Tribes, landowners and communities find themselves wrestling with the not-so-green side of green energy.

How Fast a Low Carbon Transition? Or: Is Vaclav Smil Wrong?

here are those same numbers compared 00:41:21 against reported global reserves so there's the amount of metal we need and there is the global reserves this column is the proportion of metals required to 00:41:33 phase out fossil fuels as a percentage that is of all the copper we need to make one generation of units current global reserves will get us 19.23 00:41:45 of the way there we don't have enough copper for one generation

we used to have 500 years ago a small human system a big pile of natural resources and a small pollution plume 00:46:47 an industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity that took more than a century to build with support of the highest calorifically dense source of cheap energy the world has ever known that would be oil 00:46:59 in abundant quantities with easily available credit and unlimited mineral resources and now we've got a system that's a human system that's really large 00:47:10 a depleted natural resources [Music] portfolio compared to what we had but we've now got a massive pollution stream so now we seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive 00:47:24 energy a fragile finance system saturated in debt not enough minerals with an unprecedented number of human population embedded in a deteriorating environment 00:47:35 so at this point i'm going to say this is probably not going to go as planned

it also is summed together so everything we need is summed together per metal and that gives us this column here total metal required to produce one generation of technology units to phase 00:40:15 out fossil fuels and so that the that we've got these numbers here the next column is global metal production as it was from mining in 2019 00:40:28 so this is all from the usgs and the bgo the final column is how many years of production at the 2019 rate um would be needed to hit the actual 00:40:42 volumes needed so 2019's the last year before covert is the last year of stable data that's why i've used it so you might notice some of these numbers are rather large 00:40:55 like we will need seven thousand one hundred and one years of production to produce the needed number of volume of vanadium that's your uh your redox batteries

the idea that we're going to do this in seven or eight years is very amusing so then the question is oh we'll just open more mines it's simple right

let's put the electrical power systems together these electrical power 00:22:29 systems that this is actually on the low side because most industrial action happens with the consumption of coal and gas on site and then it's converted to energy on site this is what's just been drawn off the power grid 00:22:42 so there's a vast amount of energy associated with manufacturing that is not included here and that is actually a huge piece of work to include that so these numbers i'm showing you are very much on the low side 00:22:55 so we're going to put it all together we need 36 000 terawatt hours all there abouts that's a that's a very low estimate

Early inventories of emission sources show that electric power generation in India is mostly done using a polluting fossil fuel like coal and to some extent oil. Oil and petroleum products for transport are also mostly imported.