My Dear Readers, your attention, please. Don’t waste your
time looking for the Funny Part of this one. I already looked and I did not
find a chuckle. This is serious stuff. I won’t say I understand it all
but there are more than enough Words of Caution and Confusion below to convince
me that there are Big Problems for all of us in this Blog Posting...
(I did the underlining)
A typical Electric Vehicle Battery weighs one thousand
pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of
lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200
pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are
over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come
from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must
process 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
copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just -
one - battery.
Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant
part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution
controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material.
Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an
electric car?
I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is
building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend
to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in
being 'green,' but it is not. This construction project is creating an
environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed
to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough
silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric
acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also
need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-galliumdiselenide, and cadmium-telluride,
which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the
panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and
environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses)
and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons
of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and
dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at
which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must
look beyond the myth of zero emissions. "Going Green" may sound like
the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs
realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more
destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.
Source: Dr. Rich Swier
ABOUT DR. RICH SWIER
Rich holds a Doctorate of
Education from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, a
Master’s Degree in Management Information Systems from the George Washington
University, Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from
Washington University, St. Louis, MO.
Rich is a 23-year Army veteran
who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1990. He was awarded the Legion of Merit
for his years of service. Additionally, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with
“V” for Heroism in ground combat, the Presidential Unit Citation, and the
Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in
Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Field Artillery Officers Basic and Advanced
Courses, and U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
