Solar and Wind Renewable Energy Projects are Environmentally Destructive
Tue 11:27 am +01:00, 18 Oct 2022On Sunday, Michael Shellenberger shared a Twitter thread that detailed the dark side of renewable energy projects that climate alarmists want you to ignore while they fanatically push to “save the world” from their alleged “catastrophic global warming.”
Michael Shellenberger, amongst many other things, is a leading energy expert who testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
On 15 September he was invited to testify at the United States Congress hearing on ‘Fuelling the Climate Crisis: Examining Big Oil’s Prices, Profits, and Pledges’. “All references can be found in my full [written] testimony, which draws on much of what I have published here on Substack over the last 18 months,” he wrote. Ten days later he shared an extract from his oral remarks, see the video below.
“Communities around the world are fighting back against the imposition of environmentally-destructive solar and wind projects by bankers, coastal elites, and subsidy farmers,” Shellenberger tweeted in a Twitter thread on Sunday.
Solar farms require more land than other energy sources. The low energy density of sunlight and wind is why solar and wind projects require so much land and mining, he said. Solar farms also produce more toxic waste and devastate wildlife habitats. Additionally, there is the human cost: solar panels and batteries made in China, for example, use forced labour – incarcerated Uyghur Muslims against whom genocide is being committed.
Wind turbines are a danger to birds and their blades are sent to landfills because it’s too expensive to recycle them.
Below is Shellenberger’s Twitter thread which you can also read on Thread Reader App HERE.
By Michael Shellenberger
People like the idea of solar farms in the abstract, but hundreds of communities around the world are currently fighting them because they require 300-600x more land than other energy sources, produce 300x more toxic waste, and devastate critical wildlife habitats.
Many rich nations dump used solar panels and batteries on poor African nations.
Other rich nations send used solar panels to “landfills where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium.”
By 2035 there will be 3x more used solar panels than new ones, which will make them 4x more expensive.
“The economics of solar,” wrote Harvard Business Review researchers, “would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.”
Solar farms are killing the critically threatened desert tortoises. “A team of biologists relocated 139 tortoises from their habitat to make way for the solar panels…In a span of a few weeks, 30 tortoises were killed.”
Wind turbines chop the wings off of big, endangered, slow-to-reproduce birds. “USGS scientists concluded that if anticipated growth in wind energy by 2040 occurs, increased turbine-caused deaths could cut golden eagle populations by half over 10 years.”
After wind turbines spend decades killing threatened species, their blades are sent to landfills because it’s too expensive to recycle them. (That little object in the upper right of the photo is a tractor burying the blades.)
Communities around the world are fighting back against the imposition of environmentally-destructive solar and wind projects by bankers, coastal elites, and subsidy farmers. Over 40 townships have blocked or restricted projects in Ohio alone this year.
If you would like to fight one of these hideous, environmentally-destructive projects in your own community, you can reach out to @LinowesLisa who is organizing a worldwide movement that is successfully fighting back.
We must ban all solar panels imported from China. They are being made by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims against whom genocide is being committed. They’re cheap because they’re made with slave labour. The subsidy for solar is blood money.
It’s easy to calculate the massive impact of solar and wind projects. Just draw a circle around an energy project and divide by the amount of electricity they produce. Here are calculations from around the world.
What about batteries? Also made by enslaved Muslims in China. For fundamental moral reasons, we must ban all solar panels and batteries made in China.
Rainforests are being ravaged by the toxic elements required for renewables and batteries.
Q: What about the waste from other sources of energy like nuclear? A:
Madi Hilly is the founder of the campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal. You can read her Twitter thread by clicking on the tweet above or on Thread Reader App HERE.
Hilly’s thread ends with a link to another of her Twitter threads which you can read on the Thread Reader App HERE. Embedded within this thread is a two-tweet thread by Mark Nelson which you can read on Thread Reader App HERE.
Featured image: Solar Panels Creating a Huge Waste Problem
