This is anti-renewable energy propaganda dressed up for a TED talk. It literally talks about wind farm turbine blades being a waste problem. 🙄 Don’t waste your time reading it like I did.
Degrowth
Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
Hold on, let me quote that section:
the disposal of waste and eventual retirement of the infrastructure Windmill blades are notoriously difficult to recycle because they are made of composites that can’t be easily separated into their constituent parts. Lithium batteries contain reusable materials that it’s possible to recover, but due to expense and logistics, the practice is not widespread. Most solar panels are currently land-filled because of high costs and technical difficulties. With all these, yeah “they’re working on it” but so far progress is slow.
Windmill blades being hard to dispose of is one, true, and two, just one example of one aspect of the environmentally unfriendly production, management, and disposal of renewable energy equipment.
Which is environmentally unfriendly because all industrial production is environmentally unfriendly.
And one of the big points of this article is how environmentalists don't want to talk - or even think - about that.
Lifting waste disposal of windmill blades to the same level as atmospheric CO2 does seem like a bad-faith distraction.
The article talks about real problems, but problems that can be fixed within a generation. Atmospheric CO2, on the other hand, will screw up humanity (food production, etc.) for thousands of years, as far as we know without a way to undo.
Sure man.
Now talk to me about how easy it is to recycle the constituent parts of a coal or gas fired power plant. Oh, also notoriously difficult? Laughable to even ponder, maybe? Huh.
This kind of finger pointing and pearl clutching is just an attempt to muddy the waters and ultimately delay action. Which is exactly what the entrenched energy company leaders want.
Of course we need to act quickly. But we also need to act correctly.
Green capitalism wants us to believe the only problem is greenhouse gas emissions. That if we replace fossil fuel engines and power plants with solar panels and batteries, we can continue burning energy and consuming resources like "normal" and still save the Earth.
This is a bad solution because it ignores all the other environmental harms of unchecked growth. It puts a bandage on one symptom - greenhouse gas emissions - but does nothing to cure the disease.
The solution is not to replace one energy industry with another while we unsustainably consume the world. The only real long term solution is to use less energy.
Green capitalism wants us to believe the only problem is greenhouse gas emissions.
False. It's just the biggest and most dangerous one so it's what's getting most of the attention. And people like you and other petroleum shills are trying to prevent that with disingenuous arguments.
This is part of what I mention with doomerism. Global warming put environmental concerns more in the public consciousness but it overshadowed everything else environment wise and many do not seem to get how messed up we have made the land and the oceans and the biosphere. Even if we magically got all excess co2 out of the atmosphere and ran on 100% clean energy we would still have a variety of environmental armmagedons coming down the pipe.