Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.”
Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.
Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.
Their Plan B is more complex: Replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, biofuel and battery power – their supposedly renewable, sustainable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal. Apparently by waving a magic wand.
We don’t have a Planet B. And they don’t really have a Plan B. They just assume and expect that this monumental transformation will simply happen.
Wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies represent the natural evolution toward previously unimaginable energy sources – and they will become more efficient over time. Trust us, they say.
Ask them for details, and their responses range from evasive to delusional, disingenuous – and outrage that you would dare ask. The truth is, they don’t have a clue.
They’ve never really thought about it. It’s never occurred to them that these technologies require raw materials that have to be dug out of the ground, which means mining, which they vigorously oppose (except by dictators in faraway countries).
They’re lawyers, lawmakers, enforcers. But most have never been in a mine, oilfield or factory, probably not even on a farm.
They think dinner comes from a grocery store, electricity from a wall socket, and they can just pass laws requiring that the new energy materialize as needed. And it will happen Presto!
It’s similar to the way they handle climate change. Their models, reports, and headlines bear little or no resemblance to the real world outside our windows – on temperatures, hurricanes, tornadoes, sea levels, crops or polar bears. But the crisis is real, the science is settled, and anyone who disagrees is a denier.
So for the moment, Let’s not challenge their climate or fossil fuel ideologies. Let’s just ask: How exactly are you going to make this happen? How will you ensure that your Plan A won’t destroy our economy, jobs and living standards? And your Plan B won’t devastate the only planet we’ve got?
I’ll say it again:
(1) Abundant, reliable, affordable, mostly fossil fuel energy is the lifeblood of our modern, prosperous, functioning, safe, healthy, fully employed America. Upend that, and you upend people’s lives, destroy their jobs, send their living standards on a downward spiral.
(2) Wind and sunshine may be renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the lands, habitats, wildlife, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, transmission lines, raw materials, mines, and laborers required or impacted to harness this intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not.
(3) The supposed cure they say we must adopt is far worse than the climate disease they claim we have.
Using wind power to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline for vehicles – while generating enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days – would require some 14 million 1.8-MW wind turbines.
Those turbines would sprawl across three-fourths of the Lower 48 US states – and require 15 billion tons of steel, concrete and other raw materials. They would wipe out eagles, hawks, bats and other species.
Go offshore instead, and we’d need a couple million truly monstrous 10-MW turbines, standing in water 20-100 feet deep or on huge platforms in deeper water, up and down our Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Not as many of the beasts, but each one a lot bigger – requiring vastly more materials per turbine.
A Category 4 hurricane going up the Atlantic seaboard would wipe out a lot of them – leaving much of the country without power for months or years, until wrecks got removed and new turbines installed.
Using solar to generate just the 3.9 billion MWh would require completely blanketing an area the size of New Jersey with sunbeam-tracking Nellis Air Force Base panels – if the Sun were shining at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365. (That doesn’t include the extra power demands listed for wind.)
Solar uses toxic chemicals during manufacturing and in the panels: lead, cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, and many others.
They could leach out into soils and waters during thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and when panels are dismantled and hauled off to landfills or recycling centers. Recycling panels and wind turbines present major challenges.
Using batteries to back up sufficient power to supply U.S. electricity needs for just seven straight windless days would require more than 1 billion half-ton Tesla-style batteries. That means still more raw materials, hazardous chemicals, and toxic metals.
Bringing electricity from those facilities, and connecting a nationwide GND grid, would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – onshore and underwater – and even rawer materials.
Providing those materials would result in the biggest expansion in mining the United States and world have ever seen: removing hundreds of billions of tons of overburden, and processing tens of billions of tons of ore – mostly using fossil fuels. Where we get those materials is also a major problem.
If we continue to ban mining under modern laws and regulations here in America, those materials will continue to be extracted in places like Inner Mongolia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, largely under Chinese control – under labor, wage, health, safety, environmental and reclamation standards that no Western nation tolerates today. There’ll be serious pollution, toxins, habitat losses and dead wildlife.
Even worse, just to mine cobalt for today’s cell phone, computer, Tesla and other battery requirements, over 40,000 Congolese children and their parents work at slave wages, risk cave-ins, and get covered constantly in toxic and radioactive mud, dust, water, and air. Many died.
The mine sites in Congo and Mongolia have become vast toxic wastelands. The ore processing facilities are just as horrific.
Meeting GND demands would multiply these horrors many times over. Will Green New Dealers require that all these metals and minerals be responsibly and sustainably sourced, at fair wages, with no child labor – as they do for T-shirts and coffee? Will they now permit exploration and mining in the USA?
Meeting basic ecological and human rights standards would send GND energy prices soaring. It would multiply cell phone, laptop, Tesla and GND cost five times over. But how long can Green New Dealers remain clueless and indifferent about these abuses?
Up to now, this has all been out of sight, out of mind, in someone else’s backyard, in some squalid far-off country, with other people and their kids doing the dirty, dangerous work of providing essential raw materials.
That lets AOC, Senator Warren, Al Gore, Michael Mann, Greenpeace, and other “climate crisis-renewable energy” profiteers preen about climate justice, sustainability and saving Planet Earth.
They refuse to discuss the bogus hockey stick temperature graph; the ways Mann & Co. manipulated and hid data, and deleted incriminating emails; their inability to separate human influences from the powerful natural forces that have caused climate changes throughout history; or the absurd notion that the 0.01% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use over the past 50 years is somehow responsible for every extreme weather event today.
But they won’t be able to ignore this fraud forever.
Meanwhile, we sure are going to be discussing the massive resource demands, ecological harm and human rights abuses that the climate alarm industry would impose in the name of protecting the Earth and stabilizing its perpetually unstable climate. We won’t let them dodge those issues in 2020.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.
Most climate alarmists believe all we have to do is scale up our current use of renewable energy. They have no idea of the information in this article and if they did they would ignore it because it doesn’t support their cause.
The world does not work by simply scaling items. If you want to make a much higher building than you have, you can’t make it like your current building, just bigger. More strength has to be built into the lower floors to support the extra weight. The same is true on scaling up the use of renewables. Once the permitted carbon dioxide emissions fall below a certain point, backup fossil fuel power plants can’t be used. Many think that batteries would fill the gap when renewables are not available. Don’t forget that Southern Australia’s fifty million dollar battery only had enough capacity to run their grid for a few minutes. It just isn’t feasible to replace the fossil fuel back up plants with batteries.
I read something, years ago, about intelligence and race. Northern cultures were rated higher. The intelligence needed to survive long winters weeded out the dolts.
Human evolution stopped generations ago, at least in western civilization. Modern medicine and capitalism have increased our life expectancy by several decades. It’s a New World with plenty of low hanging fruit to feed the dolts. Tell those dolts, through their smartphones, that our contribution to the carbon cycle is going to kill the low hanging fruit trees. They fall for it because they’ve been weakened by prosperity.
The Socialists are exploiting the young , the naive. No wonder that they want to lower the voting age.
F.U. illustrates clearly the mind-set of those who think we are in a climate emergency or just want the rest of the world to believe this nonsense. They can pose no valid argument, are afraid of the facts, and only desire to beat their opponents into submission rather than reason with them in an effort to convince. F.U. and his allies know they have no basis in fact.
FACT: it is the oceans which drive climate, not the atmosphere. Understand this point fully before you try to drive the claim of how carbon dioxide is forcing a disrupted climate.
Boxorox… You are right on.
On a smaller scale, just measure the air temperature of the air just above the water in your hot tub. It is determined by the temperature of the water in the hot tub and does NOT get hotter from any CO2 in the atmosphere. IMO.
If it is greenhouse gas that is to be blamed for the climate (it is sunspots, but nevermind that little tidbit), then water is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and as such has a much larger impact than trace CO2.
We need to regulate water in the atmosphere!!!
Hi Dave O! water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas but it must be remembered that it both warms and cools the atmosphere. This is a fact that many scientists leave out of their equations. It transfers heat efficiently and evaporation of it is a strong cooling agent. The power of water vapor in stabilizing the atmospheric temperatures is much stronger than some small amount of carbon gas added to the atmosphere can heat it. Not only that but how is carbon gas going to radiate heat in the winter months when there is no sunlight for months at a time in the polar regions to add radiation to the carbon to radiate back?
I guess Spurwing Plover has an opinion, too.
To F-You Your a total jerk stupid as the rest of you back to nature freaks your stupid asa sack full of rocks and dumber t hen a stump quit reading the NYT’s and watching CNN your a total ignoramus
Agreed, RV. If only ….
I would once like to read a quality analysis of an issue or a deconstruction of an opposing viewpoint without the insulting generalizations. rhetorical trolling, and contemptuous dismissals by the authors and by the commentators. I have only a few moments of patience with articles like this that seem to want to take shots at others instead of sticking to business. I have even less tolerance with hyper rants and angry slinging of hatred in the comment section. It becomes too much effort to dig out any quality of thought or depth of insight when wading through the mudslinging.
Private Citizen…I think we are in agreement. My sense with this author is his more “charged’ comments are more out of frustration, than anything else. In any case, when it comes to CIVILITY, I say more “cowbell” needed!
Not bad, but a bit of hyperbolic, climate-denial rhetoric and unsubstantiated generalizations and gratuitous insulting at the beginning and the end. Focus on facts and stop beating up your opposition. Here’s the game-changer:
Concentrated solar dramatically increases the thermal-to-electricity capacity of solar energy solutions and greatly reduces the required land-surface area per watt. Photovoltaics may shortly be replaced by concentrated thermal. You will have to change your assumptions and recalculate.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a29847655/heliogen-solar-heat-mirrors/
You are not a climate DENIER just because you may support the “null hypothesis” on AGW. The science is not “settled” and there is no “consensus” amongst qualified climate scientists that we are in a crisis. It’s going to take some time to transition to a CLEAN, SCALABLE & SUSTAINABLE replacement for 95% of our nations transportation fuel/industrial heat and 65% of our electricity, which fossil fuels currently provide. No matter who is propagating it, I’d suggest that ideology & ongoing “HYPE” is of little use in the energy transition discussion…
Concentrated thermal also requires large tracts of land for the energy produced. Not very conservation-minded at all.
Might as well propose and push fusion instead.
Allow me to point out that any clean energy source that is actually economically viable and competitive will have no problem establishing itself – the market economy will see to it. But so far, this is not the case. Not one alternative energy scheme currently survives without giant subsidies.
Paul Driessen is just a fat ignorant Trump supporter wasting his time trying to spread lies. He should GO FUCK HIMSELF and then EAT SHIT AND DIE.
As to the comments from F#@K YOU, can you posit one FACT or constructive position to dispute (refute) any of his claims? Those are NOT lies…he is just trying to educate folks that the energy TRANSITION and attendant environmental protection is a complex, multi-faceted challenge where there is no EASY BUTTON. I had a Catholic priest back in high school that said it best. Those who resort to “name calling” in the course of intelligent debate usually don’t have a legitimate argument. I’d submit you are the POSTER CHILD in that regard…
is this supposed to be intelligent response and argument? The use of such an approach shows only one thing: you have no intelligent response to facts. Just a “religion”, AGW. It is known in depth psychology as shadow projection, finding in the other what lies in yourself.
Typical response from the Cult alarmist if someone simply questions their fanatical religion.
This whole Alternative Energy is so rediculous and idiotic these people are living is another demention if their stupid enough to think we can do without Fossil Fuels then i suggest these nit-wits go live on a Island or in a Grass Hut without any heat to keep them warm all winter long lets see how long they could hack it