That’s 100 to 1,000 times lower than fossil fuels. Of course, rocks are not made of pure minerals; the minerals are often in much lower concentrations, so the total amount of rock we’ll have to move will be higher. But the same is true for fossil fuel mining: to get those 15 billion tonnes of fuel, we dig a lot more stuff out of the earth. Put simply: moving to low-carbon technologies will mean less mining, not more.
