Remember President Obama’s “Clean Power Plan”? It aimed to reduce global warming (aka climate change) by cutting American emissions of carbon dioxide from electricity generation. It never got very far, and the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) killed it.

But now President Biden has his own version. He announced his “Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard” in March. The Washington Post reported it would “turbocharge the country’s transition from fossil fuels, using the muscle and vast resources of the federal government to intervene in electricity markets, speed the growth of solar and wind energy, and foster technological breakthroughs in clean power.”

This, supposedly, will spare us from what Biden calls the “existential threat” of climate change.

Don’t bet on it. Back in January, Biden’s own “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate,” former Sen. John Kerry, said, “We could go to zero [carbon dioxide emissions] tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved.” In late April he said the same—only more so: “If China went to zero tomorrow with the United States, we’d still have a problem.”

Leave aside for now whether climate change is an existential threat. Let’s just answer this question: Is the “clean energy” Biden’s plan promotes really clean? Is it better for people and the environment than the energy it’s to replace?

To answer that, we need first to define what’s meant by “clean” in this discussion, and then we need to ask how well “green energy” meets that definition.

“Clean energy” used to mean energy the production of which didn’t fill our air and water with toxic fumes, toxic liquids, and soot. From the late-19^th through the mid-20^th centuries, such emissions, mainly from coal-fired power plants, were a serious problem—though the harm they did to Americans’ health was more than compensated for by the benefits that energy brought to the rest of our economy, as proved by our steady increase in life expectancy.

Since then, better processes have reduced those emissions to the point where they pose little risk to our health. You wouldn’t guess it from media reports on American air quality, but it’s been improving for over fifty years.

Thirty years ago I was able to write, in my book Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future:

“From 1976 to 1986 average carbon monoxide levels at monitoring stations fell 36 percent; ozone levels, 20 percent; sulfur dioxide levels, 40 percent; total suspended particulates levels, 24 percent; nitrogen dioxide levels, 11 percent; and lead levels, 80 percent.”

Those trends have continued. The EPA reported last year, “Between 1970 and 2019, the combined emissions of criteria and precursor pollutants dropped by 77%, while the U.S. economy grew 285%.”

Now, Biden’s plan focuses primarily not on such traditionally understood pollutants but on carbon dioxide because, supposedly, it’s causing catastrophic global warming. Energy sources that supposedly curb that are “clean.” Those that don’t, aren’t.

This means treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. But it isn’t. It’s an odorless, colorless gas, nontoxic at over 20 times its concentration in Earth’s atmosphere, and essential to photosynthesis and consequently to all life.

Nonetheless, Biden wants to call energy sources that put less carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere “clean.” For all practical purposes, those come down to wind turbines and solar panels. So, how “clean” are those—by the old definition or the new? And will they really make a significant difference in global warming?

No. Why?

The first reason is simple. Remember what Kerry said: you could eliminate all American and Chinese CO2 emissions tomorrow and not solve the problem. Substituting wind and solar for fossil fuels as energy sources in America wouldn’t eliminate all our emissions.
So it won’t solve the problem.

But we shouldn’t stop there. Manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels requires vast amounts of mining, moving, and processing of minerals, and then fabricating them into end products—and almost all of that has to be done with energy from fossil fuels.

In Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check, Mark P. Mills explained why wind and solar simply aren’t so “green” or “clean” as their advocates think.

Why? There are several reasons.

First, producing wind turbines and solar arrays, and the batteries needed to store electricity from them for use in electric vehicles or when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, requires mining, moving, and refining vast amounts of earth—far more than required to obtain the same amount of energy from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Mills shows that

“Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons [fossil fuels] to deliver the same amount of energy to society. … a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials.”

That’s 5 pounds of earth for every mile the car will go in its lifetime—about 25 times as much as required for an internal combustion engine.

He also points out that “Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.”

In addition, most of the equipment needed—the enormous excavators, trucks, and other giant machines—must run on diesel, made from oil. They’re simply too big and heavy to be powered efficiently by batteries.

Second, the vast majority of the rare-earth minerals used in wind turbines and solar panels are mined and refined in two countries: China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, women and children working in slave-labor conditions are exposed to deadly hazards, and the processes result in major emissions of toxic chemicals that harm both the environment and surrounding populations.

Combined with that, as Robert A. Hefner V of Hefner.Energy explains, is the national security risk of making the United States dependent on Communist China for increasing amounts of its energy. How?

1. Five of the world’s top-10 wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese-owned or operated.
2. Nine of the world’s top-10 solar panel manufacturers are Chinese-owned or operated.
3. More than two-thirds of the world’s solar panels and one-half of wind turbines are produced in China.
4. In 1954, the United States was 100% dependent on imports for eight minerals listed in the Strategic Minerals Act of 1939; today, the United States is 100% reliant for 17 strategic minerals and depends on imports for over 50% of 28 widely used minerals. China is a significant source for half of those 28 minerals.
5. China is responsible for 37% of passenger electric vehicles and 99% of e-buses sold globally since 2011.
6. China controls 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt supply chain.

Third, there is the disposal problem. Spent wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries wind up as enormous quantities of non-recyclable waste, much of it toxic. “By 2050,” writes Mills, “… the quantity of worn-out solar panels … 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.”

There is another problem with wind and solar energy. Because they start with comparatively low-density sources (fossil fuels contain hundreds of times more energy by volume than wind and sunlight) and are intermittent (requiring backup by fossil fuel or nuclear when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine), they increase the cost of energy. Since we need energy for everything we use, this raises the cost of living for everyone, harming the poor most of all. When Germany pursued an intensive policy of replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar to generate its electricity, its electricity costs more than doubled. Its experience is typical.

That’s bad enough by itself, but it’s not our focus. Our focus is on whether “green energy” is “clean energy.” But this economic effect has implications for that.

How? A clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good. Wealthier people can afford more costly goods than poorer people. When we increase energy prices, we slow, stop, or reverse the climb out of poverty for the 2 billion or more people in the world still suffering it. We also restrict how much people in already developed countries can afford to spend on things other than energy. Together, these mean we make environmental cleanliness less affordable—and consequently less common.

One last problem with wind and solar as major energy sources? You can’t make liquid transport fuels from them. You can only make electricity. To replace all the electricity we now get from fossil fuels, we’d need to cover all of the United States east of the Mississippi River with wind turbines. If we were to convert our vehicles with electric vehicles, we’d need so much more electricity that wind turbines would have to cover all the rest of the land from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. The situation is similar for solar. That would be environmentally—as well as economically—devastating. In short, wind and solar aren’t “green” (good for the environment) or “clean” (effective to curb global warming—as if that really needed to be done—or reduce traditional pollutants).

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash.