Comments by "Elections are coming yt full censorship mode" (@Cryaboutmyhandle) on "Why solar power could cost this farmer his business" video.

  1. all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy. For a snapshot of what all this points to regarding the total materials footprint of the green energy path, consider the supply chain for an electric car battery. A single battery providing a useful driving range weighs about 1,000 pounds. Providing the refined minerals needed to fabricate a single EV battery requires the mining, moving, and processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet . That’s 20 times more than the 25,000 pounds of petroleum that an internal combustion engine uses over the life of a car. Among the material realities of green energy: Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society. A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones. Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile. Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil. By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. The extraction process of lithium is very resource demanding and specifically uses a lot of water in the extraction process. It is estimated that 500,000 gallons of water is used to mine one metric ton of lithium. With the world's leading country in production of lithium being Chile,  the lithium mines are in rural areas with an extremely diverse ecosystem. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, one of the driest places on earth, about 65% of the water is used to mine lithium; leaving many of the local farmers and members of the community to find water elsewhere. Along with physical implications on the environment, working conditions can violate the standards of sustainable development goals. Additionally, it is common for locals to be in conflict with the surrounding lithium mines. There have been many accounts of dead animals and ruined farms in the surrounding areas of many of these mines. In Tagong, a small town in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture China, there are records of dead fish and large animals floating down some of the rivers near the Tibetan mines. After further investigation, researchers found that this may have been caused by leakage of evaporation pools that sit for months and sometimes even years. Lithium-ion batteries contain metals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese, which are toxic and can contaminate water supplies and ecosystems if they leach out of landfills. Additionally, fires in landfills or battery-recycling facilities have been attributed to inappropriate disposal of lithium-ion batteries. As a result, some jurisdictions require lithium-ion batteries to be recycled. In spite of the environmental cost of improper disposal of lithium-ion batteries, the rate of recycling is still relatively low, as recycling processes remain costly and immature. More than 400 million batteries are used throughout the country, with only 5% being recycled, resulting in 8000 tonnes ending up in landfill. Creating the lithium-ion battery pack is also more environmentally harmful than the manufacturing process for an average petrol-car.
    9
  2. 3
  3. 2