Episode 232: “Our Dystopian Green Energy Future” with Mark Mills

This episode is about the catastrophic dead ends we face if we plow blindly ahead with the promised “green energy”future.
Powerful forces obsessed with CO2 and climate change are determined to replace hydrocarbon fuels with solar and wind energy and other yet to be invented technologies.
It’s a obsession fueled by a toxic mix of religious fervor, old fashioned greed and a “degrowth” agenda aimed at dismantling the modern global economy.
But setting these agendas aside, has anyone anywhere adequately explained the physics and the economics of the so-called green utopia? My guest on this episode, Mark Mills, has thought it through and has a stark message for us, an inconvenient truth.
“There won’t be a world powered entirely by wind and solar or batteries. The reason I say that is because it is not possible. We don’t have the materials and we can’t afford it in either environmental or economic terms.”
Mark Mills probably knows more about this than anyone. He’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on science, technology, and energy issues. He’s also faculty fellow at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern, where his focus is on future manufacturing technologies and a strategic partner in an energy software venture fund.
This episode defies a brief description. Mark provides tour de force explanations that are well worth an hour of your time to understand. With them you will be equipped to properly understand and debate energy realities. If we are to push back against the dystopian future that a fully-realized climate change agenda guarantees, we need to be armed with informed arguments.
Just a few of the highlights:
“All energy systems used to deliver useful power to society require building machines, every energy system. So, what you really want to know is how much material does it take to build the machines to make windmills and solar panels. For wind turbines, the amount of concrete glass, polymers, plastics, and steel you need per unit of energy goes up tenfold per unit of energy produced compared to a gas turbine”
“You’ll have to increase the total supply of metals and minerals, copper, nickel, lithium, aluminum, molybdenum, neodymium, etc. Not by a little but by a lot, tenfold. We will need hundreds of new mines, not a few, hundreds of new mines.”
“By one estimate, nearly 400 new giant mines … but at what price …environmentalists are broadly sweeping under the rug the consequences, the environmental, economic and human consequences”
“Climate Change advocates have fundamentally thrown under the bus all of the environmental issues they used to care about. Everything. Land use, use of toxic chemicals, visual pollution, habitat destruction, species protection …because the quantity of materials you need to produce the same unit of energy by moving to wind and solar increases by at least 1,000%.”
“If you multiply the number of mines we need for solar, for wind and also for batteries … it’s hundreds and hundreds of mines … hundreds of thousands of square miles. We’re going to be killing habitat and species all over the planet.”
“The quantity of plastic in one small wind farm is greater than all the plastic used to make all the world’s plastic straws.”
“We import roughly 80 to 90% of the manufactured solar modules we use to make solar panels in America … from China.”
“Wind turbines being built today are about the size of a Washington Monument, two to three megawatts each. So a field of 50 covering 100 square miles could power a small town of say 20,000 to 50,000 people … A single gas turbine whose gas pipe is bare and you can’t see, the size of a tractor trailer, can provide the same amount of electricity.”
Congress has appropriated trillions of dollars to what should now be properly called the Climate Change Industrial Complex which is growing richer by the day. “When you say, “Oh, we need to replace all hydrocarbons with wind, solar, and batteries,” you’re not making a small subsidy distortion. You’re now saying, “I have to subsidize by definition, all American energy production.””
“The Inflation Reduction Act (aka the Green New Deal) included provisions intended to override local communities and state’s objections to transmission lines. The climate agenda would not only change our energy systems, but also seek to make it yet another federal power.”
“A Dutch government sponsored study concluded that Netherlands green ambitions alonewould consume a major share of all the world’s minerals.”
“The CO2 emitted to build the electric cars batteries and mine the materials will offset most, if not all, of the CO2 then not emitted by not burning gasoline in the first place. So you get nothing in CO2 terms or very, very little, for the price of exporting of jobs, geopolitical dependencies, and environmental impacts somewhere on the planet for no benefit.”
“What they’re essentially saying is that there is no possibility, and I agree with them, on cutting the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions, absent, huge degrowth, which is a euphemism for massive global recession … they’re overtly engineering a society in which you will be happy without economic growth.”
Meanwhile, people are getting rich from the green agenda, and if you consider the vast worldwide habitat and species destruction that will be caused by substituting wind and solar for hydrocarbon energy … and all the other social and economic costs … the climate change agenda should be called villainous, not virtuous.