WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE “RENEWABLE ENERGY”? ARE WE LOOKING AT THE ENTIRE LIFE CYCLE? ARE WE LOOKING AT THE SUPPLY CHAINS?
Wind power, solar power, hydro power and electric vehicles require supply chains and ecological destruction that is rarely reported.
“It’s just extraordinary to me to have people who are considered environmentalists who are arguing explicitly for the next great industrial revolution. And they're arguing for massive industrialization on unprecedented scales.”
—Derrick Jensen
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From a conversation with author Derrick Jensen.
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HART HAGAN: One thing I really like about the book (Bright Green Lies) is that you thoroughly go through the supply chains. You cannot understand solar or wind or electric cars unless you understand the supply chains. The book is a tremendous resource and very well researched.
So starting with the mining, isn’t it true that renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, etc. require a lot of mining?
DERRICK JENSEN: Oh, absolutely.
They require the mining of steel. They require the mining of copper and all the other minerals, plus rare earths.
Rare earths are types of minerals necessary for all sorts of electronics, whether it's computers or cell phones or batteries or wind turbines.
And it's incredibly destructive. And there are huge new gold rushes except they are lithium rushes.
It’s happening because of this so-called green economy. It's just extraordinary to me to have people who are considered environmentalists who are arguing explicitly for the next great industrial revolution. And they're arguing for massive industrialization on unprecedented scales.
There's this guy, Mark Jacobson, who is an engineer, who's done all sorts of studies on how to convert the entire grid to so-called renewables. And the reason I call them “so-called” renewables is … Ozzie Zehner has written a really good book called Green Illusions. He doesn't call them alternative energy. He calls them alternative oil because the oil economy is required for all of these other things, right?
We'll talk about Jevons Paradox in a minute, but Mark Jacobson has plans for how you could convert the entire economy to so-called renewables. For his windmills, for example--and I'm making up the numbers, but we show them in the book. But it’s like one and a half times the entire world's output of iron for a year just to make windmills. And he would also call for--I don't remember what it is--like a 15 times increase in the amount of hydro storage in the United States.
There's not enough rivers to do that. Never mind the harm that hydro does to a river. This is not even physically possible, right?
I don't have any problem with Mark Jacobson doing that. I find those sorts of calculations kind of fun.
At one point just for the heck of it--I know this is terrible, but we cut this out of the final book. We were discussing biomass. How many trees would have to be burned to power a certain chemical factory in Germany. Because the trees are living beings even though we don't consider them to have lives, not significant lives, we as a culture. But their lives are just valuable to them as ours are to us, as yours is to you and mine is to me.
So I calculated--instead of burning trees, we were burning human beings and how much energy it would take? How many human beings do you have to burn to keep this BASF factory running? And it was like the entire human population every year or something.
So I find those sorts of calculations interesting to do. It’s just crazy to actually try to base policy on them.
So when Mark Jacobson is saying 15 times increase in hydro, that's just nuts.
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Conclusion: To understand the full impact of so-called renewable energy, we need to look at the entire life cycle of solar panels, wind turbines, etc. The full impacts are rarely reported, and most supporters are walking around with a distorted notion of what these technologies really do to the environment.
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For the entire conversation with Derrick Jensen, please click on the YouTube video.
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