Renewables Dig Once, Fossil Fuels Dig Forever

We've all heard the “renewables require more mining” mantra from climate change denialists. It see a lot of it on my social media accounts - usually delivered with a smirk, as if the energy transition somehow collapses the moment someone mentions the need to mine lithium, copper or rare earths.

Yes, renewables do require mining. But here’s the truth that the denialists never say out loud: a fossil fuel economy requires vastly more mining, every single year, and forever.

Fossil fuels are dug up, burned once, and then dumped into the atmosphere as waste. Renewables are built, and then powered by flows that don’t need to be mined at all: sun, wind, heat. And at the end of their life cycle, they can usually be recycled.

Around 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels are mined or extracted globally every year. A coal power station isn't just a building. It's the mouth of a system that must be constantly fed with new material that needs digging up. Rail lines, ports, ships, pipelines, refineries, ash dams, tailings, spills, leaks, explosions - all of these exist to feed combustion. Renewables don’t work like that.

“But renewables use more minerals to build”

Yes, an EV does contain more minerals than a petrol car. And a wind turbine contains more minerals than a gas turbine. But that comparison collapses the moment you include what fossil fuel plants and equipment require after construction: fuel.

When construction materials and ongoing fuel extraction is accounted for, the picture completely flips. Analysis summarised by Our World in Data shows that coal has a mining footprint tens of times larger than solar or wind per unit of electricity generated. Coal never stops demanding new extraction. Wind turbines don’t need to be refuelled. Solar panels don’t need a daily shipment of sunlight. Fossil fuelled plants do.

Dig once vs dig forever

This is the core concept denialists refuse to acknowledge. Clean energy technologies are largely one-time material investments. You build them, then they operate for decades. Batteries degrade slowly, can be reused, repurposed, and increasingly recycled. Metals in grids, turbines and vehicles remain in circulation.

Fossil fuels are mined explicitly to be used once and destroyed. Every tonne of coal burned demands another tonne to replace it. Every barrel of oil burned is gone forever, leaving pollution behind.

I unpacked this directly in an earlier post, “Yeah But… What About Lithium Mining?” The key point bears repeating: lithium is mined once and used for years; fossil fuels are mined to be burned once and pollute forever.

The fossil fuel economy is structurally dependent on digging up enormous quantities of stuff and setting it on fire. The clean energy economy is not. And there’s another asymmetry the denialist's throw-away lines ignore: clean energy systems improve with age. As more batteries, turbines and panels are deployed, the grid becomes even cleaner and recycling becomes more viable at scale. The IEA estimates that expanded recycling could cut demand for newly mined critical minerals by up to 40% by mid-century.

The fossil fuel system never gets cleaner. It never reaches a point where you stop digging.

Of course, this is not a free pass for mining practices that devastate landscapes, poison water, destroy Country and exploit workers. Those risks are real and must be confronted honestly. But if you genuinely care about mining impacts, ending fossil fuels is non-negotiable. Fossil fuels represent the largest, most wasteful, most environmentally destructive mining system humanity has ever built.

Peer-reviewed research puts it bluntly. The energy transition will require substantially less mining than the fossil fuel system it is replacing. That's because a fossil fuel economy requires over 500 times more mining than a clean energy economy.

The bottom line

The “renewables require more mining” line is nothing but a distraction. It's designed to hide the true scale of the fossil fuel economy.

Renewables require mining once. Fossil fuels require mining forever.

A fossil fuel economy requires 500 times more mining that a clean energy economy.