[D66] The Myths of Renewable Energy
R.O.
jugg at ziggo.nl
Fri Aug 14 06:48:38 CEST 2020
https://derrickjensen.org/2016/12/myths-of-renewable-energy/
The Myths of Renewable Energy
December 12th, 2016
_This culture will not act to stop or significantly slow global warming.
This culture will sacrifice—read kill—the planet rather than question
the socioeconomic system that is killing our only home._
How do we know that? Well, here are a few good reasons.
Let’s start with Donald Trump. No, even though the president-elect of
the United States thinks climate change is a hoax, he and his hot
air—and what we can presume will be his policies—are not by themselves
sufficient to kill the planet.
More significant is that his position on global warming is
representative of his contempt for the natural world. And even more
significant than this is that his contempt for the natural world is
representative of the attitudes of much of this culture. He received
almost 62 million votes, meaning Trump is far from alone in what he
feels about the real world.
It’s not just Trump and the 62 million Americans who voted for him who
value the economic system more than they value the real world. The same
is true for Democrats, Republicans, political leaders around the world,
mainstream journalists and nearly all climate change activists. They all
make very clear their priorities each and every day.
Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself: What do all of their so-called
solutions to global warming have in common?
The answer is all of their solutions prioritize this way of
life—industrialism, industrial civilization, capitalism,
colonialism—over the needs of the natural world. All of their solutions
accept this way of life as a given—as what must be preserved at all
costs—and presume that the natural world must conform to the demands and
harmful effects of this culture. So in real terms, whatever effort
that’s going into stopping the harm from global warming is in all truth
attempting to stop the harm to the economy, not the planet.
They’re quite explicit about this. Read their own words. They call this
“The Race to Save Civilization.” Or “Providing a Plan to Save
Civilization.” Or “Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”
One Hell of a PR Coup
This brings us to another way we know we would rather kill the planet
than end this way of life. Too much “environmentalism”—and especially
climate activism—has by now been turned into a de facto lobbying arm for
an industrial sector. It’s a pretty neat trick on the part of capitalism
and capitalists: to turn very real concern over global warming into a
mass movement, then use this mass movement to advance the aims of
specific sectors of the industrial capitalist economy.
If you ask many of the protesters within this mass movement why they’re
protesting, they may tell you they’re trying to save the planet. But if
you ask them what are their demands, they may respond that they want
additional subsidies for the industrial solar, wind, hydro, and biomass
sectors.
That’s a hell of a PR/marketing coup. And I’m not blaming individual
protestors. They’re not the problem. The problem is that this is what
capitalism does. And the real problem is that solar and hydro help
industry, not the real world. Do desert tortoises need
solar-electricity-generation facilities built on what used to be their
homes? Do coho salmon need dams built on the rivers that used to be
their homes? How about Mekong catfish?
To be clear, wild nature—from desert bighorn sheep to Michigan monkey
flowers to Johnson’s seagrass—doesn’t benefit in the slightest from
so-called alternative energies. Sure, in some cases these “alternative
energies” emit less carbon than their oil and gas counterparts, but they
still emit more carbon than if no facility were built, and they destroy
more habitat than if none were built.
This is part of what I mean when I say that the solutions are meant to
protect—in this case, power—the economy rather than to protect wild nature.
No Free Lunch
Valuing this way of life over life on the planet causes its advocates to
tell lies, to themselves and to others. The first lie is that this way
of life isn’t inherently destructive. At this stage in the unraveling of
life on this planet I shouldn’t have to support this statement. We need
merely look around.
The last thing the world needs is more industrial energy generation,
energy that will be used to do what the industrial economy does—convert
the living to the dead: living forests to two-by-fours, living mountains
into component minerals.
There is no free lunch. Actions have consequences, and when you steal
from others, the others no longer have what you stole from them. This is
as true when this theft is from nonhumans as it is when it’s from humans.
But, as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s hard to make a man understand
something when his job depends on him not understanding it.” It’s even
harder to make people understand something when their whole way of life
depends on them not understanding it.
So we lie to ourselves. Concerning global warming, the Trump types lie
by simply denying it’s taking place. From ecocide to genocide to
individual assaults, this is nearly always the first line of defense for
perpetrators of all atrocities: What you see happening isn’t happening.
Climate activists perpetrate a similar lie, in that they seem to pretend
the destruction caused by the solar, wind, hydro, and biomass industries
doesn’t exist. Or that somehow the harm caused by them is a sacrifice
that must be made to serve the greater good. But the sacrifice is, as
always, made by the planet, and the greater good is that the industrial
economy gets more energy. That’s not a good deal for the (for now)
living planet.
Here’s an example. An article in the /LA Times headlined
<http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/05/local/la-me-solar-desert-20120205>/
“Sacrificing the Desert to Save the Earth,” described how state and
federal governments, a big corporation, and big “environmental”
organizations/corporations are murdering great swaths of the Mojave
Desert to put in industrial solar energy generation facilities. The
desert is being sacrificed not, as the article states, to save the
earth, but to generate electricity—primarily for industry. The earth
doesn’t need this electricity: industry does. But then again, from this
narcissistic perspective, industry /is/ the earth. There is and can be
nothing except for industry.
The Renewable Myth
Even leaving aside the fact that the electricity generated by
“renewables” is used to power the industrial economy, in other words to
further the murder of the planet, the wind/solar/hydro/biomass solutions
are in themselves harmful.
For example, wind/solar require the mining of rare earths. All mining is
environmentally devastating, but rare earths mining is especially so.
Rare earths mining and refining has devastated, for example, the area
around Baotou, China. As /The Guardian
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution>/
wrote, “From the air it looks like a huge lake, fed by many tributaries,
but on the ground it turns out to be a murky expanse of water, in which
no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so
thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby
factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17
most sought after minerals in the world, collectively known as rare
earths.” The soil in the region has also been toxified.
Likewise, no matter how “green” and “renewable” so many climate
activists, politicians, and “environmentalists” claim dams are, it
should be obvious that dams kill rivers. They kill riparian zones they
inundate. They deprive rivers above dams of nutrients from anadromous
fish. They deprive floodplains below of nutrients that flow with rivers.
They deprive beaches of sediment. They destroy habitat of fish and
others who live in flowing rivers, not in slow-moving, warmer reservoirs.
And then there’s biomass—another darling of the “renewable” and “green”
climate activists. Biomass is just a groovy way of saying “burning
things.” What it means in practice is that forests in the United States,
Canada, South Africa, Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic, Norway, Russia,
Belarus, the Ukraine and many other countries are being felled to feed
Europe’s demand for “biofuels.”
There are dozens of huge pulp mills just in the southeastern United
States. Guess what percentage of the “biofuels” from these are exported
to Europe. If you guessed 99% or less, up your guess and try again: yes,
it would be 100%. Most of these trees from the US are burned as pellets
in the UK. And it’s not just the UK that deforests other countries to
serve industry.
One pro-industry researcher
<http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/imba/annalspaper.aspx?v=4&i=2&p=8> blandly
states, “As North West European wood resources are not sufficient for
this sudden demand, the region relies on imports from abroad.” And of
course these countries deforest their own territory as well: Almost half
of Germany’s timber production is simply cutting down trees, pulping
them, drying them into pellets, and burning them.
And this is how they propose “saving the world” or, more accurately,
continuing to power the industrial economy, as the living planet who is
our only home enters death spasms.
Even when it simply comes to carbon emissions, many of the so-called
successes of the climate activists are not the result of actual
reductions in carbon emissions, but rather from accounting shenanigans.
For example, here’s a headline
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/costa-rica-boasts-99-renewable-energy-2015-210416028.html?ref=gs>:
“Costa Rica boasts 99% renewable energy in 2015.” Well, sorry, no.
First, they mean “electricity,” not energy. In most countries
electricity accounts for about 20% of energy use. So reduce their
percentage from 99 to just under 20.
Next, the article states that “Three-quarters of Costa Rica’s
electricity is generated by hydroelectric plants, taking advantage of
the country’s abundant river system and heavy tropical rainfalls.” So,
the electricity comes from dams, which, as we’ve said, kill rivers. And
dams aren’t even “carbon-neutral,” as governments, capitalists and
climate activists so often like to claim. This claim has been known to
be false for decades. Dams can be called “methane bombs
<http://www.ecowatch.com/the-hydropower-methane-bomb-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-1882106648.html>”
and “methane factories” because they emit so much of the potent
greenhouse-gas methane.
They are the largest single anthropogenic source, accounting for 23% of
all methane emitted because of humans. Dams can release up to three and
a half times as much atmospheric carbon per unit of energy as is
released by burning oil, primarily because, as an article in the /New
Scientist
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/>/
pointed out, “large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants
are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot.
Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the
reservoir’s bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of
dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water
passes through the dam’s turbines.”
So when people tell you that dams are “carbon neutral” they’re really
just saying, “We don’t count the carbon from dams.” But it’s all just
accounting, and doesn’t reflect the real world, which trumps accounting
any time.
From the perspective of the health of the planet, the best thing we can
say about dams is that eventually they fail, and to the degree that the
river is still alive at that point it will do its best to recover.
Biomass is, if possible, even more of a carbon accounting scam. It is
counted as “carbon neutral” and “green” and “renewable, even though
burning wood pellets produces 15% to 20% more carbon dioxide than
burning coal. This figure doesn’t include the fuel needed to grind,
heat, dry and transport the wood, which adds another 20% to the emissions.
Dollar Neutral
So you might be asking: How can climate activists (and nations, and
plain old capitalists) call this “green” and “carbon neutral”? One
argument is that because trees originally sequestered carbon in their
bodies as they grew, and will eventually release this carbon when they
die, we may as well cut them down and burn them. But this as untrue as
it is absurd. As forests continue to grow, they continue to sequester
more and more carbon. An old growth forest both contains and annually
sequesters more carbon than does a forest attempting to grow after it’s
been cut down. And individual trees also sequester more carbon with age,
and sequester more carbon per year with age.
Another way to put this argument for the “carbon neutrality” of biomass
is that the carbon was already stored when the trees grew, so all we’re
doing is re-releasing the previously stored carbon. It’s like spending
money we already put in savings. This, too, is crap, for at least a
couple of reasons. The first is that we didn’t store that carbon. The
trees did.
This is analogous to you putting money into your savings account, and me
taking it out and spending it, and then calling us even. You might call
that theft, but capitalists might call that “dollar neutral”: a dollar
was put in, and a dollar was taken out—what’s your problem? Another
reason this is untrue is that you can make the same argument about coal
and oil. The carbon got sequestered by algae in the time of dinosaurs,
and we’re just taking it back out.
Another related argument for the carbon neutrality of deforestation is
that although you may be cutting down trees and releasing carbon, since
trees grow back, the carbon will be re-sequestered in the future,
thereby rendering the process carbon neutral. As /Climate Central
<http://reports.climatecentral.org/pulp-fiction/1/> /reporter John Upton
put it:
/“When power plants in major European countries burn wood, the only
carbon dioxide pollution they report is from the burning of fossil fuels
needed to manufacture and transport the woody fuel. European law assumes
climate pollution released directly by burning fuel made from trees
doesn’t matter, because it will be re-absorbed by trees that grow to
replace them. The assumption is convenient, but wrong. Climate science
has been rejecting it for more than 20 years … The accounting trick
allows the energy industry to pump tens of millions of tons of carbon
dioxide into the air every year and pretend it doesn’t exist.”/
So basically the argument is that biomass is carbon neutral because the
trees may grow back and the carbon may be recaptured over the next 100
years. This is accounting fraudulent enough to make those who ran Enron
envious. Can you imagine what would happen to even a corporation that
tried to claim its books were balanced because it was spending money
now, and hoping to accumulate that same amount of money over the next
100 years? Any accounting firm that tried that would be shut down in a
heartbeat.
It’s actually worse than this. Because the (de)foresters didn’t
sequester the carbon, but rather the forest did, the more accurate
analogy would be an Enron-style company stealing from people, then
saying this is not theft because in time their victims will earn more
money to put back into the bank (which will then be stolen—I mean
harvested—by the company).
But none of this matters: “environmentalists,” nations, and capitalists
continue to count biomass as carbon neutral, and count it, and its
numbers, as part of their global warming “success stories,” often
without saying a word about the deforestation.
And for the record, 70% of Germany’s “renewable energy
<https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/biomass-the-worlds-biggest-provider-of-renewable-energy/>”
comes from biomass. As energy analyst Robert Wilson states, “Biomass is
. . . the biggest source of renewable energy, on a final energy
consumption basis, in all but two EU countries. The exceptions are
Cyprus and Ireland. Denmark may get 30% of its electricity from wind
farms, but it still gets more than twice as much of its final energy
consumption from biomass than from wind farms.”
We can show similar carbon accounting smoke and mirrors for wind and solar.
Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to rise.
Why Bother?
I got a note just the other day, where someone said he understands that
this culture is killing the planet, then told me his attitude about
protecting the earth is, “Why bother? I’ll just hang out with my friends
in the time we have left.”
This is the attitude that ties all of the reasons for our incapacity to
love the planet that is our only home. If your beloved is threatened you
act to defend your beloved. That’s what love is. You don’t just hang out
with friends, and you certainly don’t act—as too many climate activists
and “environmentalists” are doing—to defend the one who is killing your
beloved.
It is long past time we transferred our loyalty away from the economy
that is ravaging the earth, and back to the living planet. It is long
past time we made our loyalty to this planet absolute, and then started
to fight like hell to protect it.
/Originally published at Fair Observer
<http://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/climate-change-renewable-energy-environment-headlines-news-01742/>/
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