by Sidney SecularApril 30, 2022
“Green energy” and “The Green Raw Deal” is a road to nowhere “going forward.” If you are still a “greenhorn” on the true costs and lack of feasibility regarding green energy solutions, this little primer will help move you towards reality – always assuming that you want to go there. Far too many today, do not!
The destructive combination of culture-mulchers and political vultures carry on about the necessity of instituting green energy practices though many if not most of them are without a clue as to impracticability of what they demand or the total lack of use such practices provide. These “utopianists” only know that somehow the idea that they are “saving the planet” (however ridiculous) feels good, and that’s good enough for them! The left’s “front runner-gunner,” the wide-mouthed, empty headed AOC, along with Sleepy Joe Biden and the rest of the pests on that side of the ideological spectrum demand that we adopt green energy practices or, they say, the world as we know it will end in a few years. The MSM and the other “new world orderlies” jabber incessantly about the need for solar energy and windmills. Indeed, they create enough wind on these subjects to run those same windmills into the next century! Certainly, they carry on about “the environment” as much as they do about the Ukraine, “racism,” the three evils of the West – whites, capitalism and Christianity – the need to be jabbed and the war on humanity known as “transgenderism.”
Left out of what they term the “conversation” or the “debate” – in reality a one-sided diatribe that brooks no disagreement! – is that wind turbines chop up about 500,000 birds each year as well as massive numbers of bats, sea life, and migrating insects; that they create a constant hum that drives to distraction many who live sufficiently close by and that the “windmills” themselves require more energy and pollution to create than they in turn negate through their use. Meanwhile, windmill promoters and producers want to triple or quadruple our present number of these examples of good intentions over intelligent actions. Once the protests over the unacceptability of both the carnage and the noise fully kicks in, the windmills will be stopped in their whack-tracks with the blessings of the symbol of America itself, the bald eagle, a bird that suffers huge numbers of casualties per annum. Interestingly enough, many years ago a young boy was fined by the government for making an Indian “dream catcher” as a gift for newly elected President Bill Clinton! Why? Because the gift contained the feather from a bald eagle and to use such a thing (except for Native Americans, of course!) was illegal. That the feather had been picked up off the ground (much like the bodies of those same birds around windmill farms!) made no difference. Well, perhaps it was a cheap lesson for the child and his parents in that seeking the “blessing” of the Clintons should always be avoided even more than eagles should avoid windmills!
At best, windmills and solar panels can only supply about 20% of our energy needs and they are not only inherently unpredictable in their output, but frequently cost more in both money and energy than they are worth, something that is unacceptable in any realistic energy planning. However, enthusiasts continue to produce a great deal of “hot air” in their crusade to lower global temperatures because, in reality, human activity has very little to do with the planet’s weather! One good volcanic eruption can release into the atmosphere more pollutants than mankind and all our efforts can do in a year! Worse, the “pollutants” complained about such as carbon dioxide are essential for life on earth! Plants live on that gas and it is the plants that provide another rather useful atmospheric gas, oxygen! Indeed, for some years our CO2 level has been considered too low and only recently has it started to rebound, a matter that has been presented by the “climatologists” as a foretaste of Armageddon!
Beyond all of this, efforts to cut down the use of fossil fuels are generally stupid and inane to the point of intellectual blindness. For instance, electric vehicles (EVs) are not a solution to pollution. They cost a fortune and the batteries they require to operate are charged through the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power because the fact is, batteries store power; they don’t create it. To feel virtuous because you move soundlessly down the highway without any “exhaust” is a study in self-inflicted deception. Furthermore, “electric vehicles” are not as “environmentally friendly” as universally touted in ongoing “green spiels.”
As the libbers start to understand that their claims of “saving the environment” through wind, sunlight and electric cars is losing traction, they are beginning to come around to promote nuclear energy as a further acceptable source of power. However, in their original rush to climate judgement without doing any legitimate research, they put many nuclear power plants in mothballs and stopped the building of new ones. The result has been that no new nuclear plants have been built in many years now and it is too late to employ nuclear energy as an adequate source of power for at the very least several years “going forward.”
On top of all the impracticality of trying to make solar and wind our principal sources of energy, we’re running out of the materials and resources to manufacture the items necessary to access these modes of power especially given the potential political problems involved as many of those resources are located in problematic countries like China and Russia and those countries allied with them politically and/or economically. This is both an illustration of the Left’s proclivity to act without thinking or, in the alternative, seeing these nations as more acceptable than our own. Often, the Left is so blind in its actions that it appears when reality does intrude, they expect the God in whom they don’t believe to step in and validate their follies! We see the present extreme example of this in Biden’s hobbling our output of gas and oil and then relying on unfriendly countries to make up the deficit! Of course, that is happening – at least for the time being – but the result of that “success” has raised the prices of gasoline through the roof while the denizens of supplier countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela continue to pay less than ten cents a gallon for the same product.
Worse, we are further painting ourselves into an economic and cultural corner by encouraging an invasion of illegals from all over the world, a matter that is problematicas it is predicted to add over 100 million vagrants to our present population in less than 30 years! And as these new critters will also have to be supplied with oil, gas, and power while adding nothing useful to the economy and degenerating the culture, the resultant “invasion” will tax our capabilities to the limit while assuring that the “government” that provides for them remains in power in perpetuity.
Returning to the over-advertised “EVs,” these may be cool in what passes for the minds of Americans today, but the costs of going ahead full force with their development and deployment will soon cool the ardor of those of their proponents who are not either profiting from them or totally engulfed in the Green Movement. Let us again consider batteries, the principal foundation of the EV. As noted earlier, batteries do not produce electricity — they merely store what is produced elsewhere, primarily through the combustion of coal, uranium, or natural gas in plants or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a “zero emission vehicle” makes zero sense unless one is being deceptive and speaking only of the use of the vehicle rather than all that is required for its use. Since 40% of the electricity generated in the US is from coal-fired plants, it follows that 40% of the EVs on the road are in actuality coal-powered.
The rechargeable batteries used in EVs require lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide and nickel-cadmium, a nasty mix of “stuff” that will eventually wind up in landfills where these toxic materials will ooze out and seriously pollute the environment around them! A typical EV battery weighs 1,000 pounds and is about the size of a travel trunk. It contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel and plastics. Also included are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells! If this sounds “green” to you, you are woefully ignorant at best and damned stupid at worst! All our good green libbers say that they are concerned with depleting the earth’s resources and polluting Gaia (Mother Earth) but the fact is that the huge quantities of these toxic materials needed for EVs are derived almost entirely by mining. To manufacture just one EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine (salt water) and 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt alone along with 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of copper ore! All told, we must dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery – and that’s before we even use these poisons! What will be the condition of the earth’s surface if all our cars become EVs?
Continuing in our consideration of these critical elements, 68% of the world’s cobalt – a significant part of the EV battery! – comes from the Congo. These Third World nations have none of the “environmental safety regulations” in their mines and no pollution controls! A similar situation must obtain with respect to any and every one of the other aforesaid mined materials if they come from a country whose concern for “Mother Earth” is considerably less than is Greta Thunberg’s! Ditto for many of the battery’s chemical components. And, of course, we must factor in the costs of caring for those who become sick from the pollution arising from these batteries as well as the costs of creating and using them.
Windmills are the ultimate example of costs embedded in the production of these “green solutions” as well as being first class examples of environmental destruction. Each “windmill” weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 average houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete – to anchor the moving parts that produce the electric energy – 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass along with such hard to extract “rare earth” elements as neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. With regard to these last, they aren’t called “rare earth” elements for nothing! The amounts available are very limited and well over 80% of what is available is located in China and Russia, who of course, control their mining, shipping and pricing. A monopoly on these substances must be a source of continual worry to those Western oligarchs who presently are doing all they can to irritate the Russia-China-Iran axis over the Ukrainian “red herring” conflict.
As well, each windmill blade weighs 81,000 pounds and must be replaced after 15 to 20 years of use. Presently we cannot recycle used blades; they must be discarded altogether. Can you imagine the humongous landfills that will be required to bury these “green” monsters? Indeed, they might be larger than those necessary to bury the huge batteries used by EVs!
We can expect that once the Great Reset is in place and the New World Order is smoothly moving forward (and leaving the rest of us behind in slavery and poverty), all of these Green concerns will cease to be and the EVs and windmills abandoned because they are too costly and too stupid. Remember, once the NWO is in place, they won’t need the thugs of Antifa and BLM or the environmental loons who press for moving civilization back to the age of the Flintstones. As that will be the case, the MSM will also move on and, if the issue is again brought up by a few dumb diehards, they will be just as good at covering up the lies and deceits of the left when that happens as they were when the issue was still politically useful.
