Greens promote child slave labor and ecological destruction

Why don’t African black lives and ecological values matter? or impacts in and beyond Virginia?

Paul Driessen

The US Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling that had invalidated a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks.

Environmentalists had claimed the US Forest Service had no authority to issue the permit, because a 0.1-mile (530-foot) segment would cross 600 feet below the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail, which is administered by the National Park Service. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion scuttled that assertion.

Pipeline project developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy should receive the USFS and other permits relatively soon – and have the pipeline in operation by early 2022 – unless a Biden administration takes over in 2021 (with AOC as woke climate and energy advisor to Biden and Democrats) and imposes Green New Deal bans on drilling, fracking, pipelines, and eventually any use of natural gas, oil and coal.

Meanwhile, environmentalist groups plan more lawsuits. They insist the pipeline would put rivers and streams at risk of increased sedimentation, scar pristine landscapes, and harm sensitive species.

These plans and assertions underscore how inflexible they have become in opposing any US fossil fuel use. How incapable of recognizing or rationally discussing the far greater human and ecological impacts from energy systems they favor. How reliant on blatant double standards and mob rule, instead of on rational, cohesive, persuasive discussion.

Barely a few years ago, the Sierra Club and allied groups gladly took $187 million and more from Michael Bloomberg, natural gas producers and other financiers to wage their War on Coal. Having closed down most US coal mines and power plants, they then turned gas from a “climate friendly bridge fuel” to evil incarnate. Today they to end fossil fuel use nationwide. Via delusion, incantation and cancellation of debate, they have convinced themselves that wind, solar, battery and biofuel “alternatives” are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable.” Reality says otherwise.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be underground, mostly invisible beneath a grassy right-of-way. Any sedimentation will occur during short term construction operations, when some wildlife will be scared off or displaced for a spell. Any threat to sensitive species, even in the event of a leak, will be minimal.

In stark contrast, their preferred energy systems will have massive, permanent impacts – in Virginia and far beyond its borders. Virginia solar panels will blanket more than eight times the land area of Washington, DC. Hundreds of 850-foot-tall bird-killing wind turbines will create an enormous obstacle course for whales, ships and planes off the Virginia Beach coast. Many thousands of 1,200-pound batteries will provide backup power to replace coal and solar for a sunless, windless day or two.

Hundreds of miles of new transmission lines will soar into the sky and snake across the countryside. Just bringing wind-based electricity from West Virginia to Blacksburg, Roanoke and Lynchburg, Virginia – and solar energy from all those Virginia panels to Staunton and Harrisonburg – will require several new transmission lines across the Appalachian Trail. Not 600 feet below it; right across it.

But somehow, we and our courts are supposed to believe, all these enormous industrial facilities – and the blasting, tree clearing, machinery, noise and other impacts associated with building and maintaining them – will cause no stream sedimentation, landscape scarring or harm to sensitive species.

In reality, the radical greens, utility companies and Democrats promoting these projects under the Virginia “Clean” Economy Act will simply demand that courts ignore the arguments they raised and environmental laws they cited when they raged against coal and gas power plants and the pipelines and transmission lines associated with them. They’ll demand that citizen groups opposed to these monstrous wind, solar and battery complexes be thrown out of court. They’ll want the same double standards applied nationally.

Eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers – and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. That would require turning some 700 million acres of food crop and habitat land (four times the land area of Texas) into biofuel corn, sugarcane and canola plantations for ethanol and biodiesel.

More extreme versions of the Green New Deal would eliminate coal, gas and nuclear electricity and backup power, gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and internal combustion vehicles. We’d replace it all with wind or solar – and use wind or solar on good days to generate enough extra electricity to charge batteries for seven windless, sunless days. That’s 8.5 billion megawatts – twice what we used in 2018!

We’d need some 75 billion solar panels ... or 4.2 million 1.8-MW onshore wind turbines ... or 320,000 10-MW offshore wind turbines ... and some 3.5 billion 100-kWh backup batteries. The concrete, steel, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, aluminum, cobalt, plastic and other materials to build them would require vastly more mining and manufacturing than the world has ever seen – nearly all of it with fossil fuels.

Environmentalists oppose almost all mining anywhere in the United States, and even by US companies operating overseas under rigorous Western rules. That means essential metals and minerals get mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mining and industrial areas have become vast toxic wastelands.

For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. That’s today – for today’s battery, solar panel and wind turbine needs. Imagine how many would be needed to serve the Green New Deal. 400,000 perhaps? 4,000,000?

China alone will soon have 200 times more coal-fired generation than Virginia will be shutting down. During 2020, says consulting company Wood Mackenzie, Europe and the United States will close down 22,000 megawatts of coal-fired power capacity – even as Asia opens 49,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants, on top of those it already has and in addition to its growing fleet of gas-fired units.

China is building or financing numerous coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India already has hundreds of coal-fired units and is building or planning 400 more. China and India are also building or planning hundreds of new airports, and putting millions of new cars and trucks on their roads. That (plus the GND mining, processing and manufacturing) means, even if Virginia or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it wouldn’t make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels.

These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards: the same kinds that excoriate and ban religious services and funerals, anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies – while permitting, excusing and praising Black Lives Matter marches that have too often turned into anti-police mobs, riots, looting, arson, beatings, and murders of people like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood, whose also precious black lives certainly haven’t mattered much to this crowd.

They also require that the woke Campus Cancel Culture spread its intolerant, authoritarian rule to our cities, media, social media, and even legislative bodies and courts – to instill constant anger and anarchy, and silence, defame and punish anyone who dares to offer nuanced or contrarian viewpoints. Every victory brings new demands, with no accountability for the mayhem and destruction they inflict.

Why should rural, poor, minority and working class families and communities have to accept the ecological, health and economic damages inflicted in pursuit of this pseudo-renewable energy utopia? Why should Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have to accept slave status to advance this agenda?

The situation is coming to a head. Let’s hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems.

Via email





Energy density and the electric car charging dilemma

Given all the hype over renewable sources to generate intermittent electricity, the numbers from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) support none of the biased hype. Fossil fuels dominate the energy mix today and are projected to do so for at lest a decade as shown in the figure below.

Yet over the past four decades billions have been spent on solar, wind, corn and other biofuels, not to mention electric cars which I will cover shortly. The result of all this investment been only a modest gain in market share. Part of this is the amazing number of other lifestyle products derived from petroleum. EIA has calculated that they number over 6000. An added disadvantage is that renewables have no role in the military, or for airlines, cruise ships or supertankers.

While conspiracy theorists may prefer to believe that big oil, coal and nuclear have stifled the growth of renewables, it is not so. Only coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear can satisfy the four energy imperatives, power density, energy density, cost and scale. Renewables fall woefully short of meeting these requirements.

The biggest impediment to the growth of electricity generated by wind and solar is the newly coined Ciccione/Lehr Rule of Thumb which states “All wind and solar power on the electric grid must be backed up by an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power running on standby 100% of the time” It has been described in detail in numerous previous articles by this author at CFACT.org.

Let’s turn our attention to the most over looked source of energy coming to the fore daily, that which powers so-called electric cars. California plans to have over 25 million such vehicles in the not too distant future. The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections or the certain increased rates that will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind or solar can support any of it.

A Canadian engineer recently ran the numbers involved in the switchover to electric vehicles and concluded that in order to match the 2000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, the filling station would require 600, 50 watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid which would be enough to power 20,000 homes. Unlike home recharging stations, these would be operating at peak usage hours where the rates are the highest. Can you spell brownout and blackout. Basically new grids will need to be built at the cost of billions.

No-one likely thinks about the fact that it can take between 30 minutes and 8 hours to recharge a vehicle, depending on it being empty or just topping off. They will need lounge areas, holding areas for vehicles completed but waiting for owners to return from shopping or dining.

There is no question that electric vehicles have some positive attributes, low refueling costs, no air pollutants at the point of use and quiet operation, but are they actually clean anEnergy density and the electric car charging dilemmad green as their marketing insists. They have no tailpipes, as we know, on the car, but immense exhausts miles away. Aren’t they really coal or natural gas cars? They are certainly not wind and solar cars .

Regardless of their promise they continue to be hampered by their long standing drawbacks, extra costs, limited range, slow recharge rates, lack of recharging stations and a relatively short battery life with a high replacement cost against the life cycle of the average internal combustion engined car.

Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium-ion battery in your cell phones weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1000 pounds.

Do we still think electric cars are the wave of the future?

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America leads the world in pollution reduction

The constant hammering by the left at climate change is driven by a desire to destroy the very foundations that drive our economy. How can one come to any other conclusion when wAmerica leads the world in pollution reductione look at these charts? Guess who leads the world in the reduction of ocean pollution?

THE USA. Look at China, the worlds biggest polluter. Now look at Carbon emissions, Who is one of the greenest countries on the planet?

The USA. So why are we being subjected to a collective guilt trip on destroying the planet, when, if what they say is true, it’s large areas of the rest of the world that is doing it?
Does it even phase them that prosperity leads to better living conditions?

America leads the world in pollution reduction 1Here is the reason. Its not a concern about CO2 destroying the planet. How could it be when our capitalistic system has developed a way to reduce that for those that fear it? And guess what, there are more things that can be done that would ENHANCE, not destroy our way of life in this matter. So why would anyone hammer the USA?. Because its not the real agenda. They know darn well that though climate change is down on the list of most importance to most people, there is a bloc of INDOCTRIANATED VOTERS, that have no idea that their country is the leader because of its system, that can turn an election. We have enough swing states that if you have a bloc voting on their fears because they believe their country and way of life is evil, you get pushed over the edge. That bloc has no idea on the exact statistics, whether you believe CO2 is the devil or not. They are unaware that the USA is doing its share, in fact, more than our share if this is the real matter.

But it is not. Like so many things, there are informational predatory practices designed to prey on people to sway them, with no regard for other sides of the issue. They know few will actually look. So they hide information and push a missive to achieve another goal to seek a mass group think, where there is no dissent. Those very tactics are an attack on our way of life. So what can this possibly be driven by? And here is what is so maddening.

They seek to destroy the very system that could actually get rid of this if it was a problem. The problem now is not the climate, it’s the perception that an atmospheric apocalypse is on the way and you must in essence, commit economic suicide to stop it. Yet if that’s true, the USA is doing our part to stop that.

Simple logic dictates that if our way of life is leading the world in this matter. While a socialist/communist giant like China is at the bottom, why would anyone want to destroy the very nation leading the way and move toward a system that does not? The real reason can not be, for most, a true concern for climate, but instead to push the perception that we are not a force for good in the world, and that our way of life must be dismantled. They claim its for the good of the world, but it’s the opposite. This nation better wake up to the idea that this has very little to with science, but ulterior motives that run counter to what made this nation the envy of the world. Which if climate change was the real issue, the US already is in that matter!

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Mining lobby increases its virtue signalling

Australia's peak mining lobby group will release a road map on Monday to cut carbon emissions as it throws its support behind the Paris Agreement.

The Minerals Council of Australia wants to use clean energy and electric vehicles at mines across the country.

"This is a time for action, instead of vague virtue-signalling about future ambitions without the courage to outline concrete plans," chief executive Tania Constable told The Australian on Monday.

The three-year plan is expected to help Australia's major mining companies compete while calming community concerns on climate change.

Ms Constable said climate change posed risks and opportunities for the sector with sustained action needed to dampen its effects.

The federal government is currently designing its technology investment blueprint to entice funding in gas, hydro and hydrogen energy as a way to cut carbon emissions.

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