Legacies: The myth of “green, clean” renewable energy

Author: Dr. David R. Legates

Dr. David R. Legates is Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware and Director of Research and Education at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He also serves on the Advisory Board of A Better Delaware.

The state of Delaware is pursuing an ambitious plan to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and cut emissions in half by 2030. The legislature has already begun proposing draconian measures to achieve this goal, including House Bill 99, passed in 2023, which potentially catastrophic climate change is blamed on carbon dioxide.

Some Delawareans, based on a somewhat one-way flow of information, believe that even if carbon dioxide emissions are not responsible for changes in our climate, reducing our dependence on oil, gas, petroleum and other forms of fossil fuels will be good for the environment.

As a result, Delaware farmland in Kent and Sussex counties is being covered with solar panels. Proposals are being put forward to build offshore wind turbines and run their new power lines through our state park or Fenwick Island to connect to the power grid. We are told that ultimately our environment will be better for the eye injuries these proposals will cause.

But will it get better? As “climate change” continues to be called “global warming,” media reports tell us that wind and solar power—so-called renewable energy sources—are both clean and green. The truth is, neither do they.

When we look at a solar panel or a wind turbine, the only obvious thing is that they deliver solar or mechanical (wind) energy to the grid, powering our homes and our businesses.

They appear to do this without producing any harmful by-products. Clean and green, right?

Clean energy technology requires a wide range of metals and minerals such as aluminum, cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and zinc, as well as rare earth minerals such as scandium, yttrium, lanthanum and many others that you have probably never heard of and may not pronounce. They are obtained mainly from mines in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.

These mines are not like the coal mines you may be familiar with. Open pit mining must be used to extract these metals and minerals. Such mines are considered very dangerous both for the health of miners and for the local ecology and hydrology due to the harmful pollutants they produce.

Consider lithium, an important metal used in the construction of electric vehicle batteries. Lithium mining causes enormous environmental damage because the extraction process requires large amounts of water. The result is a toxic lake that leads to contamination of surface and groundwater.

Various places, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in Africa, as well as China, Inner Mongolia and South Korea in Asia, and Brazil and Chile in South America, are plagued by pollution resulting from open-pit mining carried out to recover components of renewable energy.

In addition to environmental concerns, the mining process in these countries should also be of concern to those concerned about social justice issues. The Chinese Communist Party, which owns mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often uses slavery and child labor. Even those who willingly work in mines face extreme health risks.

We may not even know the true extent of the negative impact on our environment. Italian researcher Enrico Mariutti examined the actual carbon footprint of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries and found that the mining, production and transportation associated with so-called “green” energy technologies release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The nature and amount of pollution produced by these mines is reported by the mining companies themselves. Mariutti asks whether we would trust car manufacturers to certify emissions from their internal combustion engines, or pharmaceutical companies to certify the safety of their drugs. I don’t think so.

He wrote: “We invest hundreds of billions of dollars a year in low-carbon technologies just because someone wrote it down somewhere. (…) There are no national or international authorities that bother to understand on what basis and how this “paper knowledge” was accumulated.

So the next time you see a wind turbine, a large solar panel or an electric vehicle, think about the environmental damage done in extracting the metals needed to produce them, the energy used to extract and transport the raw materials, and the health and social consequences of the miners extracting the necessary metals and minerals.

Are wind and solar energy truly clean and green energy sources, or are they simply unreliable and expensive sources of intermittent energy?

Reader reactions, pro and con, are welcome at [email protected].