Copper Cannot Be Mined Fast Enough to "Electrify Everything," Not Even Cars.

This note came into one of my news feeds: Report shows copper can't be mined fast enough to electrify the US

Some text:

There was a time, maybe as little as ten years ago, that I bought into the idea that electric cars are "green," and thus sustainable. I changed my mind.

Older now, as the end of my life approaches, I have come to understand that no avenue exists to make the car CULTure sustainable. I fully realize that this is a hypocritical position, since I drive a car, a hybrid, which on my grid, PJM. is slightly less dirty , in carbon dumping terms, than an electric car and/or an internal combustion engine car.

I have been pronuclear since 1987, well before DU existed, once I came to understand what the consequences of that worst possible of all nuclear "accidents," Chernobyl, actually was, compared to what I expected based on barely literate media interpretations.

However when I came to DU, in 2002, I was also a fan of so called "renewable energy" believing, incorrectly as it turned out, that "renewable energy" had something to do with sustainability and the elimination of dangerous fossil fuels, which has turned out to be completely untrue. Nevertheless I believed this when I came here over 20 years ago.

I was wrong. I changed my mind:

Experiment invalidates theories that conflict with results:

When I came to DU in November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ was 374.14 ppm. As of this writing, for the week beginning September 14, 2025, it was 423.98 ppm.

The so called "renewable energy," experiment, widely embraced by humanity at a cost of trillions of dollars, has done nothing to address extreme global heating. Things are getting worse, faster. We are using more fossil fuels than ever. Moreover, the material and land costs of so called "renewable energy" suggest that it is neither sustainable nor environmentally acceptable.

The "report" at the link is actually a university press release. We see a lot of university press releases here about "breakthroughs" in batteries, solar cells, wind turbines, blah, blah, blah. It's been going on here for more than 20 years, but the results are clear enough, again, to repeat, Things are getting worse, faster. All these "breakthroughs" haven't meant a damned thing.

The "report" links to a "study" put together by the IEF, the International Energy Forum, which describes itself as follows in the study:



As for the existence of oft evoked "energy transitions" or "energy transition," I rather see them as equivalent in reality to Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer and his bright nose.

The "study" in the report's link is here:

Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification

Downloads are free; registration is required.

The authors are academics, one of whom has emeritus status, who before becoming an academic worked for Kennecott, the mining company that produces metals, including copper.

In the addendum to the report, there's a nice list of the world's top copper ore producing mines:



It seems that the mine in the picture at the link opening this post is not the Morenci mine listed in the table. Apparently it's one of the three much smaller copper mines in Arizona located in Pima County.

We may compare the table above with the soothsaying demand predicted if we continue to believe - despite the laws of thermodynamics and other laws of physics and chemistry - that electricity is or will be "green." (There are, of course, a lot of people, lulled into a kind of narcotic haze by pictures of one time wilderness transformed into industrial parks for wind and solar energy, that electricity is already "green." It isn't. The majority of the world's electricity is thermodynamically degraded primary energy from the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels.)

Here's a soothsaying graphic about copper demand from the report:



There is a kind of glib belief - more faith based than reality based - that we are going to mine our way out of extreme global heating.

That's not going to happen.

So called "renewable energy" has not reduced the use of dangerous fossil fuels, is not reducing the use of dangerous fossil fuels, and won't reduce the use of dangerous fossil fuels. On the contrary, so called "renewable energy" depends entirely on access to dangerous fossil fuels, and there is not, and almost certainly never will be, enough holes in the Earth to pull out copper to make it happen.

Of course, the enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" was really never about addressing the ongoing collapse of the planetary atmosphere. On the contrary it was always about attacking - regrettably successfully - the only sustainable form of primary energy that exists, nuclear energy. In terms of copper use efficiency, a generator that is attached to a turbine that can run, for years at a time, at 100% capacity utilization is better than a vast array of wind turbines that have a capacity utilization of 30% or less.

Have a pleasant weekend.