President Trump’s Executive Orders have ended U.S. participation in the Green New Deal and Paris climate treaty. He’s also terminated mandates, programs and subsidies that would have changed our reliable, affordable energy systems to wind, solar and battery power for all-electric homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, factories, farms, transportation and shipping.
His actions will benefit wild, scenic and agricultural lands in America and worldwide.
- Wind, solar and transmission line installations would have sprawled across tens of millions of acres, impacting habitats, farmlands and scenic vistas, onshore and offshore; interfered with water flow, aviation, shipping and other activities; and killed whales, birds and other wildlife.
- These “clean, green” technologies require far more raw materials than the equipment they replace: electric cars need 4-6 times more metals and minerals than gasoline counterparts; onshore wind turbines require 9 times more raw materials than equivalent megawatts from combined-cycle natural gas turbines; offshore wind requires 14 times more materials than gas turbines; solar panels are just as resource-intensive. And we’d still need gas power plants or grid-scale batteries for windless/sunless periods.
- Those raw material needs would require mining at levels unprecedented in human history. Just meeting “green energy” plus “normal” needs for copper would require more than twice as much copper mining as occurred throughout human history up to now. That would mean mine shafts and open-pit mines; ore removal, crushing and processing; and land, air and water pollution – on unprecedented scales.
- Converting those raw materials into finished technologies, and transporting, installing, maintaining and ultimately removing the turbines, panels, transformers, power lines, batteries and other equipment would require unfathomable quantities of materials, equipment and energy.
- All this mining and processing, equipment damaged and destroyed under normal operations and from extreme weather, leaching from non-recyclable components in landfills, and huge infernos when batteries ignite would send massive quantities of toxic chemicals into air, soils and water worldwide.
- U.S. mining, processing, manufacturing and waste disposal would be done under tough environmental, workplace safety and human rights standards. Not so in despotic regimes in the rest of the world.
- A large portion of the cobalt, lithium, rare earth, graphite and other exotic and strategic materials still come from China, which has monopoly control over mining and processing them. That puts U.S. and Western energy, transportation, communication, AI, defense systems and national security at great risk.
Simply put, humanity would have had to destroy the planet with green energy mining and systems, to save it from GIGO computer-modeled climate cataclysms.
Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.
Photo: James St. John via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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