Shel Evergreen, MIT science writing student, has revealed a little known secret about clean energy: Its unsustainable appetite for minerals and dirty methods of obtaining them.
Salt flats in South America’s Atacama Desert are sprinkled with small, turquoise-colored pools of lithium brine. Children in the Democratic Republic of Congo chip at the ground to find cobalt. Toxic chemicals in China leach neodymium out of the earth.
She writes that all this extraction “poses humanitarian, logistical, and environmental challenges.”
Last year, the International Energy Agency warned that to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, global mineral needs would have to rise sixfold.
It is somehow newsworthy that we cannot put minerals we don’t own into solar panels, electric cars batteries or wind turbines. It should be news — GIANT-TYPE HEADLINE News — that clean energy is associated with increased carbon emissions.
According to Javiera Barandiaran (associate professor of Global Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara), lithium mining in the Atacama desert has increased by three times over the past decade. She said, “We must continue to tell people that this is a nonrenewable resource and it will end.” “The faster we extract it, it will run out by some factor we don’t know.”
Evergreen pointed out that “renewable energies come from finite resources” without irony. This can lead to a land grab that can take people out of their livelihoods and degrade human and environmental health. These results in higher levels of poverty, a well-known correlation for areas that are rich in commodities known as the “resource curse”.
Although I was told that switching to clean energy would make everyone richer, the majority of the benefits have flowed to billionaires with high-net worth, often found in Communist China.
Whatever the problems of our planet, any clean energy solution must include nuclear power.
Evergreen and IEA admit that extracting the minerals required for solar and wind power is a dirty business. It may be even more hazardous than drilling, fracking or mining for coal.
These processes also release a lot of carbon, a postmodern boogeyman.
Clean energy can solve one problem of the Left: People who don’t like doing what they don’t approve.
That one word, quoted above, is the key to unlocking the key: “Reduce.”
Non-nuclear, “clean energy” doesn’t aim to save the Earth. How could it? Even its advocates admit how dirty it is.
Non-nuclear, “clean energy,” is not about encouraging people to use less energy. The goal of non-nuclear “clean energy” is to reduce crop yields, just like the Ukraine War, which is being used by the Biden Administration to push farmers to return to organic farming.
[Obama Administration retread Samantha] Power telling Stephanopoulos potential food shortages were a way to push farmers in the direction they want them to go is similar to their regular arguments that high gas prices should encourage drivers to switch to electric cars.
All people, except the wealthy, would see a decrease in energy production. This would mean that everyone will live a preindustrial lifestyle. It will be difficult for the hoi polloi not to complain about reducing food production.
