… clean nor renewable, that is.

That fact came through loud and clear in an article last August by energy expert Mark Mills and co-author Alexander Ackley in The International Chronicles titled “The Destructive Myth of Green Energy: If You Want ‘Renewable Energy’ Get Ready to Destroy the Environment.”

Here are a few facts that Mills and Ackley explain and prove in detail:

1. While wind and sunlight renew themselves, we can only derive usable energy from them by using materials that don’t. That means wind and solar aren’t really renewable. “Old equipment must be decommissioned, generating millions of tons of waste.” E.g., meeting the Paris climate agreement’s goals for solar to 2050 would “result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste.”
2. But then of course the energy generated via those panels has to be applied in end users. In electric cars, that means through batteries weighing “about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle miles over the battery’s seven-year life” (after which it must be disposed of, with major toxic waste implications).
3. Generating electricity from wind and solar “requires far more materials and land than fossil fuels. … A wind or solar farm stretching to the horizon can be replaced by a handful of gas-fired turbines, each no bigger than a tractor-trailer.”
4. “900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic” go into a single wind turbine and “solar power requires even more cement, steel and glass.” Oh, and by the way, making the cement and steel emits lots of carbon dioxide—though wind and solar are justified by claiming they’ll reduce emissions.
5. It would take “32,850 wind turbines to replace the Cubic Mile of Oil consumed globally every year,” and at least “1,642,000 turbines to replace oil over the next 50 years.” And to make up for all the time the wind’s not blowing, those figures likely need to be tripled, and we’d have to add “massive energy storage batteries” that have their own environmental problems from mining to construction to disposal.
6. Wind turbines and solar panels require vast amounts of “rare-earth” minerals—not really rare on a global scale, but rarely mined in developed countries. Meeting Paris agreement goals would raise demand for them by 300–1,000% by 2050, while “demand for cobalt and lithium will rise more than 20-fold” to replace conventional cars with electric.
7. Most of those “rare-earth” minerals will be mined “in nations with oppressive labor practices” like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and China, where children and women work long and backbreaking hours in hideous conditions exposed to toxic chemicals.

Get more details by reading the full article. And let your elected representatives know you don’t want your views obscured and your land poisoned by “clean, renewable energy” that’s neither clean nor renewable.

Photo by Angie Warren on Unsplash.