Sustaining the Wind, Part I...

[NNadir]

12. Funny you should mention it...

...this is a five part series on Brave New Climate.

I would note that the first series begins with a rather long discussion of water.

In part 4 of the series on Brave New Climate, we'll look at the water requirements of the so called "renewable energy" industry in light of the fact that it is actually mine intensive.

There is, by the way, no intrinsic reason why waste heat couldn't be utilized for something other than dumping...but that said, arguably the only successful form of so called renewable energy - successful, in my book anyway, being defined as a form of energy that can produce 10 of the 560 exajoules humanity now consumes each year - is hydroelectricity.

Now.

I happen to be something called "an environmentalist" and as an environmentalist I am prone to ask how many major river systems, and the ecosystems that support them are left to totally and completely destroy?

Right now, if you look, you can learn that we are in the process of destroying the Amazon river system with dams, as well as finishing off the Ganges, having already trashed one of the world's largest wet lands on the same continent as the Amazon, the Pantanal, to grow "renewable" ethanol.

By the way, poisoning rivers is not, decidedly not, "protecting water." The solar industry is totally useless. It can't even generate enough electricity to run the servers dedicated to saying how wonderful it is. It doesn't generate two exajoules.

It is also a participant, a major participant, in the distribution of toxic metals. Right now, as I will report, with references, 10% of the Chinese rice crop is contaminated with cadmium. The profile of the gas fronting solar industry is exactly equivalent to the profile of the electronics industry, and, if one is interested in the environment, one can learn that one of the most intractable environmental and health problems on this planet - although it usually falls to poor people and not bourgeois "solar will save us" types to bear the cost - is electronic waste.

Have a nice evening.