Do You Want Electric Cars?

If so, you need to let someone mine copper

Each hybrid contains about 100 pounds of copper — most of that is in the electrical cables and the electric motor. A conventional car only contains about 50 pounds of copper.
Other “green” technologies also contain lots of copper. A five-megawatt wind turbine is made of nearly five tons of copper and solar panels are up to 60 percent copper. Blocking future mine construction effectively jeopardizes the very technology greens want to power their vision of a “clean-energy future.”

Plus additional Cu will be needed to bolster the power lines that carry power to households. Major transmission lines are mostly aluminum, but the distribution system, which will need to have increased capacity in the event that all electric or plugin hybrid cars are widely adopted are mostly copper.

So, why are environmentalists opposed to the Pebble Project, a proposal to develop a new copper mine in Alaska, where a new deposit of copper ore bearing as much as 8 billion (with a "b") tons of copper, gold and molybdenum?  Are they opposed to its environmental impacts? 

The Pebble Project’s owners have reportedly already spent $125 million on the environmental research reports required to open the mine. But opponents have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to deny a Clean Water Act permit for the mine before the owners have even applied for an operating permit. Incredibly, the EPA is seriously considering this outrageous petition. And even more outrageously, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this spring attended and spoke at a reception for opponents of the mine, which was hosted in the Supreme Court by retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor!

Well of course, even though the project is not yet fully planned, and the impacts cannot be known for certain.

There's simply no doubt.  Mining is a dirty business.  To extract metals from ore, you have to dig up the ore, which often involves a huge hole, and considerable difficulties with groundwater contamination.  You have to extract the metal from the ore, and this often involves extremely messy chemical processes, or fume producing smelting. And then, the raw metal must be shaped into the final form for use in a factory.  All these processes can be dirty, but all can be considerably improved through technology.

Should the United States, as a country, simply make it a policy to abandon the processes of mining, refining and production of goods from metals, hoping that we can sell enough software and banking services abroad that other metal producing nations abroad will be willing to give us their metal products in exchange?  You know, anyone can learn to do paperwork, especially if the price is too high...

It is incumbent on us to do our mining and refining with as cleanly as reasonably possible, with the acknowledgment that reasonably is sensitive to costs), but it is simply insane to give them up entirely for a imaginary idyllic future.