“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” [Sam] Ricketts [Climate director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D)] greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” [Saikat] Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Saikat Chakrabarti, was chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Was” chief of staff. But he perpetrated too many outrageous gaffes even for AOC. Starting with the insanity of Green New Deal, a totalitarian aspiration of which Chakrabarti was the primary author, and culminating with a Tweet “comparing a Native American congresswoman to the Ku Klux Klan.”
Yes, it’s a “change-the-entire-economy thing;” to levels of misery not seen since feudalism. And, in exchange for that, we get environmental degradation.
The Environmental Disaster of Solar Energy
“[T]he volume of waste produced by solar panels and wind turbines vastly exceeds that associated with reliable power sources…”
“Vastly” is right, and solar panels are the worst offender. Check the chart at the link above.
There’s a lot of highly toxic cadmium behind the glass in those panels.
For Most Things, Recycling Harms the Environment
But for most other things [aside from aluminum cans and corrugated cardboard], recycling harms the environment. I’m not (just) saying it’s costly. I’m saying recycling is harmful. If you care about the environment, you should put your bottles and other glass in the regular garbage, every time.”
There’s a lot of glass in solar panels, which should be put in landfills – except for the Cadmium… Maybe we can put the solar panel waste in Yucca Mountain.
And wind isn’t any better:
Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy
(That article is from 2017, and the only change is that wind has gone from .46% to 2% of electricity generation, according to some more recent articles. Whether that’s all usable power is another question.)
…world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years…
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000.. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry…
…that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale…
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal… Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
…you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year… just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.
If the envirostatists really believe we have only a few years to “save the planet,” they should be pushing for a crash program to build nuclear plants. Financed by the money they could save if they stopped flying their private jets to environmental conferences.
See also, The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking.