no energy system without materials. Furthermore, these developments have environmental consequences of their own.
Welcome to the green-energy paradox: industrialize nature in order to save it.
Solar Panels Don’t Grow on Trees
A solar panel looks wonderfully clean once it has been installed in a field. No chimney. No smoke. No coal truck arriving at the gate.
Unfortunately, solar panels do not grow in fields.
Solar technologies require materials including aluminum, silicon, silver, gallium, indium and tellurium. These materials must be mined, processed, refined, transported and manufactured into equipment. Mining requires enormous quantities of heavy machinery, much of it diesel-powered.
Mineral processing and refining can also be extremely energy-intensive, while ores, metals and finished components travel through international supply chains heavily dependent on ships and trucks.
Here we encounter the first irony of the “fossil-fuel-free” future: it takes enormous quantities of fossil fuels to build it.
The green economy, it turns out, is not floating somewhere above the fossil-fuel industrial economy: It is built by it. The supposedly clean, post-industrial green economy turns out to be extraordinarily industrial.
I am not opposed to mining or industry. Modern civilization obviously needs both. What I object to is the marketing trick whereby one enormous industrial system is described as “dirty,” while another enormous industrial system is painted green and presented as if it descended from heaven on a leaf.
The issue is honesty. Renewable-energy infrastructure does not exist outside the vast energy-intensive industrial system required to build it.
Then there is the land. Utility-scale solar requires large areas because sunlight is diffuse. Add access roads, substations, and transmission infrastructure, and eventual disposal or recycling of equipment, and the physical footprint grows further.
Environmental damage does not cease to exist merely because it happens somewhere beyond the photograph on the renewable-energy brochure.
And What If The Premise Is Wrong?
The public is routinely given the impression that virtually every qualified scientist agrees that human CO₂ emissions constitute a climate emergency. Yet the World Climate Declaration organized by CLINTEL has attracted more than 2,000 scientists and professional signatories who reject the claim of a CO₂-induced climate emergency. I am one of its signatories.
I examine that scientific dispute in detail in my book Climate CO2 Hoax – How Bankers Hijacked the Environment Movement. The relevant point here is the extraordinary paradox: governments are undertaking a vast reconstruction of modern energy and transportation systems while the climatic premise used to justify it remains disputed.
Wind Power Has a Big Material Footprint Too
Wind has the same material usage problem — only on an enormous physical scale.
The late Cambridge engineering professor David MacKay, who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, calculated that producing about 50 kWh per person per day from British offshore wind would require wind farms occupying a sea area roughly twice the size of Wales.
That means enormous quantities of turbines, foundations, steel, concrete, copper, substations and transmission infrastructure — before dealing with intermittency, storage, backup generation and grid balancing.
The wind may be renewable. The steel, concrete, copper, mines and factories are not.
That is the green-energy paradox: technologies promoted to protect nature require the industrialization of vast areas of land and sea.
The Electric-Car Magic Trick
Electric cars provide perhaps the clearest example of green marketing. Look at the car, and there is no exhaust pipe. Wonderful: zero emissions.
Now move the camera backward.
There is the lithium mine. The nickel. The cobalt. The graphite. The steel and aluminum. The battery factory. The charging network. The expanded electrical grid. And somewhere, of course, the power station generating the electricity (and that is most likely to be a fossil fuel power station).
The emissions and environmental costs have not magically vanished. Much of the activity has simply moved somewhere else.
Replacing hundreds of millions of conventional automobiles with electric vehicles therefore requires an enormous industrial reconstruction involving mines, battery factories, charging stations and expanded electrical grids. Again this entire cycle is heavily dependent on fossil fuel use.
This doesn’t mean that electric vehicles have no advantages. It means that calling them simply “zero emission” or “green” tells only a fraction of the environmental story.
And Then There Is Artificial Intelligence
Perhaps the funniest contradiction belongs to artificial intelligence.
AI systems are very good at reminding humanity about the dangers of CO₂ emissions. There is just one small problem: AI is ravenously hungry for electricity.
Data centers consumed roughly 415 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, and consumption could more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, with AI the main driver of that growth.
The majority of that electricity comes from coal and natural gas. So worldwide fossil-fuel power stations are generating electricity for giant data centers so that an AI chatbot can explain to you why humanity urgently needs to stop burning fossil fuels.
You couldn’t make it up.
When “Green” Becomes a Marketing Label
This is what happens when environmentalism is reduced largely to carbon accounting. Mines, habitat destruction, water consumption, transmission corridors and millions of tons of industrial equipment can all acquire the magic label “green” if the spreadsheet says they reduce CO₂ somewhere else.
I spent part of my professional career working on environmental issues in government and at the United Nations. I have no desire to see polluted rivers, poisoned land, or filthy air.
But somewhere along the way, protecting nature became synonymous with reducing carbon emissions. They are not the same thing.
The technology advertised as saving nature requires mines, diesel machinery, steel, concrete, factories, transmission systems, and huge areas of land.
Real environmental accounting should examine the whole lifecycle: mining, manufacturing, energy consumption, pollution, land, water, transportation, reliability, recycling and disposal. There should be no environmentally sacred technologies.
This broader distinction between carbon accounting and genuine environmental protection is something I examine in more detail in my book Transcending the Climate Deception – Toward Real Sustainability.
If an oil well deserves scrutiny, scrutinize it. If a solar farm, wind farm, or battery factory deserves scrutiny, scrutinize that too.
Which is precisely why I find the modern definition of “green” so peculiar.
Protecting nature cannot simply mean moving environmental damage from the exhaust pipe to the lithium mine, from the power station to the mineral-processing plant, or from one landscape to another.
If saving nature requires destroying nature on an industrial scale, perhaps the first thing that needs recycling is our definition of environmentalism.