Are Electric Cars Really Green?

NOTE: I didn’t write this excellent breakdown and analysis of electric vehicles and “green energy” or whether they are truly “green” and therefore less damaging to the environment than fossil fuel vehicles. If I can find the name of the original author I will gladly provide attribution.

Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EV’s on the road are coal-powered, do you see?”

Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

All batteries are self-discharging.

That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly. But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs.

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just – one – battery.”

Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. These mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. There have been many articles written about this tragedy in periodicals that you have probably never seen nor heard of and your local and national news sources don’t cover stories like this. Regardless whether you are aware of such atrocities, should we factor in the stories of these children as part of the cost of driving an electric car?” Yes, I think we must.

I’ll end this note with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.

“Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically, with an open mind, you can see that “Going Green” is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye or ear depending on your sources for information.

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California is on Fire. Must be Global Warming.

Since the news cycle has decided to jump back on the topic of climate change again…just in case we forgot it’s all our fault…no wait, Trump’s fault…Dr. Leslie Woodcock, emeritus professor at the University of Manchester (UK) School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, is a former NASA scientist and stated the following about the subject.

“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis about our climate which says it has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.”

“The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ — in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent. There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean anything in science, it’s not significant.”

“Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale. The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

Politicians and journalists in general have no scientific training or background and yet they are the ones insisting the global warming debate is settled science and there are no dissenting scientists. Remember the 97% consensus story that was roundly debunked and shredded by the many scientists who weren’t in consensus?

Dr. James Lovelock, known as a “green guru” has also questioned climate change as a movement. He described the environmental movement as “a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” He then said, “It’s just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can’t be certain.”

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore, has said publicly that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years… no actual proof, as it is understood in science, actually exists.”

There really isn’t a debate that our climate has changed, even in my lifetime. Some summers have been hotter longer. Some winters have been milder. But to say without doubt it’s all manmade and the world is going to end if we don’t listen to some wealthy, powerful, politically connected people with a stake in the debate that can make them much more wealthy and powerful is as absurd as saying nothing is or has changed with regard to our weather patterns and global climate.

It’s like we have to live in the extremes of everything. There is no middle ground any more.

So when they tell us “the science is settled” and the California wildfires are the result of humans burning fossil fuels for a century and NOT the decades of bad forest management policies created by liberal California lawmakers that allowed California’s forests to pile up with deadwood and kindling, consider the information above and compare it with the climate zealots words being shouted in your face again.

Climate Changes… It’s Called Weather.

I was born more than half a century ago.

Since that time major newspapers and news organizations along with numerous climate, environmental, and scientific groups have made claims and predictions that when viewed today are laughable, but when reported were considered very serious and in need of immediate attention and action.

During the past 50+ years of living on this planet the media has reported the following:

• Global cooling. A new ice age was approaching. In fact scientists wrote Richard Nixon to warn him of the coming cold and ask for help reversing the impending frigid world. It was even suggested that soot be spread across the poles to melt the ice and slow down the process.
• The Ozone Layer would soon disappear.
• The oceans would be dead with no life left in them.
• Acid rain would destroy all the forests.
• Ecologist Kenneth Watt said, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil.”
• Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
• The polar ice caps would completely melt causing the oceans to rise and swallow up places like Manhattan and huge chunks of the East and West Coasts.
• In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
• In the 1970s Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, said he believed that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct.
• Decaying organic pollutants would use up all the oxygen in the rivers killing all fresh water fish.
• Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich, who is perhaps best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicted by the year 2000 the United Kingdom would be simply a small group of impoverished islands. He said, “England will not exist in the year 2000 and I give ten to one that the life of the average Briton would be of distinctly lower quality than it is today.” Today Ehrlich has latched on the to global warming hysteria claiming “humans may soon be forced to resort to cannibalism.”
• The U.N. claimed by 2010 50 million refugees would be fleeing the sinking islands of the Caribbean, low-lying Pacific Islands, and coastal regions.
• The North Pole was supposed to be “ice free” by 2013 according to Al Gore.
• Polar bear numbers would dwindle to near extinction levels. They are currently at record level populations.

The list goes on.

But now, this time, 2018, we MUST listen to the climate alarmists. This is it. If Donald Trump doesn’t listen this time and do everything the climate changers say, we’re all doomed.

This is our last chance! (if you don’t count the 2015 Paris Summit when they said that was our last chance, or any of the last chances in this video)

If nothing else, these ridiculously dire and horribly wrong predictions tell us one thing, we’re not as smart as we think we are when it comes to this planet and the natural forces that make it what it is. Let’s consider every climate prediction with a healthy dose of skepticism and a willingness to search for information that can either corroborate or debunk such claims. In the meantime, try not to fall for the hype, hysteria, and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions that are bound to continue, promoted by “environmental grievance hustlers” like the news media, Al Gore, and pretty much every Democrat in power.