Acknowledging the need to combat climate change is one thing. But we should take a critical look at many of the tools being utilized in this fight.
A report from the Manhattan Institute, Green Energy Reality Check: It’s Not as Clean as You Think, uncovers the dirty truth and the hidden environmental costs of our clean energy technologies.
Seeking alternatives to oil and gas, green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Indeed, here in Canada the federal Liberals recently announced that by 2035, all new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the country will be zero-emission vehicles.
But left out of the discussion, writes Mark P. Mills, is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy. Fabricating green energy machinery requires continual mining and processing of materials extracted from the earth.
“Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.”
This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy (currently less than 4 percent of America’s total consumption versus 56 percent from oil and gas) will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals. This will in turn radically exacerbate existing environmental and labour challenges in emerging markets where many mines are located.
There’s also the monumental waste, Mills points out:
“By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels — much of it nonrecyclable — will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.”
