‘Clean’ Energy Exploitations – OpEd

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The newly released book “Clean Energy Exploitations” helps citizens attain a better understanding that just for the opportunity to generate intermittent electricity dependent on favorable weather conditions, the wealthier and healthier countries like Germany, Australia, Britain, and the U.S. continue exploiting the most vulnerable people and environments globally.

Asians and Africans, many of them children from the poorer and less healthy countries, are being enslaved and are dying in mines and factories to obtain the exotic minerals and metals required for the green energy technologies for the construction of EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.

The same less-developed countries that control the supply chains for the materials to support the current electrification movement of wealthier nations, are mining for these materials in countries with virtually non-existent environmental regulations. This lack of oversight inflicts humanity atrocities and environmental degradation to the local landscape beyond comprehension.

While at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world are living on less  than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians and mainstream environmentalists are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity.

To meet the needs of roughly 2.7 billion in China and India, mostly poor people, those countries have over half (1,363) of the world’s coal power plants (2,449). Together they are in the process of building 284 new ones. Whatever emission reductions the U.S., European Union, and western-aligned nations believe they are achieving by using solar panels and wind turbines for electricity is negated by 3rd-world, vulnerable populations reliance on coal-fired power plants.

The poorer and less healthy countries, like China, India, and Africa, are desperately in need of affordable, reliable, and continuously uninterruptible electricity for their billions of residents. Until clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, and hydrogen can meet the five electricity standards of being abundant, affordable, reliable, scalable, and flexible they are nothing more than niche forms of intermittent electricity. Under current technological constraints they are not anywhere near to meeting the five standards of reliable electricity.

We can easily observe the world’s poorest countries to see what lifestyles are like without the thousands of products from oil derivatives that benefit the richer countries. In those poorer countries there are 11 million children in the world dying every year.  Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to those products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries.

In the richer and wealthier countries, the inventions of the automobile, airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900’s led us into the Industrial Revolution and winning World Wars I and II. The healthier and wealthier countries of today now have more than 6,000 products manufactured from petroleum derivatives that did not exist a few hundred years ago. Those products have resulted in the increase in longevity projections and virtually eliminated weather related fatalities.

How dare we, in the healthier and wealthier countries, insist that we should limit poor countries future access to fossil fuels? Cheap, reliable, accessible power, and products from fossil fuels are lifesaving, and one of the best ways out of poverty.

In “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping citizens understand the environmental and humanity abuses that support “clean” energy” aims for readers to learn there is a worldwide abundance of fossil fuels in virtually every country, but the minerals and metals for a “green” society are limited to human rights abusers such as China, Russia, the Congo and lithium triangle in South America.

Under President Biden’s plan to rid American lifestyles and economies of fossil fuels, such a plan would ground the military, space program, and Air Force 1. It would also mothball the huge energy demands of airlines, cruise ships and merchant ships, as well as eliminate the medical industry, electronics industry, and the communications industry that are totally reliant on the thousands of products made from petroleum derivatives.

Biden’s climate plan puts a major focus on electrifying everything, from intermittent wind and solar to power the grid, to the banning of gas-powered vehicles, which means a crushing change for American lifestyles and economies. The unintended consequences of reliance on wind, solar, and EV batteries, is that they only generate electricity, and intermittent electricity at best as they are weather dependent to perform.

Biden and other EV enthusiasts have yet to accept the fact that there may not be enough of the “green” exotic minerals and metals in the world to build billions of EV and utility-scale batteries. They only need to review the paper by Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, that shows replacing just the United Kingdom’s 32 million light duty vehicles (of the 1.42 billion cars in operation worldwide) with next-generation EVs would require huge quantities of materials to manufacture 32 million EV batteries: such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and neodymium.

Energy is more than just electricity. Electricity by itself cannot support the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, trucking infrastructures, and space program. Nor can electricity alone, and especially that generated solely from intermittent renewable sources such as wind and solar, provide the thousands of products from petroleum that were virtually non-existent before 1900 that are essential to our medical industry, electronics, communications, transportation infrastructure, our electricity generation, our cooling, heating, manufacturing, and agriculture—indeed, virtually every aspect of our daily lives and lifestyles. Without a barrel of crude oil, we would not have the COVID-19 vaccines and been able to conquer the pandemic.

With China having total domination of the supply chain of the exotic minerals and metals for “clean” electricity, every single EV battery, windmill, and solar panel is money for Communist China. In addition, the world is paying no attention to the environmental degradation and humanity atrocities occurring in China, the Congo, Russia, and large swaths of South America during the mining for these “green” exotic minerals and metals.

None of the world’s prominent politicians, environmental groups, or billionaire backers have condemned less-developed countries degradation of landscapes from mining, or the use of enslaved labor to mine for these minerals and metals to support the green movements of wealthier and healthier countries.

Ronald Stein

Ronald Stein, Founder and Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure of PTS Advance, headquartered in Irvine, California.

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