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Stephen Moore: Beware: 100% green energy could destroy the planet

June 7, 2022 | | Print Article

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Steve Moore

The untold story about “green energy” is that it can’t possibly be scaled up to provide anywhere near the energy to replace fossil fuels. (Unless we are headed back to the stone ages, which is what some of the “de-growth” advocates favor).

Right now, the United States gets about 70% of its energy from fossil fuels. To go to zero over the next 20 years would be economically catastrophic and cost tens of millions of jobs. With gas prices at nearly double their price back from when Donald Trump left office and inflation up from 1.5% to 8% in just 15 months, we are already experiencing the economic damage from the green energy crusaders.

But we also have to ask whether green energy is even good for the environment. Some environmentalists are pointing to a little-noticed study by the World Bank showing that moving toward 100% solar, wind and electric battery energy would be just as destructive to the planet as fossil fuels. This was precisely the conclusion of a story in Foreign Policy magazine, hardly a right-wing publication.

According to the Foreign Policy analysis, moving to a “carbon-free” energy future “requires massive amounts of energy, not to mention the extraction of minerals and metals at great environmental and social costs.”

Here are some of the numbers. Going all-in on batteries, solar and wind would require:

— 34 million metric tons of copper

— 40 million tons of lead

— 50 million tons of zinc

— 162 million tons of aluminum

— 4.8 billion tons of iron

Those tens of millions of windmills, solar panels and electric batteries for cars and trucks aren’t exactly biodegradable. So, we will have the most prominent energy graveyard with toxic pollutants that will be 100 times larger than any nuclear waste storage. And yet, the Left is worried about plastic straws!

I’m all for mining for America’s bountiful natural resources of copper, lead, magnesium and precious metals. But ironically, it’s the greens that want to shut down mines, which is like saying you want food, but you oppose farming. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Then, the land space is needed for the windmills and solar panels. Bloomberg reports that getting to zero carbon by 2050 would require a land area equal to five South Dakotas “to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories, and more.”

In other words, the liberals are calling for a full-scale industrialization of America’s wilderness and landscape.

Now, even many of the most liberal areas of the country are shouting “no” to green energy in their own backyard. Vermonters are rebelling against unsightly solar panels spoiling their views. According to the Bennington Banner, “Vermont’s utility regulator has rejected permits for two 2 MW solar farms proposed in Bennington, pointing to aesthetic concerns and current land conservation measures in the town plan.”

Meanwhile, a town in Wisconsin is suing state regulators to “stop construction” of what would be “the state’s largest solar project,” according to the Wisconsin Journal.

Even blue Massachusetts residents are fighting green energy projects. Off-shore wind farms are delayed off the coast of Cape Cod, where per capita income is nearly the highest in the country, because they don’t want their ocean views spoiled from their beachfront villas.

In other words, real nature lovers are finally starting to awaken to the reality that wind and solar aren’t so green after all. A nuclear plant takes up at most 1 square mile of land. Wind and solar farms require hundreds of thousands of acres. So, to provide enough electric power to keep Manhattan lit up at night would require paving over nearly the whole state of Connecticut with windmills and solar farms.

The public is starting to ask: How is any of this green? The Green New Deal strategy makes especially no sense given that by increasing our use of clean-burning and reliable natural gas, we are reducing energy prices AND cutting carbon emissions. Add nuclear power to the mix, and we wouldn’t need to start building wind and solar farms in our forests, deserts and national parks.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: “Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”

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11 thoughts on “Stephen Moore: Beware: 100% green energy could destroy the planet”

  2. We have a LOT of those wind turbines here in Iowa. At least farmers are able to plant around them You stick solar panels (all made in China now since the last plant in the U.S.-Michigan shut down), on that farmland, and you cannot farm it anymore.

    • 1923. Chicago Tribune – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” (Professor Gregory of Yale University).
    • 1970 January, Life magazine: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
    • 1974. NY Times: “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence.”
    • 1975. International Wildlife magazine: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
    • “The evidence for global cooling consensus:-Most cited is a 1975 Newsweek article The Cooling World that suggested cooling “may portend a drastic decline for food production”:Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend… But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

    2006, January. Al Gore predicted that we had ten years left before the planet turned into a “total frying pan.”

    2008. ABC News predicted that NYC would be under water by June 2015.

    2008. Al Gore predicted that within five to seven years the entire north polar ice cap would be completely melted.

    May 13, 2014. France’s foreign minister said that we only have 500 days to stop “climate chaos.”

    2009. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center head James Wassen warned that Obama only had four years left to save the earth.

    2018. A bartender from N.Y. City predicts that we will all be dead in 12 years.
    “During her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez had access to public transit – the famed No. 7 subway line was 138 feet from her Queens campaign headquarters, a one-minute walk. Yet AOC listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses.

  4. The average 5 passenger Electric Car weighs almost twice as much as a combustion engine car of the same payload.  If this holds true to other vehicles then a Tractor Trailer that normally weighs approximately 35,000 pounds empty would come in at about 70,000 pounds, empty. A fully loaded rig weighs in at about 80,000, if you add the additional battery weight that would be 115,000 pounds. Currently a fully loaded tractor-trailer weighing 80,000 pounds traveling under ideal conditions at a speed of 65 miles per hour will take 525 feet to stop (almost the length of two football fields). This of course is for perfect conditions, dry road, clear vision, all systems on the rig in perfect working condition and of course if the rig doesn’t jack-knife. Of course most truckers are union workers and since the Biden Socialist Regime spends most of its time kissing the Union’s butt they will get and exemption for going green and he rest of us will pay the price.

  5. There are places for electric cars….

    ….and those places are not every place.

  6. Just one look at building electric cars and their batteries tells you that the green energy mob is just plain stupid! And we all know, you can’t fix that, but you can elect it to office.

  7. when will they figure out that solar and windmills don’t make plastic, fertilizer and other chemical compounds.

  8. Your proposals are short-sighted, Steven. They do not provide for central control of a one world government, which screws up biblical end-time prophesies. Stay out of this. You’re a small fish in a huge pond.

  9. Exactly right. People on the left dont want anyone to really understand the cost or effect of green energy on the grid and the environment.

  10. What these greeners are doing to our lands. WOW! Go look at a solar farm. It’s disgusting and will barely provide enough energy to run about 50 to 75 homes. These panels cover acre after acre of prime land.

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