DDP Newsletter September 2018 Vol. XXXIV, No. 5
To climate warriors, carbon is black, even when green in plants or invisible as CO2, and wind turbines and solar panels are green. These supposed ecophiles are generally against the reliable renewables, which require building dams or incinerators. “Green,” UNreliable energy sources get an undeserved pass on environmental impact.
The U.S. has so far managed to export the environmental degradation and human costs of mining rare earths and other necessary components of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and battery storage, but end-of-life costs are mounting.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimated that solar panel waste, about 250,000 metric tonnes in the world at the end of 2016, could reach 78 million metric tonnes by 2050 (Forbes 5/13/18, https://tinyurl.com/y8z5m7ar). A veteran solar developer said: “Contrary to previous assumptions, pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a period of several months, for example by rainwater.” Toxic metals can be leached from broken panels because of natural events. In 2015, a tornado broke 200,000 solar modules at the Desert Sunlight solar farm in southern California. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria broke the majority of the panels in the nation’s second largest solar farm.
In Holland, rooftop solar panels overheated and caught fire, nearly destroyed an apartment complex, and released toxic fumes (https://tinyurl.com/yab8gfne).
A solar farm is turning an Essex County, Va., watershed brown with tons of mud. Such problems are caused by stripping the site of vegetation (tinyurl.com/y8c6sbam).
Solar manufacturing installations in North Carolina are being investigated for causing water contamination with perfluorinated compounds that have been shown to be carcinogenic in lab animals (https://tinyurl.com/yaxgekar).
Wind turbines have been called the “rotors of sickness,” and the German Ministry of Environment has been accused of covering up evidence of harmful levels of infrasound. Effects include reducing cardiac muscle strength (https://tinyurl.com/y7uohf6u).
The effect of infrasound on humans was reportedly confirmed by the U.S. Army 30 years ago. There is said to be information that in the 1980s the Soviets and Chinese experimented with infrasound as a weapon. But the military is said to have abandoned the idea because different people reacted differently to its effects (ibid.).
A wind turbine is a “perfect incendiary device,” packed with flammable and toxic oils, plastics, fiberglass, and low-ignition-point metals. A Vestas V112 3MW turbine contains 1,170 liters of gear oil. Combustion of the engine house at a height of 90 m is a spectacular sight. The burning blades are likely to fall off (https://tinyurl.com/y9brf66n).
“Green vandalism” is causing a mounting toll of endangered species, including raptors, the migratory hoary bat, and desert tortoises (https://tinyurl.com/ybcmaqgx).
The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED, WiseEnergy.org) offers extensive information on energy generation and tactical and legal advice on protecting communities from wind development. For updates on wind energy, Twitter lovers might follow @StopTheseThings, by citizens concerned about the spread of wind farms in Australia.
Without “tough action,” climate change will allegedly reduce crop yields and raise food prices, causing food insecurity. In one scenario, climate change alone would result in an extra 24 million people going hungry in 2050, compared with the number expected if today’s climate prevailed. And with tough action? The number of hungry people jumped by a further 78 million, most of them in Africa and South Asia, according to a study by Tomoko Hasegawa at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan (Nature Clim. Change, https://tinyurl.com/y8d6lmk7).
Famine has stalked humanity throughout history. And what has conquered famine in our age? Carbon fuels, writes Viv Forbes, along with the industrialization that brought farm equipment, efficient transportation, irrigation, natural-gas-based fertilizers, and refrigeration (https://tinyurl.com/y95ucgst). Each barrel of oil (5.8 million BTUs) contains the energy equivalent of more than a decade of one human’s labor. Each $40 barrel is worth approximately $400,000 of labor (https://tinyurl.com/ybx76duu).
A UN special climate report suggests that by the end of the century, a carbon tax the equivalent of $240 gal of gasoline might be necessary. While this is unlikely to happen, the report calls for societal changes that are “unprecedented in terms of scale” (https://tinyurl.com/ydgr57nw). That means replacing capitalism with a “radically different [authoritarian, socialist] global economy” (https://tinyurl.com/yc7fkqhx).
The intensely anticapitalist Nazis envisioned large-scale wind projects (https://tinyurl.com/y7cg2puv). Deliberately produced famine was a Soviet weapon to destroy capitalism—along with other active measures. Russian activist Yury Dmitriyev is unearthing and identifying remains in a large mass grave in Sandormokh. More than 6,000 prisoners were shot there (https://tinyurl.com/y9yop6uw).
The main health hazards of the “Green” agenda—world socialism—have been starvation and mass repression. Why would this time be different?
CLIMATE-CHANGE ‘LIPOSUCTION’
As it increasingly appears impossible to cut CO2 emissions enough to theoretically put a lid on warming, many stakeholders are ramping up work to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (https://tinyurl.com/ybne5s9h). Most would be sequestered in the ground so it could not be used to make food for living things.
Dominic Lenzi et al. call this a “three-fold folly.” (1) It might delay emissions reductions. (2) It demands an unprecedented sink, demanding control of a land area twice the size of the current natural sink (with a possible adverse effect on biodiversity, Science 5/18/18). (3) It might not scale up. As many as 16,000 plants would be needed by 2015. Currently three (3) demonstration projects exist (Nature 9/20/18). Still, some call carbon capture “key to fighting climate change, speculating that the current cost of $100/ton might be lowered to $20/ton by 2025 (Scientific American, August 2018). An American Physical Society report estimated $600/tonne. Carbon Engineering, a 9-year old company, estimates that its process could be scaled up to cost $94-$232/tonne. Its prototype plant removes one (1) tonne per day. The cost of using the process to scrub more than 8 billion tonnes per year would be trillions of dollars. But “no one said guaranteeing civilization’s survival was going to come cheap” (Economist 6/7/18, https://tinyurl.com/y9ctgrr9). One BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) plan calls for growing switchgrass (over an area the size of India), burning it, and capturing the CO2 (Science 2/16/18).
The key to implementing such climate schemes is “brute force” (Nature 4/16/18).
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