The different worlds of wealthy nations and developing countries

The building of EV's has two distinctive features, the motor and battery, that requires about 500% more specialty metals and minerals that are mined, refined, and transported around the globe using hydrocarbons, as well as more energy-intensive aluminum in the vehicle body to offset the weight of a typically half-ton EV battery.

There is, similarly, a huge increase in critical metals needed to fabricate wind and solar hardware, compared with conventional fossil fuel electricity production. That translates into far more mining of earth natural resources, which is not green, regardless of labels and aspirations-and often done in poorer, less regulated countries where human rights violations and environmental degradation are all too common.

No energy system is "renewable", because all machines that access, convert, move, and store energy-drilling rigs, dams, mining trucks, wind turbines, solar panels, trains, boats, planes, pipelines, batteries, electronics, and beyond-wear out, produce waste, and require replacement and disposal of materials, some of which can be hazardous.

Recycling consumes energy, takes time, is limited in terms of useful recovery, and is often more expensive than producing something new. That is why the idea of a "circular economy" with near-perfect recycling is profoundly unrealistic, and even with aggressive recycling, there remains the challenge of new supplies needed to meet net new demands that come with growing economies.

Society needs simultaneously: products and electricity that are affordable and reliable for the 8 billion on this planet. Energy for the 21st Century and that minimizes overall environmental impacts. The real impediments to progress are an underlying obliviousness to energy realities and associated denial of trade-offs.

Furthermore, the impact on land, materials, and water tends to:

• Decrease with denser forms of energy such as hydrocarbons and nuclear, and
• Increase with less dense energy such as wind, solar, biomass, and batteries.

Delivering useful energy to society is made possible by technologies that can capture natural forces and materials and convert them into a useful form.

Forecasting long-term possibilities for supplies of products and electricity are thus determined by future innovations that can take advantage of the underlying scale of those primary natural resources. Scientific estimates of those quantities illuminate the reality that enormous amounts of energy may exist in the natural world around us for several centuries, but quantifiable, they're without replacement of those natural resources on this 4-billion-year-old planet earth.

The central challenge of our time is thus illuminated by the simple fact that about one fourth of the world's population accounts for three-fourths of global GDP. Our goal for the coming century should be to ensure that the whole population, both the less fortunate in already developed countries as well as those in emerging and developing nations, can obtain the material wealth and social conditions enabled by low-cost, abundant and affordable energy, and in so doing have the economic wherewithal to invest in environmental protection. That will require significantly more energy to address the needs of ALL 8 billion on this planet.