Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got
Paul Driessen
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 presents 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 more raw 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, toxics, 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 die. 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 costs 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.
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Does the Green Leap Forward include methods to make nitrogen fertilizer, portland cement, or to smelt metals without fossil fuels?
Planet B is where liberals come from.
Well done. They must come from somewhere far, far away, with vastly different notions of sanity and facts and logic.
(I was going to say the same thing, but checked upthread first–what a concept! Scooped by the best.)
The Climate Lysenkoists will keep the hoax going for as long as possible. Many millions of people depend on the perpetuation of the hoax, just like the many who depend on government handouts to pay for their housing, food, education, mobile phones, etc. In their minds, the hoax is too big to fail.
The most brilliant such short, decisive explanation I have seen. Congratulations!
As a Registered Professional Chemical Engineer (Florida ), I have had to evaluate energy costs and practicality on a regular basis.
My evaluation of Renewable Energy is Hydro -> Bad (dams destroy fish populations needed by poor people to survive) Fish ladders?…..
Hydrothermal OK but often expensive. Wind? Usually silly w/o better pumped storage availability. Solar –> Give me a break. Only valid where sun shines, which is also where most of the Crude is from, otherwise only valid away from a Good Grid.
Hydrogen…Dream On.
*************************
However, as long term readers will recall, I have pointed out that the Electric Sun model claims that LENR is proven by the theory that Solar energy is mostly from nuclear fusion occurring in the plasmic corona of the sun, not under extreme pressures in the center of the sun.
Numerous efforts are currently underway to see if the stripping of electrons from elements in a plasma might result in some form of transmutation. I follow https://e-catworld.com/2019/11/24/statement-of-andrea-rossi-we-did-it-obtained-permanent-self-sustaining-mode/ and discount negative thoughts about A. Rossi being a great fraud. I think of him as Nicola Tesla …in a great competition with Edison and Westinghouse.
Hydrogen (minus electron) plus Lithium7 (minus electrons) —> truly renewable energy. An the heck with CO2
Excellent explanation of why renewable energy is a myth.
My greatest concern is that a point will be reached when we have destroyed to many fossil powers plants before they realize the harm they have done and that there is not enough time or power to recover.
Producing enough electricity to take care of existing power requirement is bad enough, but having enough power to produce the solar panels, wind mills and batteries to produce the power we need is not taken into account. If you do take that required power into account, you reach an impossibility because “renewable” power has a negative coefficient: it generate less power than needed to be manufactured… discussion over.
Besides the huge amount of resources and enormous footprint required for solar and wind, proponents ignore the costs of toxic material disposal and decommissioning associated with those technologies. Worse yet is the elephant in the room–grid stability and the generation of reactive power. Too high of a fraction of unreliable energy sources on a grid will bring it down, the consequences of which could be more devastating than those of a major war, let alone the laughable dire predictions of the global warming alarmists. Of course, the reliability issue could be softened by enormous amounts of battery backup, but such a strategy simply amplifies the cost, resource availability and toxic material disposal issues.
The only real options are fossil and nuclear fission, the cost of the latter being many times what it could be due its absurd over-regulation.
Perhaps another paragraph close to the end, saying that by the time we have constructed the necessary wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, we can immediately start over, because the life expectancy of wind turbines is x; solar panels, y; and batteries, z.
That brings up a question I have not been able to find an answer for: what is the shelf-life of an EV’s battery? Everything seems geared to total possible miles you can put on a battery, but that doesn’t help me. Time would kill my battery, not miles. I don’t drive that much. I know lithium batteries have a shelf-life, so there’s an answer out there, somewhere.
And please don’t tell me what the warranties are. Battery guarantees are worthless. My experience is that manufacturers will give, say, a four-year warranty on a three-year battery, then pro-rate a discount on a new one when it goes bad – a 25% discount on the full retail price if a new battery, which is commonly found on sale at that price. They are simply selling three year batteries at the full, retail price of a three year battery.
Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got
That’s a feature not bug for the Malthusian left. Their plan A is their Plan B (IE the “morning after” pill) – aborting/ending most human life on planet A.
A great article, which needs to be more widely disseminated, especially to the politicians pushing the nonsense of the Green New Deal, whose true cost is probably even higher than the already astronomical costs the proponents quote.
The advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has shown oil and natural gas to be more abundant than previously thought, so they should be available for decades into the future. Still, they could eventually become scarce, so there should be some effort devoted to developing nuclear power, using the best available technology, which has been largely neglected over the past 35 years after the Chernobyl incident and various scare campaigns have led to the shutdown of too many nuclear plants.
The article only dealt with electric power, which can be generated using natural gas, coal, nuclear fission, and some renewables (with hydroelectric being the most efficient). But there are also the energy needs for transportation (not only passenger cars, but also delivery of products to market by rail and trucks), which generally require the use of fossil fuels. The promoters of electric vehicles want us to believe that all transportation could use electric vehicles, but how much would a battery weigh which could replace the diesel engine of an 18-wheeler, or even larger trucks which can haul two or three semi trailers? Locomotives of freight trains are even more powerful and consume more fuel. They could eventually be replaced by electric engines, but this would require stringing high-tension wires over all the freight rail lines in the nation–has anyone calculated the cost of that?
The proponents of the Green New Deal also claim that failure to reduce CO2 emissions would lead to catastrophe, but where is the proof of that? It might be easy to scare a 16-year-old like Greta Thunberg into thinking the world will end in 12 years, but for older people who have seen the same old weather cycles for 40 years or more with no change in the frequency of droughts, floods, or catastrophic storms, what is the great problem that needs such a drastic “solution”? And with that extra CO2 in the air, that may have contributed to the increased food production all over the world due to faster plant growth, do we really want to spend trillions of dollars to possibly REDUCE food production and increase hunger?
In case this isn’t generally known, entities like LaRouchPAC (continuing Lyndon LaRouche’s work) traced the whole evil carbon thing historically back to influential early twentieth century British ‘thinkers’ Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russel, etc who basically considered the world had too many ‘lesser races’ and needed to find a way of getting rid of them.
They trace the development of this arrogant notion through to the establishment of the World Worldlife Fund, on to the UN and, through eminent shill scientists, broadcast it to the world – even admitting that they were lying.
Nasty people. It makes me feel ashamed to be British.
Sommer.
OMG What absolute nonsense. I’ve sent half a dozen emails each to the CBC and CTV politely asking them to balance articles like this with a few from people with expressing opposing views to be published.
At least CBC sends out auto-replies. Nothing from CTV. I am going to send Ms. Nicole Mortillaro a link to Paul’s post.
Where is Griff or one of the other climate alarmist disciples when you need them to come and comment on the detail?
Anyway what is so difficult about making and commissioning a new nuclear plant every day for the next 11,000 days? The UK’s share is just one every six weeks, now we normally manage one every ten years when we really try to push things along these days so increasing our rate of production by just 9000% should be easy in the GND world we are about to enter.
Being serious for a moment, you do realise the reason the Greens won’t ever allow new nuclear energy plants on line, is because once they are on line, it closes off the available capacity for wind and solar to feed into.
Now can never be allowed.
And that explains why California is forcing nuclear plants into early retirement.
The left doesn’t care about the planet or the environment, only about power! It’s all about wealth and power redistribution — global socialism and communism. And who will be the great dictator? The biggest liar!
Who appoints the dim wits and imbeciles to the long range planning committee ??
Lurking in every Liberal brain is the notion that there is an endless supply of money to fund their ignorance-based energy concepts.
Presently the United States consumes 122 Quadrillion Btus [that is 122 with 15 zeros or 122,000,000,000,000,000 Btu] of energy per year. 110 of that is Fossil or not designated as renewable, e.g. Nuclear. Of the 10 Quadrillion obtained from “Renewable” only 1/3 comes from Wind/Solar. Also, about 1/3 of the so called renewable, e.g. biomass, ethanol, etc, emits CO2. Therefore to have Zero Carbon energy requires more than 30 times the present number of solar panels and wind turbines. This will NOT provide us with 60/60/24/7/365 [that’s 60 seconds/60 minutes/ 24 hrs/7 days a week/365 days a year] of electricity. thus we will need to have sufficient storage to provide about a week anywhere in the 50 states. That means you will need to almost double that number again so that you have power to charge the batteries, pump the pumped storage, etc.
That means we need about 1,830 Quadrillion 2-MW Wind turbines and an equivalent capacity in Solar panels. 1,830 Quadrillion is 1.83 Quintillion or 1.83 Billion Billion.
Please explain to me how we can build 1.83 Billion Billion Wind Turbines AND a Billion Billion solar farms. Then the needed storage facilities. Note: The surface area of the southern facing roofs of private owned homes is not sufficient to meet this need.
I just wrote an article about these unrealistic ideas about resetting societies to pre-industrial levels, when it comes to CO2 emissions:
“If the United States, which is one of the largest emitters in the world (100 times more than Sweden approximately), right now would cut emissions to zero, then the world’s carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by around 14 percent but be the same again in just over eight years.
Mostly, I try to avoid the word emissions (additions are better) because you associate with air pollution. Carbon dioxide is not in the usual sense a pollution or a poison; carbon dioxide is a gas absolutely necessary for life on earth and we all breathe it out (almost 400 kg per person per year).
Getting the whole world to cut its carbon dioxide additions, perhaps not to zero but to what is usually called pre-industrial levels, is simply utopic. The result would be that our modern life would completely cease.”
See “The climate issue summarized in two points”:
https://slowfox.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/the-climate-issue-summarized-in-two-points/
or
https://wp.me/pb64C-IG
What is the root cause of this whole issue? I did not read all of the comments posted however I did read a lot and not one touched on the real problem. The real problem is human beings. That’s right we are re-creating at an alarming rate and that is what must be slowed. It doesn’t matter how. We can run into the sea like lemmings or let disease, war, and forced birth control take place to reduce populations around the world. Our choice is fast becoming the real crisis as the world can only support so many humans based on its size and needs. This is real science much the same as global warming is based on a NASA model.
According to the UN, just as reliable and skilled in this sort of thing than the NASA Model, projects(nobody predicts) about 10billion people on earth come 2100. By that time economies will have grown that the bottom tier, those that meet the UN definition of poverty will be in the 100’s of millions, not the 1 billion now without electricity, reliable heat and cooking, and a protective, functional house.
According to available population statistics the growth curve for human population has passed the inflection point in the population growth chart. The population is increasing slower and will likely gradually slow to below the 2.13 kids per woman to replace the population. Then population will decrease to a sustainable 9 billion.
These models are not computer models, but models based on a growth function that has produced very accurate at predicting how population grows, relative to the environment, on everything from bacteria to island populations of birds and other animals.
So rest easy. If we don’t waste money on computer modeled climate projections and just keep on growing our science, technology, markets, and governments there will be many happy, economically satisfied people enjoying the lives they want to live. The only unhappy ones will be the parasites that live off of other people’s misery and their own power.
Never saw an article about the life expectancy of each wind turbine, which is expected to be around 25-30 years (off-shore wind turbines have a shorter life). After this time each one has to be 100% replaced.
This numbers totally change the sustentability of renewables.
It would be interesting to have this discussion 🙂
It really is interesting to see how some comments still seem to be «barking up the wrong tree» of Socialism. The «founding fathers» of modern (scientific…) Socialism (Karl Marx amd Friedrich Engels) would nowadays be labbeled as «deniers» and «scepicts»… As a matter of fact, in his book «The Dialectics of Nature», Engels speaks (in almost Faustian terms) of a very, very, long term of «global cooling»… And they would both be probably very, very active, against this neomalthusian movement of AGW hoax.
Mark’s point about over population is at the root of all this drive to frighten people onto thinking we’re a nasty virus and should leave the planet.
And I believe it is an intentionally manufactured attitude by those superior members of our race – in the tradition of the British Empire…. divide & rule – reduce the competition from emerging ‘lesser’ races.
But that was a very useful counter post by Philo which I shall copy and keep as ammunition for any serious debate about the population ‘crisis’.
By the way, I don’t mean to diminish what Mark has written. It’s the logical view which would be expected from any intelligent person…. and difficult to counter.
Incidentally, to bring up Lyndon Larouche again, he saw the world hosting a larger population as a necessary prerequisite for a more innovative and creative population, where resources of genius are pooled in a family of nations. High thinking, albeit high expectations.
Thank you soo much, Dr. Driessen. I was starting to feel guilty about driving my monster truck on weekends and my Mustang convertible down the block to Sev, not to mention my snowmobile and jet ski according to the season. I was never really convinced there was any problem with conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels especially when we can send our military anywhere in the world at the drop of a dime to make sure we have enough juice. Hooray for a ” … healthy, fully employed America”!
My only critique is the bit about the Congolese children. C’mon Doc, since when do we need to worry about the children? Anywhere?