Balsa tree (Ochroma pyramidale). Photo by Alejandro Bayer Tamayo from Armenia, Colombia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I get why the “green” energy narrative appeals to people. We do indeed need to de-carbonize our societies. We should leave fossil fuels in the ground. So people are relieved when presented with the idea that coal, oil and gas can be replaced by ostensibly “clean” alternatives like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power, and battery storage.[1] For example, since electric vehicles lack tailpipe emissions, they must be a silver bullet.
However, the narrow focus on greenhouse gases paints an incomplete picture of the impacts of all of the above modes of energy production. Carbon is not even the only bad thing about burning fossil fuels, and as I wrote recently: “Emissions are SO not the only problem with cars.”
Crucially, when we look at “green” energy, we find many serious issues, among them:
- Habitat destruction for siting wind farms, solar arrays, transmission lines, reservoirs, etc.
- Child slave labor and other unjust practices implicated in critical material sourcing
- We can now add coups for green energy to wars for oil, as seen in Bolivia.
- Lithium mining for storage batteries for intermittent sources like solar and wind inflicts a host of environmental impacts
- Copper mining, which is essential for transmission lines is totally not green at all (another article by me)
- All the other resource extraction and refining processes needed to manufacture “green” energy components have significant environmental impacts
Wind turbine blades are an example of the last bullet item. I’ve been educating myself about the downsides of “green” energy for a few years now, but I wasn’t too informed about the details of this particular topic until I saw this fact sheet about floating offshore wind energy infrastructure from Protect The Coast PNW. Offshore windmills have been in the news recently because of Trump’s executive order “temporarily halting offshore wind lease sales in federal waters,” a move decried by some “green” energy proponents but which I personally welcomed. Declaring any chunk of nature off-limits to any form of resource extraction is an environmental win in my book. That’s not Trump’s intention obviously, or to his credit at all, but it is the inadvertently positive result.
