alt Hacker NewsI recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben. There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs. This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year. The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
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One point that gets very little coverage is that fossil fuels are a limited resource. Once they used they are gone.
The materials for renewable energy are still in a usable form.
But it creates enough cash to redirect all ire away to weakly lobbying industries, like aggrarian-sector or other weakly lobbied sectors like nuclear.
Only there is no forever when you're talking about a finite resource, like fossil fuels.
Solar panels etc. will last decades and can and will be recycled afterwards. Further, most materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure (iron, lithium) are highly abundant on earth. Most of the suppliers work to use cheaper (=more abundant) materials in their products, replacing lithium with sodium in batteries and silver with copper in solar panels. Wind turbine blades are produced now using re-solvable resins.