A hermit observing the world from his cave
Aside from abortion and LGBT, liberals are aggressively pushing the narrative on climate change, raising fears of climate apocalypse. Through the decades, they have predicted the demise of the planet, all predictions of which have failed to come to pass. Still they persist in their climate alarmism and hysteria.
Now climate does change. It goes up and down. It grows cold and hot. That is nature, and it is not because of man or cows. Climate change is not man-made. But the liberals are intent on a new world order that is green. And this means green energy. So there is an all-out war on fossil fuels, on agriculture, and on people’s current way of life (insects instead of steaks, anyone?). There is a mad rush on energy projects that use the sun, the wind and the seas.
That would seem good, and today there are electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines, and other clean energy products and projects. But the downside is substantial.
To establish the electric girds, transmission lines and very tall towers need to be laid across scenic lands, wildlife habitat, agricultural and residential lands, sprawling across millions of acres.
To have offshore wind turbines, thousands of monstrous 680-foot-tall offshore turbines would have to be built.
To have wide spaces for solar panels, lands will have to be cleared, including forests and habitable land. A nuclear plant takes up 1 square mile of land, while wind and solar farms will require hundreds of thousands of acres.
It would require billions of tons of copper, steel, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, lithium, concrete, rare earth, and composite plastics. It would require many mining projects, moving trillions of tons of ore and overlay, and setting up square miles of toxic waste pits all over the world. It would use up much fossil fuel energy to operate the mining equipment. And there would be toxic air and water pollution in the process.
As is already the case, but would become even more, wind turbines would kill birds, bats and other endangered species, aside from devastating wildlife habitats.
The tens of millions of windmills, solar panels and electric batteries for cars and trucks, which are not biodegradable, will be placed in energy graveyards with toxic pollutants that would be 100 times larger than any nuclear waste storage.
While wind and sunshine are free, clean, green, renewable and sustainable, harnessing this diffuse, unreliable, weather-dependent energy to power civilization is not. And it is terrible costly.
And in reality, the goal of “net-zero” economies, desired within a few decades, is unrealistic. There are not enough mines, metals and minerals on the entire planet to provide what is needed. Further, a World Bank study shows that moving toward 100% solar, wind and electric battery energy would be just as destructive to the planet as fossil fuels, as moving to a carbon-free energy future requires massive amounts of energy, not to mention the extraction of minerals and metals at great environmental and social costs.
The proponents of 100% green energy by killing off all fossil fuel energy make no sense. The world is better off just continuing to use clean-burning and reliable natural gas, as well as nuclear power, and in the process reducing energy prices and cutting carbon emissions. There is no need to destroy forests, deserts and national parks to give way to wind and solar farms.
Green energy? We will have to destroy the planet in order to save it.
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