WHEN A SOLAR INSTALLATION IS ANYTHING BUT CLEAN, GREEN OR RENEWABLE
The Dark Side of Solar Power ... The environmental movement needs to rethink everything.
From a conversation with Max Wilbert of “Deep Green Resistance” and “Protect Thacker Pass.”
Max Wilbert is also co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What We Can Do About It
For the full conversation, please click on the link.
HART HAGAN: The trailer of the film Bright Green Lies shows you giving a tour of a solar installation and the trailer ends with you saying, “This crap ain't green!” What were you talking about? What is not green about that solar installation?
MAX WILBERT: I just happened to drive by a solar facility out in eastern Oregon, and decided to pull over. I had my camera with me. And nobody was around, so I decided to climb the fence, go inside and look around.
What I noticed immediately is that outside the fence, you have healthy western juniper forest. These are probably 100 to 200 year old trees, pretty old. You have a layer, closer to the soil, of shrubs and herbaceous plants. You have a lot of animal tracks that you could see in that area running around through the juniper and the sagebrush.
So, even though it was next to a road and next to an industrial solar facility, you have an ecosystem, you have a natural community, you have beings living and reproducing and storing carbon, filtering water and releasing oxygen into the air.
As soon as I climbed the fence and went inside, there was not a single plant. There actually was a little bit of invasive grass, just just a few stray stocks of invasive grass. Other than that, there's not a single plant. There's not a single track of an animal because it's hurricane fencing. They built it deliberately so that no creatures can get through it. I grew up rock climbing, but it was a pretty challenging climb for me to get over the fence.
So that habitat is completely cut off. And not only that, it's been destroyed. They cut down all the trees who live there. They ripped out the stumps, they bulldozed all the plants, bulldozed all the boroughs of the animals, and they replaced that with solar panels.
So what are solar panels? A lot of us don't really think about it. We see the finished product, and we just think that's a solar panel.
HART HAGAN: We don't see how the sausage is made.
MAX WILBERT: Right. There are these massive steel frames that the solar panels are mounted on. They stretch on for hundreds of yards in each direction. There's cables leading from inverters and eventually to the power substation to the electric grid. There's all these cables running in. They connect to the bottom of these solar panels.
The panels themselves are bolted onto these movable steel platforms, so they can adjust to the angle of the sun. The panels themselves are made up of things like high quality metallurgical silicon, also used in computer chips. They're made up of things like cadmium, lead, tin, plastics.
They have high-quality glass materials that they use on the front of the solar panel. All of these things have impacts. All of these things have industrial supply chains associated with them.
If you live in the city like the nearest town to that particular solar panel, Bend, Oregon, there's no mining in Bend, Oregon. There's no aluminum mine. There's no steel mine. There is no metallurgical grade silicon mine. Those things are happening far away. So, if you live there, you're not paying the price. You're only reaping the benefit, you're getting the energy from these solar panels.
But for the wild beings whose lives are being destroyed, whose habitat is being destroyed, and for the human communities who are being impacted by the mining, the action, the pollution, the displacement and the human rights violations that are associated with mining and other forms of extraction around the world, you pay the price and you probably don't [00:13:06] see the benefit.
This is something that we see again and again throughout industrial supply chains, whether you're talking about sweatshop labor in the production of clothing or you're talking about slavery in the Congo in central Africa where cobalt is mined that, goes into the battery of every smartphone, every laptop, every electric vehicle.
So again, this type of destruction--ecocide--is found not only at the point of production of these raw materials, it's found throughout the supply chain of these industrial processes and it's a real problem for the planet. It's implicated in the sixth mass extinction event that we're facing right now. It's implicated in global warming. And the problem is not getting any better because we have solar panels now. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
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For the entire conversation with Max Wilbert, please click on the link.
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