It still isn’t easy being ‘green’

Written by Climate Discussion Nexus on February 19, 2025. Posted in Current News

For some reason the MSN algorithm recently decided we couldn’t get enough of Climate Cosmos. Which was initially true in rather a sardonic way, as they seemed useful mostly for illustrating the chronic fatuities of alarmism

But something seems to have changed, because we just got from them “Electric Cars Aren’t Green: The Truth About EVs and Emissions”. Which is not news to CDN readers and viewers.

But it is news when alarmists start saying it out loud, and not just to rubbish it but to worry about it.

Granted Elon Musk is no longer the darling of the left despite all the EVs he cleverly convinced them to buy before revealing he’s literally Hitler for extending his arm in the air and liking Donald Trump. (But they repeat themselves.)

However worry they now do, from the environmental footprint of making the batteries to how the power to charge them is produced to the hideous difficulty of disposing of them. Just wait until they discover what wind farms do to birds.

In fact they’re getting close: Climate Cosmos, via MSN, just unexpectedly told us “How Renewable Energy Is Destroying Natural Habitats.” What’s next, the downside of EV batteries?

Yes, in fact, namely what lithium plants do to water supplies. So here’s something awkward for everyone: Musk is building a lithium refinery in Texas to try to break the Communist Chinese stranglehold on vital minerals for the “green energy transition” or lack thereof, which sounds like something right and left could both applaud.

But alas the thing is apparently going to need up to 8 million gallons of water a day… in bone-dry Corpus Christi. Which arguably we should have been told before they embarked on this project.

But it’s noteworthy again that there’s more and more open discussion of such things among the kinds of people who used resolutely to shtum them. As Bloomberg reports, Musk’s plant is in “an area so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games”.

And when we ask why weren’t we told, well, you know what project boosters are like. Yup. As Bloomberg reports:

“In 2022, Tesla estimated it would need 400,000 gallons per day to run the lithium plant, rising to 800,000 gallons per day at peak usage.

Two years later, a Tesla employee told a consulting firm, Raftelis, that the forecast has spiked to as high as 8 million gallons per day, according to South Texas Water Authority records obtained by Bloomberg News through a public records request.”

Oh. Heh heh. Twenty times as much. Sorry. Moreover, the story explains, “the average American family uses about 300 gallons of water per day or 109,500 gallons per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Meaning they’re planning to blast through enough water for over 26,000 such families. Now imagine if everybody started refining lithium. And imagine also if the excessive stress on groundwater in dry areas, including Texas and California, the dwindling of rivers to creeks and the draining of aquifers, were still a big issue for environmentalists instead of having been eaten by the carbon monster.

Back in January we genuinely endorsed the call from Climate Home News for “more honesty and straight-talking and less jargon, misinformation and accounting tricks when it comes to climate policy and action.”

But we warned that they might not like it very much. And when you see something you don’t like, and talk straight about it anyway, it’s the kind of honesty we need a lot more of in climate policy, and public policy more generally.

Much of it, frankly, is rather basic, and we’ve been saying it for years, and they remain enthusiasts for EVs under the right circumstances. But hey, they’re new to this approach, and they do stress the possible downsides and the narrowness of those circumstances.

So better late than never. (Like Canary Media admitting of the giant Vistra battery fire in California that “the dramatic conflagration complicates the energy-storage industry’s efforts to win community support for more large batteries, which are seen as crucial to cleaning up the electrical system” instead of going fire? What fire? We don’t see any fire) and Climate Cosmos even deals with the EV-supply-chain child labour issue.

Now let’s look at it more broadly, because that Climate Cosmos piece does suggest that properly “green” production of power will overcome many current EV issues. But their other one warns that “green” production of power often isn’t green either.

It refers to “the explosive growth of renewable energy” as though it were a natural economic phenomenon and not a creature of ill-advised subsidies, and takes the urgency of cutting GHGs for granted.

But then it mentions that windfarms have a huge footprint where they are installed, including massacring birds and bats in horrific numbers. And that solar farms “offer a different but equally troubling dilemma” because of how they infringe on animal and plant habitat.

It gets worse. Or better, if you like frankness. Because they mention that damming rivers to generate hydro electricity has all sorts of negative impacts from blocking fish migration to preventing sediment flow to accumulating stagnant water.

And that “biomass” cultivation destroys complex habitats for aggressive monoculture, in the process promoting erosion.

Again, it may all sound like Tradeoffs 101. But given the habitual lack of attention to tradeoffs on the left, including among climate alarmists, indeed the tendency to dismiss them as sinister ‘denialist’ tricks, it is again refreshing.

Even if the warning that the giant footprint of alternative energy might interfere with farming according to traditional indigenous ways of knowing is a bit clichéd.

Speaking of which, the conclusion that it might not happen if we were smarter, including “designing technology that is less intrusive… the key lies in innovation”, has a bit of that typical “A plan! You’re right. We’ll need a plan.”

But the subsequent observation that the other key is “informed decision-making that prioritizes both energy and ecological well-being” lands squarely in the deal-with-tradeoffs camp.

Which is a huge step forward.

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