>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements.
No I didn't.
A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all).
>Wind power can share land with other uses.
Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude.
>There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.
I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect.
Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.
No I didn't.
A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all).
>Wind power can share land with other uses.
Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude.
>There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.
I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect.
Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.