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Thread: Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

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    Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

    Long-time environmentalist, Michael Shellenberger, President of Environmental Progress, and recipient of Time Magazine's "Hero of the Environment" award, explains in detail why wind and solar are failures and nuclear is the only viable energy option.

    https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why...ve-the-planet/

    The snippets below are from the article. But, read the entire article when you get a minute (yes, I know, it's lengthy) to fully understand the impact each source of energy on the environment and on society. It contains so much more information than what is contained in the below quotes.

    Another challenge was the intermittent nature of solar and wind energies. When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.
    Despite what you’ve heard, there is no “battery revolution” on the way, for well-understood technical and economic reasons.
    What house cats kill are small, common birds, like sparrows, robins and jays. What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines. In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.
    In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.
    Between 2011–17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet our electricity prices rose five times more than they did in the rest of the U.S. It’s the same story in Germany, the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices increased 50 percent between 2006–17, as it scaled up renewables.
    Strange as it sounds, nuclear power plants are so safe for the same reason nuclear weapons are so dangerous. The uranium used as fuel in power plants and as material for bombs can create one million times more heat per its mass than its fossil fuel and gunpowder equivalents.
    A single Coke can’s worth of uranium provides all of the energy that the most gluttonous American or Australian lifestyle requires. At the end of the process, the high-level radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce is the very same Coke can of (used) uranium fuel. The reason nuclear is the best energy from an environmental perspective is because it produces so little waste and none enters the environment as pollution.
    But aren’t renewables safer? The answer is no. Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.
    Bat scientists recently warned that wind turbines are on the verge of making one species, the Hoary bat, a migratory bat species, go extinct.
    Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?
    ""A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul" ~George Bernard Shaw

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    Humans are stupid if they think they will have the same quality of life without of fossil fuels. The green idiots got their head up their ass so far they are drunk from the fumes. Yes, wind and sun are not always on demand. Sometimes in the Rustbelt the sun does not come out for many days.

    Our world was built on fossil fuels. You cannot just rip that foundation out of the world and expect everything to be the same. The theory on Peak Oil summed up what will happen to humans once the fossil fuels are taken away...a massive die-off. Sure, fossil fuels will run down on their own. But that is unavoidable. We are sifting the crude out of sand and cracking / fracking rocks to find gas...so the writing is on the proverbial wall.

    Petrochemicals make up a big use of crude oil. Asphalt on the road, roofing, lubricating oils, motor oil, tires, plastics, synthetic, clothes, farming, dyes, detergents, pharmaceuticals, chemicals such as sulfuric acid, guitar strings, wood varnish, hand cream. CD's, DVD's, crayons, pillows, packing material, toilet seats, heart valves..the list is almost endless...all crude oil based. Our fertilizer is made as a byproduct of natural gas.

    They tried to replace crude based printing ink with soy ink. Result...the printing stinks worse that Bader Ginsburg's $#@!...the ink goes rancid and the printing has a rancid smell to it. Are we going to make soy tires...soy roofs...soy roads? We already got plenty of soyboys and we can see how that worked out. (OK, they got metal roofing, but not practical for everything.)

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