Meet Bernie Sanders' 2018 challenger

[NNadir]

190. Wow! An open mind!!! I'm not used to seeing those, but I'm grateful that they still exist!

Thanks. You made me feel very good.

I used to support solar and wind and geothermal. I am, after all, a Democrat. But when I did so, I have to confess I didn't know much about that stuff. I only learned the gory details after listening to people tell me "we don't need nuclear" because solar and wind are so great.

I have changed my mind about solar and wind. I don't think they are either acceptable or in fact, ethical, since, to my mind, their chief function is not to produce energy, but rather to produce complacency, complacency which allows the gas (and other dangeros fossil fuel) industries to expand.

I'm not impressed at all about the "rising percentages" of energy people claim they are producing. As of 2015, the world was generating and consuming 574 exajoules of energy per year. Solar and wind combined don't produce 5 of them. After 50 years of wild eyed cheering, solar doesn't produce 1 of them. The entire solar industry after 50 years of cheering for it doesn't produce as much total energy as the growth, year to year, of dangerous natural gas.

And let's be clear, the fastest growing fuel on this planet is not so called "renewable energy." It's dangerous natural gas, by a long shot, and the all time record for growth in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere established in 2015 and nearly matched in 2016 reflects that fact. Both coal and petroleum are near their highest use levels ever.

The lie that so called "renewable energy" is growing fast is based on a deliberate misrepresentation using peak capacity as being the same as continuous utilization. A solar farm rated at 1000 MW that produces that much power for 15 minutes 25 days a year is not the equivalent of a nuclear plant at the same rating that produces 100% of its capacity continuously for two years between refueling.

All of this disaster is the result of misplaced faith and squandered money in so called renewable energy. We spent, on this planet, roughly two trillion dollars on solar and wind in just the last ten years alone, this on a planet where billions of people lack access to any kind of approved sanitation at all.

I'm, again, impressed by your open mind - and, again, never expect actually to see one anymore - but I have to tell you that the more deeply I look into the matter, the more that I think that the so called "renewable energy" industry is a tragedy in the making.

I no longer support solar, in particular, since I regard it as modern day asbestos, a material considered wonderful in its time, but which is now a huge and expensive liability that has fallen on the heads of those generations that had nothing to do with putting it there.

Asbestos was, in fact, thought of as a major wonder, even though there were some voices, few but some, who questioned it and began to understand the huge and unacceptable risk it represented to the public.

This link has a disturbing list of the kind of products into which asbestos was added: History of Asbestos, the Wonder Material

The solar industry, which has a waste profile very much like the already intractable problem of electronic waste, is almost certainly to prove as bad.

That Santayana cliche applies here.

The solar industry is not remotely safe; it's not remotely sustainable, and I suspect that 30 or 40 years ago, the people who are babies today will face huge risks to clean up the mess that these distributed toxics will represent.

I wrote in this space about the huge cadmium crisis in China, affecting millions of people.

Predictably, nobody cares, because I'm saying something that differs from what people want to hear.

The astounding cadmium intake associated with rice in Southern China.

Many solar cells on this planet are cadmium telluride or cadmium selenide based. This makes solar cells the equivalent of leaded gasoline to my mind, because, even if the solar cells last 25 years - and I doubt they will - eventually they will begin to leach what's in them, just like another example of "distributed energy" that has been an environmental disaster, the automobile.

I've spent much of the last 30 years in libraries reading about energy and the environment. I am deeply disturbed about what the public, not just the right wing, but also the left wing thinks about energy.

Thanks again, for listening. It's usually more than I can ask.