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<address class="classic"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://derrickjensen.org/2016/12/myths-of-renewable-energy/">https://derrickjensen.org/2016/12/myths-of-renewable-energy/</a><br>
</address>
<h1 class="classic">The Myths of Renewable Energy</h1>
<span class="postdate">December 12th, 2016</span>
<p><u>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.</u></p>
<p>How do we know that? Well, here are a few good reasons.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself: What do all of their
so-called solutions to global warming have in common?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h4>One Hell of a PR Coup</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>No Free Lunch</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Here’s an example. An article in the <em><a
href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/05/local/la-me-solar-desert-20120205"
target="_blank">LA Times headlined</a></em> “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
<em>is</em> the earth. There is and can be nothing except for
industry.</p>
<h4>The Renewable Myth</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution"
target="_blank">The Guardian</a></em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One <a
href="http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/imba/annalspaper.aspx?v=4&i=2&p=8"
target="_blank">pro-industry researcher</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/costa-rica-boasts-99-renewable-energy-2015-210416028.html?ref=gs"
target="_blank">headline</a>: “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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="http://www.ecowatch.com/the-hydropower-methane-bomb-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-1882106648.html"
target="_blank">methane bombs</a>” and “methane factories”
because they emit so much of the potent greenhouse-gas methane.</p>
<p>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 <em><a
href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7046-hydroelectric-powers-dirty-secret-revealed/"
target="_blank">New Scientist</a></em> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>Dollar Neutral</h4>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em><a
href="http://reports.climatecentral.org/pulp-fiction/1/"
target="_blank">Climate Central</a> </em>reporter John Upton
put it:</p>
<p><em>“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.”</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And for the record, 70% of Germany’s “<a
href="https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/biomass-the-worlds-biggest-provider-of-renewable-energy/"
target="_blank">renewable energy</a>” 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.”</p>
<p>We can show similar carbon accounting smoke and mirrors for wind
and solar.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to rise.</p>
<h4>Why Bother?</h4>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Originally published at <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/climate-change-renewable-energy-environment-headlines-news-01742/">Fair
Observer</a></em></p>
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