Monday, August 31, 2020
Yeah, well, math is racist!
These numbers are sobering, obviously. But Minnesota consumes only 1/71 of the electricity in the U.S. If we extrapolate Minnesota’s numbers to the U.S. as a whole, a rough conclusion is that getting all of our electricity from wind, solar and batteries would consume around 70% of all of the copper currently mined in the world, 337% of global nickel production, 3,053% of the world’s total cobalt production, 355% of the U.S.’s iron output, and 284% of U.S. steel production. Along with unfathomable quantities of concrete–which, by the way, off-gases CO2.
Thus, at a minimum, implementing just this one part of the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal would require an expansion of mining, world-wide, that would dwarf anything in human history. Whether the world contains enough of these metals to support a transition to solar, wind and batteries in the U.S.–and if so, for how long–I have no idea. And that mining, along with the infrastructure needed to support it and the transportation of vast quantities of metals around the world, would itself have inevitable environmental impacts.
Further, if the goal of this whole exercise is to combat global warming, there is little point in talking about American electricity production. If one accepts the calculations of the global warming alarmists, the impact of anything we do on global temperatures is risibly small. To have perceptible effect, China, India, Brazil and the rest of the developing world would have to get all of their electricity from wind and solar, too. That would increase the above demand for materials by something like 15 to 20 times.
It would be great if someone would ask one of the "green" energy true believers about this analysis and its implications.
Labels: party of science
