Tag Archives: environmental damage

EeeeeeeVeees Aren’t “Earth Friendly”, by Eric Peters

Posted on October 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Eric Peters punctures The Grand Delusion. From Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

In the Department of there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, it is reported that in order to supply the raw materials needed to make batteries for EeeeeeeVeeeees, it will be necessary to break ground – literally – for 384 new graphite, cobalt and nickel mines.

Plus vast leach fields for the lithium.

That’s a lot of Earth Rape – in the name of “the environment.” 

Well, in the name of forestalling the “crisis” that is “imminent” on account of the 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide increasing by a fraction of that percent.

Of course, they don’t tell you that. About the 0.04 percent. Because they want you to believe it is a much larger percent. So as to make you afraid and thus amenable. Like “the cases” – as opposed to the deaths. (And the deaths . . . when it comes to the “vaccines.”)

They also don’t want you to know how much it will take to forestall a fractional increase in the 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide. As in how much it will take – from the Earth. 

Every EeeeeeeVeeeee battery requires an enormous quantity of the materials mentioned earlier – because it takes an enormous battery to power a single EeeeeeeVeeee. One that is about twenty times the weight (and size) of the automotive batteries most people are familiar with, the lead-acid ones that start the engines in non-electric cars. These are typically about 9 inches long and about the same inches wide and weigh around 50 pounds. A small EeeeeeeeVeeeee battery pack for a small EeeeeeeVeeee such as a Tesla Model 3 weighs around 1,000 pounds and is spread out over most of the length and width of the EeeeeeVeeeee’s floorpan.

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The Myths of Green Energy, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of drawbacks, including environmental ones, to green energy. From Charles Hugh Smith at dailyreckoning.com:

The Myths of Green Energy

Finance is often cloaked in arcane terminology and math, but the one dynamic that governs the future is actually very simple. Here it is:

All debt is borrowed against future supplies of affordable hydrocarbons (oil, coal and natural gas).

Since global economic activity is ultimately dependent on a continued abundance of affordable energy, it follows that all money borrowed against future income is actually being borrowed against future supplies of affordable energy.

Many people believe that alternative “green” energy will soon replace most or all hydrocarbon energy sources, but this belief is not realistic. All the “renewable” energy sources are about 3% of all energy consumed, with hydropower providing another few percent.

There are unavoidable headwinds to this appealing fantasy…

Reality Check

1. All “renewable” energy is actually “replaceable” energy, analyst Nate Hagens points out. Every 15-25 years (or less) much or all of the alt-energy systems and structures have to be replaced, and little of the necessary mining, manufacturing and transport can be performed with the “renewable” electricity these sources generate. Virtually all the heavy lifting of these processes require hydrocarbons and especially oil.

2. Wind and solar “renewable” energy is intermittent and therefore requires changes in behavior (no clothes dryers or electric ovens used after dark, etc.) or battery storage on a scale that isn’t practical in terms of the materials required.

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The ‘battery fairy’ and other delusions in the demand to replace gasoline powered vehicles with electric cars and trucks, by Thomas Lifson

Posted on February 4, 2021 | 1 comment

Widespread use of electric cars and trucks will wreak more damage on the environment than internal combustion engines. From Thomas Lifson at americanthinker.com:

I continue to be amazed that serious people think that gasoline powered vehicles can be completely replaced by electric vehicles in a decade-and-a-half, and that this would be a good thing, even if possible. Under threat of government action, however, the world’s major auto manufacturers are falling in line boosting production of plug-in models, and upstart Tesla Motors is now the world’s most valuable auto manufacture, based on the value of its capital stock issued and in the public’s hands. Mary T. Barra, CEO of General Motors, has pledged to sell only zero emission vehicles by 2035.  That would meet the deadline imposed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed an executive order banning the sale of internal combustion vehicles in the nation’s largest car market by 2035.

Charging electrric cars at work makes sense, as it rquires several hours. But what if you want to drive on a long trip?

Photo credit: Felix Cramer CC-BY-SA 2.0 license 

GM, rescued from liquidation courtesy of US taxpayers (and bondholders who were cheated out of their place in line as creditors by the Obama administration), may simply be sucking up to governmental power. But Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motors, the world’s largest (or second largest, depending on the year). and grandson of the automaker’s founder, has spoken out and called out fallacy of thinking that this is possible or desirable. [I must here disclose that I was a consultant for a Toyota company for several years, but that all my comments on the company here are based on publicly available information.]

 

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US Military Bases: The Polluter Is Not Paying, by H. Patricia Hynes

Posted on January 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

The US military doesn’t just leave dead bodies in lands it occupies, it sometimes kills the land itself. From H. Patricia Hynes at antiwar.com:

My nephew, an Army veteran who spent most of his 20 plus years military service as an officer in South Korea, is now a civilian military contractor living on a base in Afghanistan. Our only conversation about US military pollution in South Korea was something of a nonstarter.

These two Asian countries, so disparate in development, economy and stability, have something in common – severely polluted US military bases, for which our country takes little to no financial responsibility. The polluter pays (aka “you break it, you fix it”) does not apply to the United States military abroad. Nor do civilian workers and most US soldiers stationed at these bases have a chance of winning medical compensation for their military pollution-related illness.

Consider the barbaric military burn pits. In its haste for war, DOD ignored its own environmental regulations and approved open-air burn pits – “huge poisonous bonfires” – on hundreds of US bases in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. They were sited in the midst of base housing, work and dining facilities, with zero pollution controls. Tons of waste – an average of 10 pounds daily per soldier – burned in them every day, all day and all night, including chemical and medical waste, oil, plastics, pesticides and dead bodies. Ash laden with hundreds of toxins and carcinogens blackened the air and coated clothing, beds, desks and dining halls, according to a Government Accounting Office investigation. A leaked 2011 Army memo warns that health risks from burn pits could reduce lung-function and exacerbate lung and heart diseases, among them COPD, asthma, atherosclerosis or other cardiopulmonary diseases.

Predictably, base commanders temporarily shut them down when politicians and high-ranking generals came to visit.

Few veterans exposed to burn pit toxins have won compensation for their severe, chronic respiratory illness. No local Afghani or Iraqi citizen or independent military contractor ever will. Wars may end, bases may close, but our toxic military footprint remains as a poisonous legacy for future generations.

To continue reading: US Military Bases: The Polluter Is Not Paying

 

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Posted in Environment, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Military

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