{"id":12817,"date":"2015-09-30T07:35:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T12:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12817"},"modified":"2015-09-30T07:35:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T12:35:18","slug":"the-stuff-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12817","title":{"rendered":"The stuff problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The stuff\u00a0problem<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"28.09.15-yes-to-renewables-590x393.jpg<\/div>\n

‘Yes to renewables!’ Hundreds rallied outside the Victorian Parliament House, Melbourne, 10 December 2013.\u00a0Takver under a\u00a0Creative Commons Licence<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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How much mined material will we need to build a 100-per-cent renewable world?\u00a0Danny Chivers<\/strong>\u00a0works it out.<\/em><\/p>\n

The problem with wind turbines, solar panels, ground-source heat pumps and electric cars is that they\u2019re all made of stuff. When people like me make grand announcements (and\u00a0interactive infographics<\/a>) explaining how we don\u2019t need to burn fossil fuels because fairly shared renewable energy could give everyone on the planet a good quality of life, this is the bit of the story that often gets missed out. We can\u2019t just pull all this sustainable technology out of the air \u2013 it\u2019s made from annoyingly solid materials that need to come from\u00a0somewhere.<\/p>\n

So how much material would we need to transition to a 100-per-cent renewable world? For my new NoNonsense book,\u00a0Renewable Energy: cleaner, fairer ways to power the planet<\/a><\/em>, I realized I needed to find an answer to this question. It\u2019s irresponsible to advocate a renewably powered planet without being open and honest about what the real-world impacts of such a transition might\u00a0be.<\/p>\n

In this online article, I make a stab at coming up with an answer \u2013 but first I need to lay down a quick proviso. All the numbers in this piece are rough, ball-park figures, that simply aim to give us a sense of the scale of materials we\u2019re talking about. Nothing in this piece is meant to be a vision of the \u2018correct\u2019 way to build a 100-per-cent renewably powered world. There is no single path to a clean-energy future; we need a democratic energy transition led by a mass global movement creating solutions to suit people\u2019s specific communities and situations, not some kind of top-down model imposed from above. This article just presents one scenario, with the sole aim of helping us to understand the\u00a0challenge.<\/p>\n

– See more at: http:\/\/newint.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/15\/material-requirements\/#sthash.FQbbzNu7.dpuf<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The stuff\u00a0problem ‘Yes to renewables!’ Hundreds rallied outside the Victorian Parliament House, Melbourne, 10 December 2013.\u00a0Takver under a\u00a0Creative Commons Licence How much mined material will we need to build a 100-per-cent renewable world?\u00a0Danny Chivers\u00a0works it out. The problem with wind turbines, solar panels, ground-source heat pumps and electric cars is that they\u2019re all made of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9422,263,328,1482,9424,674,4301,9423,998],"class_list":["post-12817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-electric-cars","tag-energy","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-mining","tag-new-internationalist","tag-renewable-energy","tag-solar-panels","tag-sustainable-technology","tag-wind-turbines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12818,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12817\/revisions\/12818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}