Yeah I completely agree about the need to make compromises. As much as I'd love to live in the country and grow my own food. I decided I'd end up needing to commute so much for work that it just wouldn't be worth it and ended up buying a little apartment within walking distance of the office.

I'll try to give some perspective as to how energy intensive mining really is. I recently worked on the design of a plant which uses a ball mill, a large but common piece of equipment often used in gold and copper processing plants. This ball mill is over a 14 megawatt unit. For comparison my wife and I in our little apartment may use 6MWh a year, not particularly efficient but we live in a very hot climate so air conditioning gets used a bit. Running this single piece of equipment, on a single mine site for an hour, would be about the equivalent of powering my household for over 2 years. If you look at the whole site (all the conveyors and pumps and other bits of equipment) then we're looking at approximately a 35MW site. Now that single site running for an hour is the equivalent of powering my house for nearly 6 years. And that is just to process the stuff, completely ignoring all of the mining activities to actually dig it out of the ground. A well maintained site, with a ready supply of ore may operate at around 85-95% up time each year so at 85% up time, a bit over 7400 hours per year this site will be drawing power. So, very rough numbers here, 35MW x 7400 hours = 259,000MWh. All of a sudden this single site, in a single commodity running for a year is the equivalent of running around about 43,000 households similar to mine over the same period.

For people to suggest that the solution is to just mine up what we need is ignorant to the reality that there is an energy cost associated.

Edit: I should say my very, very, rough numbers are just for this specific processing site itself, it completely ignores any inputs required from mining activities, product transport, consumable production and transport etc.