The Impact Of ‘Green’ Energy On Wildlife And The Environment

Written by Lynne Balzer on November 15, 2023. Posted in Current News

We’ve been told repeatedly by the media that electricity produced by ‘renewables’ is clean, essentially free energy, better for the environment than traditional sources such as coal and natural gas

But is that true? Maybe we should look at the facts.

Wind turbines injure, maim, and kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year in clear violation of federal law.

The Golden Gate Audubon Society in California reported that the wind farm at Altamont was killing about 10,000 birds, including over 1,100 birds of prey, each year.

Strangely, wind farm enthusiasts ignore the numbers and types of birds killed by wind turbines, even those who call themselves “environmentalists”.

Offshore wind turbines have similar impacts on marine birds, and, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, offshore wind farms also impact fish and other marine wildlife.

Currently, the construction of an offshore wind farm about 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts is underway. The foundations for the huge wind turbines, called monopiles, are being driven into the seafloor by pile drivers.

Pile-driving noise can deafen, injure, or even kill marine mammals. At least fourteen dying humpback whales were recently washed up on beaches in this area.

The people building these projects are fully aware of the damage to marine life that they are causing and will cause.

Although killing such creatures is illegal, these companies have been given special permission by the government to injure or kill hundreds of whales and thousands of other marine mammals, including dolphins.

“It is hard to see how this hell can be allowed under present laws, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act,” noted David Wojick of the Heartland Institute.

In May of 2022, Sean Hayes, a NOAA scientist, issued a warning that “the development of offshore wind poses risks to these species [whales]” and that “these risks occur at varying stages, including construction and development, and include increased noise, vessel traffic, habitat modifications, water withdrawals associated with certain substations.”

Steve Gray, a former congressional candidate, wondered:

”Where are the environmentalists? No outrage. No protests against a Democrat-led Government backing offshore windmills.

The hypocrisy is deafening. Fourteen dead whales and counting.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, hundreds of square miles of forests have been clear-cut to provide space for wind farms, causing extensive environmental damage. It’s been estimated that wind and solar farms require 400 – 800 times the amount of land to produce the same amount of power as conventional power plants.

Modern wind turbines depend on rare earth minerals mined primarily in China, which has a poor record of environmental stewardship. The process of extracting these minerals imposes wretched environmental and public health conditions on China’s people.

It takes a tremendous amount of material to produce one wind turbine. A typical wind turbine, over 500 ft. (50 stories!) tall, contains more than 8,000 different parts, made of steel, fiberglass, cast iron, concrete, and oil.

One important component is a magnetic material made from neodymium and dysprosium, mined almost exclusively in China.

In the Chinese village of Dalahai, where the dumping of waste materials occurred, villagers’ teeth had begun falling out, their hair turned white at unusually young ages and they suffered from severe skin and respiratory diseases.

Children were born with soft bones, and cancer rates had skyrocketed. There were also unusually high rates of cancer, osteoporosis, and skin and respiratory diseases reported. The nearby lake’s radiation levels were ten times higher than in the surrounding countryside.

An article in the Daily Mail stated that every wind turbine contributes to “a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.”

Added to these problems are the adverse health effects of living anywhere near these wind turbines.

The incessant grinding noises they make have been known to cause tinnitus [ringing in the ears], vertigo, panic attacks, migraine headaches, sleep deprivation, and even heart disease, according to Dr. Nina Pierpont, a leading New York pediatrician.

The construction of photovoltaic panels also causes great harm to the environment. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaics are made in China, much of it with slave labor in Uighur Muslim concentration camps.

The New York Times reported in 2014, “Although China may be a cheaper place than Europe for producing solar panels, the savings come at a higher cost to the environment.”

“Sometimes the environmental costs of solar panel production can be lost among the drive to encourage the development of clean energy,” declared Huang Xianjin, a Nanjing University professor who studies land use.

Huang and two other professors submitted a letter to the journal Nature arguing that China needed to take significant action to offset the environmental damage the solar industry is causing there.

A solar panel manufacturer in Zhejiang Province halted its operation after residents complained about serious air and water pollution caused by their production.

The Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Company produces a highly toxic byproduct of polysilicon used in solar panels called silicon tetrachloride.

“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place… It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” declared Ren Bingyan, a professor at Hebei Industrial University in China.

Due to lax standards, these companies are cutting corners with hazardous waste disposal. Although polysilicon producers in other parts of the world recycle this compound, Chinese companies prefer to dump it to avoid the high cost of recycling.

Michael Shellenberger expressed his concern about environmental hazards resulting from discarded solar panels. Typically they contain cadmium, lead, and other toxic chemicals that can’t be extracted without taking the whole panel apart.

Such panels left in landfills break apart and release toxic waste into the ground or bodies of water. In a 2016 study, the Electric Power Research Institute concluded, “Solar panel disposal in regular landfills [is] not recommended in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil.”

Over a while, rainwater will wash cadmium out of solar panels and into the environment. This fact was brought up when local people in Virginia rejected a proposal to construct a 6,350-acre solar farm in Spotsylvania County.

Sean Fogarty of Concerned Citizens of Fawn Lake stated, “We estimate there are 100,000 pounds of cadmium contained in the 1.8 million panels.”

Mining and processing the materials needed for lithium-ion batteries used in EVs is also an environmental disaster.

Producing just one EV battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, and 200 pounds of copper, in addition to 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.

The production of this one battery requires 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for the copper, all of which takes about half a million pounds of the Earth’s crust.

In Indonesia, where nickel for EV batteries is produced, polluted air and water reportedly cause respiratory problems and destroy forests and fisheries.

Lithium mining is one of the most ecologically destructive activities on the planet. At just one lithium mine, 35-40 Caterpillar trucks use nearly 18 million gallons of diesel per year.

Battery-powered vehicles (EVs) use much more aluminum than conventional vehicles. Ford’s F-150 battery-powered truck contains 682 lbs of aluminum, mostly mined and refined in Brazil.

There is a class action lawsuit going on there against Hydro, a Norwegian company. Here bauxite [aluminum ore] is mined and converted to alumina, a toxic residue that leaches into rivers and creeks.

“The alumina made here is produced at the cost of a lot of misery,” proclaimed Ismael Mores, a lawyer working on this lawsuit.

Because lithium-ion batteries are full of toxic chemicals, they can’t just be dumped into landfills. Like solar panels, they require recycling, a complicated process. If this isn’t properly done, the heavy metals involved will contaminate water and soil.

Another fact hidden from the public: extracting lithium from a used battery is five times as expensive as the cost of mining it. Does anyone think these batteries will be recycled?

This article has just scratched the surface of the disaster facing the world. Considering these facts, it is incomprehensible that anyone embracing these ‘climate change’ ‘solutions’ could ever be called “green”.

We need to stop referring to these people as “Green”. We must get this information to as many people as possible, especially our elected representatives.

See more here climatechangedispatch

Header image: Science News For Students

Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Trackback from your site.