The world's clean energy transition represents a colossal expansion of the world's mining industry. To catch a diffuse energy source like sunlight or wind needs an unprecedented volume of physical machinery. A single solar farm requires roughly 30 times more total metal infrastructure than a conventional gas plant. We aren't moving away from mining; we're swapping enormous oceanic drilling rigs for vast open-cut metal mines. The demand for heavy mining and rare earths is just as compelling as the downstream e-waste crisis, but the numbers are even more staggering. While solar cells rely heavily on high-purity silicon, silver, and copper, the broader 'green infrastructure' ecosystem demands far more. The EV motors, wind turbines and massive national grids required to tie intermittent solar together are entirely dependent on an unprecedented surge in heavy mining and rare earth extraction. This physical mining demand has simply exploded with the shift from conventional fossil fuel energy generation to wind and solar. Because wind and sunshine are so diluted and diffused, harvesting them requires a massive physical footprint, necessitating endless extra acres of complex machinery. This translates into heavily vandalised landscapes and grotesque coastal settings. According to the IEA, replacing them world's fossil-fuel system with renewables increases the total volume of materials requiring extraction and handling by a factor of 10. Solar alone is exceptionally copper-intensive, using roughly 850 kg per megawatt for intricate grid connections, inverters and cabling. Renewable energy is projected to drive 45% of total global copper demand by 2030. Yet, developing a new major copper mine takes an average of 16 years from initial discovery to first production. The world faces a massive demand spike for a metal where the supply chain is notoriously slow, costly, and inflexible. Solar panels don't use much in the way of rare earths, but wind turbines and the electric vehicle motors that back up the low-carbon shift are hungry for permanent magnets made from neodymium, praseodymium and dysprosium. Processing these elements involves intensive chemical leaching that produces vast amounts of toxic and radioactive wastewater. Compounding the problem, China controls roughly 60–70% of the extraction and up to 90% of the refining for these specific elements. This has created a massive geopolitical bottleneck. Image: this massive chasm is the Bingham Canyon Mine (also called the Kennecott Copper Mine) just outside Salt Lake City, Utah. It is one of the largest man-made excavations on Earth and the deepest open-pit mine in the world, stretching 4 kilometres wide and more than a kilometre deep.

BREAKING: Alice Edwards, one of only two UN rights experts to sign a letter on the Oct. 7 atrocities, says “There was a campaign [by other rapporteurs] to prevent that letter going out. Weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it, telling me everything in it was false.”

Opinion: SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him theglobeandmail.com/business…

Toronto Police Officer Killed in Raid on Suspects in March Attack on United States Consulate — a Shooting US Prosecutors Allege Was Directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Proxy Network thebureau.news/p/toronto-pol…

Toronto Police Officer Killed in Raid on Suspects in March Attack on United States Consulate — a Shooting US Prosecutors Allege Was Directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Proxy Network thebureau.news/p/toronto-pol…

Tonight the #CNTower will dim for the first five minutes of every hour in honour of @TorontoPolice Constable Marc Pinizzotto, who died in the line of duty