#Renewables are just adding to the fire

What politicians, economists, and academic book publishers would like us to believe is that the world is full of limitless possibilities. World population can continue to rise. World leaders are in charge. Our big problem, if we believe today’s models, is that humans are consuming fossil fuel at too high a rate. If we cannot quickly transition to a low carbon economy, perhaps based on wind, solar and hydroelectric, the climate will change uncontrollably. The problem will then be all our fault. The story, supposedly based on scientific models, has almost become a new religion.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/12/17/scientific-models-and-myths-what-is-the-difference/ 

Study shows dams not worth the cost

A brisk building boom of hydropower mega-dams is underway from China to Brazil. Whether benefits of new dams will outweigh costs remains unresolved despite contentious debates. We investigate this question with the “outside view” or “reference class forecasting” based on literature on decision-making under uncertainty in psychology. We find overwhelming evidence that budgets are systematically biased below actual costs of large hydropower dams — excluding inflation, substantial debt servicing, environmental, and social costs. Using the largest and most reliable reference data of its kind and multilevel statistical techniques applied to large dams for the first time, we were successful in fitting parsimonious models to predict cost and schedule overruns. The outside view suggests that in most countries large hydropower dams will be too costly in absolute terms and take too long to build to deliver a positive risk-adjusted return unless suitable risk management measures outlined in this paper can be affordably provided. Policymakers, particularly in developing countries, are advised to prefer agile energy alternatives that can be built over shorter time horizons to energy megaprojects.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2406852 

Solar panels an ecological nightmare

Total e-waste—including computers, televisions, and mobile phones—is around 45 million metric tons annually. 

...By comparison, PV-waste in 2050 will be twice that figure.

...At the same time, demand for everything from sand to rare and precious metals continues to rise. While supplying only about 1 percent of global electricity, photovoltaics already relies on 40 percent of the global tellurium supply, 15 percent of the silver supply, a large portion of semiconductor quality quartz supply, and smaller but important segments of the indium, zinc, tin, and gallium supplies. Closing the loop on these metals and embracing circular economy concepts will be critical to the industry’s future.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-downside-of-solar-energy/? 

Wind turbines are neither clean nor green, and they provide zero global energy

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/

Electric cars will help destroy the oceans

The future of electric cars may depend on mining critically important metals on the ocean floor.
That's the view of the engineer leading a major European investigation into new sources of key elements.
Demand is soaring for the metal cobalt - an essential ingredient in batteries and abundant in rocks on the seabed.
Laurens de Jonge, who's running the EU project, says the transition to electric cars means "we need those resources".

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49759626

High cost of recycling wind turbines

While the turbines' steel and concrete can be disposed of without greater problems, the UBA found that the rotor blades will pose particular problems as the materials they are made of are difficult to separate properly. By 2024, about 70,000 tonnes of old blades could pile up annually in Germany alone. Moreover, the reserves set aside by operators could fall short of covering the financial needs by hundreds of millions of euros by 2038, which is why the UBA recommends reviewing the reserves' calculation base and have them reviewed by independent experts on a regular basis.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/mass-dismantling-old-wind-turbines-could-overburden-germanys-recycling-capacities? 

EROEI -- looking at the true energy cost of using #renewables

If there is any plan to cease using fossil fuels, all of these backup electricity providers, including nuclear, will disappear. (Nuclear also depends on fossil fuels.) Renewables will need to stand on their own. This is when the intermittency problem will become overwhelming. Fossil fuels can be stored relatively inexpensively; electricity storage costs are huge. They include both the cost of the storage system and the loss of energy that takes place when storage is used.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/10/24/how-renewable-energy-models-can-produce-misleading-indications/ 

Exploited lithium miners fighting back

Indigenous communities of the Council of Atacama Peoples block world's no.2 producer of lithium SQM in #Chile. Ending extractivism in IPs' territories means fighting for free public transport & active travel for all rather than electric cars for the few. https://t.co/LBZQJzz2xJ

— Tom Younger (@tomayounger) October 27, 2019

Renewable energy depends heavily on rare elements

To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.

https://communemag.com/between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal/ 

Norwegian study shows "sustainable forest management" is not working

While SFM has been increasingly integrated into legal frameworks, it seems to remain poorly applied in practice, and most commercial logging remain stuck into the paradigm of “sustainable income”, instead of progressing towards “sustainable provision of goods and services”. Poor forest-related law enforcement in producer countries and low prices of wood or carbon credits are creating uncertainties among stakeholders, who generally prefer fast return on investment.

https://redd-monitor.org/2018/01/30/norwegian-funded-study-exposes-the-myth-of-sustainable-forest-management/ 

Solutions that don't work: Nuclear Energy

In the 10 years since I suggested that the opportunity for a nuclear energy-based economy had come and gone, the circumstances for the industry have only gotten worse—worse than even I foresaw back then. It's hard now to believe that the United States government predicted back in 1962 that half of all electricity in the country would be produced by nuclear reactors by the year 2000 and that all new power plants after that would be nuclear. Today, the percentage of electricity generated by nuclear power in the United States stands at about 20 percent, a percentage that has remained nearly steady since the early 1990s.

And so, an energy source that was once imagined to be the long-term replacement for fossil fuels is now in the equivalent of an old-age home. What is more disturbing is that the other candidates for replacing fossil fuels—renewables, which the BP Statistical Review of World Energy defines as wind, geothermal, solar, biomass and waste—still only provide energy for 3.6 percent of total world consumption.

http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2019/06/alarm-bell-on-decline-of-nuclear-power.html 

Changing to #renewables means more plunder of scarce resources

Take cobalt. Each electric vehicle needs between five to ten kilograms of the bluish-white metal for its lithium-ion batteries. The authors consider cobalt a “metal of most concern for supply risks,” because nearly 60 percent of its production takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a dismal record of child labor and human rights abuses. Should the world’s transportation and electricity sectors ever switch to running entirely on renewables, demand for the metal would soar to more than four times the amount available in reserves, according to the researchers.

https://grist.org/article/report-going-100-renewable-power-means-a-lot-of-dirty-mining/? 

Wood pellets, environmental and economic disaster

• Debunking the “green” myth behind wood pellets
• Current status and expected growth of the industry
• The industrial effects of sourcing, producing, transporting and burning wood pellets on the environment and health
• A case study of North Carolina and Enviva, the largest industrial scale producer of wood pellets in the US
• Environmental justice implications of the industry
• Political and economic drivers of the industry
• How you can take action through political engagement and important NGOs working on the issue

https://rachelcarsoncouncil.org/clear-cut/

Carbon capture does not work, and is a harmful distraction

...due to a fundamental error in it’s representation of the carbon cycle, BECCS could never work, but also why such ‘sci fi’ climate solutions are so prevalent and so dangerous. Even if these kind of solutions have no realistic possibility of being viable, they allow politicians and businesses to give the impression that they are committed to reducing emissions and have strategies to do so. Thus, like the walking dead, new publicly subsidised demonstration projects continue to pop up as others die off.

https://corporatewatch.org/the-zombie-technofix/ 

Nuclear energy may not even be carbon neutral

Greenhouse gases are emitted in all stages of the lifecycle of a nuclear reactor: construction, operation, fuel production, dismantling and waste disposal. Leaving out any of these five stages will bias estimates towards lower values.
The last two contributions, dismantling and waste disposal are particularly difficult to estimate. Not many commercial reactors have been fully decommissioned. Also there is still no scientific or political consensus on the approach to be used for the long-term storage of waste.
The fuel preparation contribution is also problematic. Considerable amounts of carbon are released in the mining, milling and separation of the uranium from the ore. Also the carbon emitted is very dependent on the concentration of uranium in the ore.
It's important to appreciate that these three problematic contributions, fuel production, dismantling and waste disposal are either non-existent or small contributions in the case of electricity generation by renewable technologies. Estimates of the carbon footprint of renewably generated electricity therefore should be much more reliable than those for nuclear.

https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon