Renewables Aren’t Renewable

 

• Renewables Are Not Renewable

  A recent post by respected investment blogger Wolf Richter, compiling data from the Energy Information Administration, reported “renewables” generated 22.6 percent of all U.S. electricity in 2022, a record high. Proponents of renewables consider this achievement as validating their strategy. To begin with, hydropower accounted for 6.1 percent of that total. The residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors of the U.S. economy rely on direct inputs of natural gas and petroleum for 62 percent of the energy they require. At the same time, hundreds, if not thousands of gigawatt-hours of battery storage would be required. Peter Ziehan, an economist whose new book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning should be mandatory reading for anyone promoting renewables, had this to say about relying on wind and solar power, along with transmission lines and battery backup: “Such infrastructure would be on the scale and scope that humanity has not yet attempted.”

• The Resources Required for Renewable Energy

  One of the most prolific and persuasive advocates for a realistic energy strategy in the U.S. is Alex Epstein, whose latest book Fossil Future, makes a compelling case for why the benefits of using fossil fuel far outweigh the costs, including the environmental costs. Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, he produced the following chart, which ought to make plain the devastation—and complete unsustainability—of so-called renewable power. The entire U.S. cement production in 2021 was 80 million tons. This means if 50 percent of the renewables required to electrify the entire U.S. economy were via solar power, 14 million tons would be required. Have the renewables advocates thought this through?All conventional power plant alternatives, using gas, nuclear and coal, require one-tenth or less raw materials to generate an equivalent quantity of electricity. But when it comes to solar and wind power, which is distributed and intermittent, what about the transmission lines and the batteries?

• Electric Vehicles Are Not Sustainable

  When discussing the sustainability of renewables, of course, an honest analysis cannot focus exclusively on the production side. Can they use hydrogen fuel cells instead? Will they swap batteries in the middle of a shift? But they are expensive and they squander resources. If we’re truly serious about a green transition that will electrify everything, our consumption of all these materials and more must increase by more than an order of magnitude.”Not just the environmental, but the human impact of replacing hundreds of millions of conventional automobiles with EVs is outlined in a scathing new book by Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Environmental regulations are nonexistent.

• Current responses to the climate change “crisis” are not serving the interests of people or the environment. For this reason, the money being directed to retooling the entire energy sector to adopt “renewables” should be redirected to research and commercialize breakthrough technologies. Advanced hybrids that might utilize onboard generators, natural gas internal combustion engines, and smaller batteries, could deliver much higher fuel efficiency. Only with practical infrastructure development will the cost-of-living descend to the point where people in prosperous nations will again choose to start families. Solar farms consume vast amounts of open land—where, paradoxically, environmentalists prohibit anyone from building to increase the supply of homes—and they will consume more steel and copper than the world can possibly supply. Critics of the renewables mania correctly identify climate crisis passions as a new popular religion for a post-modern culture that has lost its way.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/07/renewables-arent-renewable/