Nothing Renewable About Green

“We live in a time where few understand how things get made. It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run.”  Doomberg

The world is about to plunge into its worst energy crisis since the 1970s and it is the left-wing green machine that is causing the crisis.  Since the world first contracted a serious case of climate alarmism more than 30 years ago, rich countries have rushed headlong into “greening” their electricity generation.  

In spite of the fact that Germans, whose electric bills are twice that of the U.S., refer to electricity as a “luxury good,” or that people in New England and California pay 70% more for “green” electricity than people in West Virginia pay for coal-based power, environmental activists are continuing to push for the use of wind, solar and electric cars.  However, no one wants to talk about the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.

Did you know that building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy or that a single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones?

Did you know that a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of material?  On averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth whereas an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

Did you know that oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals needed to build these so-called green machines?  The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

There is nothing renewable about green. All machines wear out meaning that there must be a continual extraction of materials to build new ones, which will require mining, processing, transportation, and, ultimately, the disposing of millions of tons of materials, much of it functionally or economically unrecyclable.  

Did you know that by 2030 more than 10 million tons of spent batteries each year will become garbage? Or that by 2050, the quantity of worn-out solar panels will constitute double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades?

Did they tell you that just to replace the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house, that produces enough electricity for 75,000 homes will require at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land?  Several years ago, it was estimated that to power the United States would require some 1.2 million turbines.  You do the math!

As you have to know by now, the green agenda has less to do with saving the earth than it does with redistribution of wealth, population control, and world government.

According to Separating Fact from Fiction, a report by the Co2 Coalition, natural disasters worldwide are in a 20-year decline; temperature and carbon dioxide fluctuations since the early 20th century show both periods of increased warming and cooling; and both heat waves and droughts have declined in recent decades.  Global trends have seen crop yields increasing since the 1930s with the adoption of hybrids. greater fertilizer use, more efficient farming and the increase of CO2.  There is no acceleration in sea-level rise as recorded by tide gauges.  There is well-documented isotactic 3 rebound along the eastern seaboard which is a phenomenon that accounts for the relative sea-level rise of nearly 20 inches in parts of the Atlantic Coast.

Renewables don’t power our societies, they’re not about to any time soon, and the fact that they are not isn’t a policy choice, or “greedy capitalism.” The impossibility of “renewals” is a technical and physical problem.

Alex Epstein writes in the preface to his book Fossil Future: a net-zero policy, actually implemented “would certainly be the most significant act of mass murder since the killings of one hundred million people by communist regimes in the 20th and it would likely be far greater.”

A world of 8 billion people cannot survive without fossil fuels.

Source:  Lighting the Gas under European Feet: How Politicians and Journalists Get Energy So Wrong by Joakim Book, Mises; Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check by Mark P. Mills, Manhattan Institute

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