The Environmental Costs of Renewable Energy Are Staggering - Foundation for Economic Education

The Environmental Costs of Renewable Energy Are Staggering - Foundation for Economic Education
Limits of Clean Energy" is the title of an article by Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy, with the sub-title “If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels.” 
Here’s the opening:

...The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question....we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

MP: As we learned from Thomas Sowell, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” 

See video below.