By Mark Keenan
September 7, 2026
The environmental movement used to be about protecting nature: clean rivers, clean air, fewer toxic chemicals and less destruction of the countryside. Now, apparently, we are going to save nature by digging up enormous quantities of it.
The "green transition" requires an enormous expansion of mines, mineral-processing plants, battery factories, transmission lines, solar farms, wind farms and an extraordinary amount of industrial machinery. Much of that machinery still runs on fossil fuels and most likely will continue to do so. There is no energy system without materials. Furthermore, these developments have environmental consequences of their own.
Welcome to the green-energy paradox: industrialize nature in order to save it.
The contradiction has become particularly relevant in the United States, where the Trump administration has begun reversing elements of the previous administration's wind and solar policies. In June, four offshore wind leases were terminated, with investment redirected toward natural gas generation and geothermal energy.
Perhaps this is a good moment to ask a very unfashionable question:
Just how "green" is green energy?
Solar Panels Don't Grow on Trees
A solar panel looks wonderfully clean once it has been installed in a field. No chimney. No smoke. No coal truck arriving at the gate.
Unfortunately, solar panels do not grow in fields.
Solar technologies require materials including aluminum, silicon, silver, gallium, indium and tellurium, among others. These materials have to be mined, processed, refined, transported and manufactured into equipment. Mining operations require enormous quantities of heavy machinery, including excavators, drilling equipment and giant haul trucks. Most of this machinery is diesel-powered.
Mineral processing and refining can also be extremely energy-intensive, while the movement of ores, refined metals and finished components through international supply chains remains heavily dependent on fossil-fuel-based transportation including ships, trucks and other vehicles.
This exposes one of the fundamental contradictions of the green-energy transition.
Here we encounter the first little irony with the "fossil-fuel-free" future: it takes enormous quantities of fossil fuels to build it. Mining trucks burn diesel. Ore must be crushed and refined. Metals and components travel by truck and ship. Factories manufacture the panels, turbines and batteries.
The green economy, it turns out, is not floating somewhere above the fossil-fuel industrial economy. It is built by it. The supposedly clean, post-industrial green economy turns out to be extraordinarily industrial.
I am not opposed to mining or industry. Modern civilization obviously needs both. What I object to is the marketing trick whereby one enormous industrial system is described as "dirty," while another enormous industrial system is painted green and presented as if it descended from heaven on a leaf.
The issue is honesty. We should not pretend that renewable-energy infrastructure exists outside a vast energy-intensive industrial cycle that is also heavily fossil-fuel dependent.
Then there is the land. Utility-scale solar requires large areas because sunlight is diffuse. Add access roads, substations and transmission infrastructure and eventual disposal or recycling of equipment and the physical footprint grows further.
Environmental damage does not cease to exist merely because it happens somewhere beyond the photograph on the renewable-energy brochure.
And What If The Premise Is Wrong?
There is an even more awkward question. What if the climatic premise being used to justify this enormous industrial transformation is itself disputed?
The public is routinely given the impression that virtually every qualified scientist agrees that human CO₂ emissions constitute a climate emergency. Yet the World Climate Declaration organized by CLINTEL has attracted more than 2,000 scientist and professional signatories who reject the claim of a CO₂-induced climate emergency. I am one of its signatories.
I examine that scientific dispute in detail in my book Climate CO2 Hoax - How Bankers Hijacked the Environment Movement. My purpose here is simply to point out the extraordinary paradox: Western governments are proposing a vast reconstruction of the energy, transportation and industrial systems of modern society while many qualified scientists continue to dispute the climatic premise being used to justify it.
Wind Power Has a Big Material Footprint Too
Wind has the same material usage problem - only on an enormous physical scale.
The late Cambridge engineering professor David MacKay, who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, calculated that producing about 50 kWh per person per day from British offshore wind would require wind farms occupying a sea area roughly twice the size of Wales.
Twice the size of Wales.
That means enormous quantities of turbines, foundations, steel, concrete, copper, substations, access roads, and transmission infrastructure spread across an extraordinary area - before dealing with intermittency, storage, backup generation and grid balancing.
The wind may be renewable. The steel, concrete, copper, mines and factories are not.
That is the green-energy paradox: technologies promoted as necessary to protect the natural environment can themselves require the industrialization of vast areas of land and sea, extensive mining and enormous quantities of manufactured infrastructure.
The Electric-Car Magic Trick
Electric cars provide perhaps the clearest example of green marketing. Look at the car and there is no exhaust pipe. Wonderful: zero emissions.
Now move the camera backwards.
There is the lithium mine. The nickel. The cobalt. The graphite. The steel and aluminum. The battery factory. The charging network. The expanded electrical grid. And somewhere, of course, the power station generating the electricity (and that is most likely to be a fossil fuel power station).
The emissions and environmental costs have not magically vanished. Much of the activity has simply moved somewhere else.
Lithium-ion battery production requires minerals including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. EV production also requires enormous quantities of steel, aluminum and copper.
Replacing hundreds of millions of conventional automobiles with electric vehicles therefore requires an enormous industrial reconstruction involving mines, battery factories, charging stations, expanded electricity generation and substantially enlarged electrical grids. Again this entire cycle is heavily dependent on fossil fuel use.
This doesn't mean that electric vehicles have no advantages. It means that calling them simply "zero emission" or "green" tells only a fraction of the environmental story.
And Then There Is Artificial Intelligence
Perhaps the funniest contradiction belongs to artificial intelligence.
AI systems are very good at reminding humanity about the dangers of CO₂ emissions. There is just one small problem: AI is ravenously hungry for electricity.
Data centres consumed roughly 415 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, and consumption could more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, with AI the main driver of that growth.
The majority of that electricity comes from coal and natural gas. So worldwide fossil-fuel power stations are generating electricity for giant data centres so that an AI chatbot can explain to you why humanity urgently needs to stop burning fossil fuels.
You couldn't make it up.
When "Green" Becomes a Marketing Label
This is what happens when environmentalism is reduced largely to carbon accounting. Mines, habitat destruction, water consumption, transmission corridors and millions of tons of industrial equipment can all acquire the magic label "green" if the spreadsheet says they reduce CO₂ somewhere else.
However, the technology advertised as saving nature requires mines, diesel machinery, steel, concrete, factories, transmission systems and huge areas of land.
Real environmental accounting should examine the whole lifecycle: mining, manufacturing, energy consumption, pollution, land, water, transportation, reliability, recycling and disposal. There should be no environmentally sacred technologies.
This broader distinction between carbon accounting and genuine environmental protection is something I examine in more detail in my book Transcending the Climate Deception - Toward Real Sustainability.
If an oil well deserves scrutiny, scrutinize it. If a solar farm, wind farm or battery factory deserves scrutiny, scrutinize that too.
I spent part of my professional career working on environmental issues in government and at the United Nations. I have no desire to see polluted rivers, poisoned land or filthy air.
Which is precisely why I find the modern definition of "green" so peculiar.
Protecting nature cannot simply mean moving environmental damage from the exhaust pipe to the lithium mine, from the power station to the mineral-processing plant, or from one landscape to another.
If saving nature requires destroying nature on an industrial scale, perhaps the first thing that needs recycling is our definition of environmentalism.
Mark Keenan is an independent writer and former Science Adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and former Environmental Affairs Officer at the United Nations. His work examines the intersections of science, history, technology, finance, religion and institutional power.