I recently saw someone online wax poetic about how solar panels are so benign because they don’t leak oil or emit air pollution or make noise like machinery running on fossil fuels. “They just sit there,” he said, doing their thing. While I agree that we must reduce fossil fuel use for the good of the planet, I must point out that solar panels are not benign.

Like any technological product manufactured by industrial processes from raw materials extracted from the earth, solar panels have an ecological footprint that negatively impacts the more-than-human world.

Currently, the subject of these impacts is most often ignored or when it’s not, is usually hand-waved away. After all, the carbon-centric narrative goes, with the climate crisis being such an existential threat, we must do anything we can to “decarbonize” and that means scaling up solar, wind, etc., as fast as possible. As regular readers will know, I have long advocated for cutting overall energy use and consumption rather than trying to sustain current levels with alternate means. To emphasize: my critique of “green” or “clean” energy is from an environmental perspective, and be assured I’m far from a climate denier.

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[See also part I of this series, “Trees Royal and Divine”]

The Hobbit, published in 1937, was the world’s introduction to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth legendarium and is still typically recommended as the best book to start with. Only one forest is featured in the book but it plays a major role: Mirkwood. Gandalf calls it “the greatest of the forests of the Northern World.”

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Mention “renewable energy infrastructure” and most people will probably picture solar and wind farms out in the country. What’s usually not envisioned is how the power from these often remote sites is brought to the cities and towns where it’s used. Obviously that part is essential, and it’s accomplished with high-voltage transmission lines, usually aerial (rather than buried). “High-voltage” is anything from 115 kilovolts (kV) up. For long distances, 354 kV and 500 kV lines are common.

Currently (no pun intended) the US has 200,000-240,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. In order to decarbonize or electrify the nation’s energy supply, many miles of new transmission lines would be needed. How many? The most commonly mentioned estimate is to double the present amount by 2035. However, according to a well-known and oft-cited Princeton study, two to five times as much will be required by 2050 to reach net-zero, which translates to a million or more new miles of lines.

Transmission lines are not benign structures. They have their own environmental impacts, both on-site and off-, that are not trivial. Besides the lines and towers themselves, there are also transformers, substations and other related infrastructure including roads.

On-site impacts include:

• Habitat loss (locally)
• Habitat fragmentation (regionally)
• Bird injury and death

Off-site impacts result from the manufacturing of the components themselves, and include everything from raw material extraction to component manufacturing to transportation.

This is a follow-up in spirit to last week’s post, “Meet Venezuela’s National Tree,” which was intended to help (re)humanize a nation that has been much maligned in the media. Iran has gotten a worse rap and for longer. US Americans have held negative attitudes against Iran for close to five decades, when 52 US Americans were taken hostage at the embassy in Tehran in 1979. I was only ten years old but I clearly remember the ugly vitriol that erupted at the time. (“Bomb Iran,” a parody of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” was actually on the radio.) The hate never really fully went away. I’ve since learned the sordid history of US meddling in Iran’s affairs, which puts the 1979 incident into context, and makes me skeptical of current narratives from establishment politicians and press about what’s happening there and how the US should respond.

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The US media flattens “enemy” countries into two-dimensional caricatures, villainizing their leaders and reducing their people to homogeneous masses. It’s dehumanization in the service of justifying violence, whether economic or military. Of course reality is multi-dimensional; no leader is completely good or bad and no people is monolithic in their feelings about their government or anything else. (As for the designation of “enemy,” that’s about who the elite wants to target, not who’s actually a credible threat, which is virtually nobody for a country (the US) protected by oceans on the east and west and non-belligerents to the north and south.)

Deeper than politics, every country has its own heartfelt traditions, flavors and aesthetic sensibilities that, when we are made aware of them, are humanizing, or in the case of “enemies,” re-humanizing. This is incredibly important, especially during periods of active conflict.

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.

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