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Beware of the Toxic Green Menace!

Every day we are bombarded with the eschatology of Green activism. The problem is: far from saving the planet, the Green movement could actually do more harm than good.

When I was nine, I was staying with my Aunt Theresa while my mother was having surgery. One afternoon after school, a very shocked Aunt Theresa opened the guest room door and was overwhelmed with light. Bounding out of the room and down the back steps to the yard, she found me on the patio holding an enormous bureau mirror which was aimed through the window to reflect on the two other mirrors in the room, so as form a repeating triangle of light. The heat was pretty intense!


"I'm making a solar heater" I said to my dumbfounded aunt when she asked me what I was doing. It was the 70s, so obviously I was concerned about the coming ice age.


As years went by, this story got trotted out from time-to-time as a testament to my youthful precociousness. At the moment however, I'm sure the immediate concerns of potentially burning down the house was far more present in my aunt's mind. And this is how I see most Green initiatives these days. Effective perhaps; but at what cost to man and planet.


Earlier this week The Socratic Review re-published a piece from WIRED entitled Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash. The premise of the piece is rather simple. Homeowners are being coaxed into spending tens of thousands of dollars on solar panels that (naturally) wear-out, and have to go into landfills. Other than taking up an inordinate amount of space (and being about as biodegradable as a plastic Volvo) the solar panels have the added horror of leaching any number of unpleasant chemicals into the groundwater.


Of course, when it comes to leaching nasty, caustic, toxic, chemicals into the groundwater, solar panels have nothing on batteries. In another piece from WIRED (published in 2018) and entitled, The spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction the author Amit Katwala looks into not just the costs and dangers involved in batteries, but the human toll as well; especially in the acquisition of rare elements like lithium. If you've ever wondered where the term: "back to the salt mines" comes from as a meme for something arduous and backbreaking, just take some time and read-up on the mining of lithium. This horrific industry is often executed by young children, and usually in places where Sally Struthers would be otherwise be hosting a tear-filled appeal for food, clothing, and medicine.

Of course, all of this could be sensible (and even justifiable) on some level, if it were in any way practical; which of course, it is not. Take for example the map on the left showing the inordinately small amounts of surface area on Earth that are required to power the entire world with solar energy. That is of course if you want to run power lines under say, the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea to use up said solar power generated in say, the middle of the Sahara.


One also has to wonder who produces these feasibility studies. Where is the answer to the obvious question as to who will maintain solar panels in 140 degree heat in a dessert without water, let alone who will drag those decayed panels out of a dessert that even with airplanes is dangerous to cross, and what do you do with said panels after you have dragged them across the dessert? How about another of their choices? Farmland in China? Do we really think solar farms set up in a country that gave parents the perennial guilt threat that "children are starving in China" to get them to eat broccoli, really think it's sensible to cover arable land with solar panels?


These are the questions we need to ask the Green activists; and these are the questions they need to answer before I can take any of them even remotely seriously. And no. I do not want to hear: "We're all going to die from carbon," while I am being handed a lithium-laced Kool Aid to drink. One eschatology is no less horrific than another. Like I said to an orthodox Jewish client of mine years ago over lunch: "Whether its the first coming or the second coming Art, its going to be about the same result for either of us."


Personally, I feel carbon based fuel is as dirty, archaic, and inefficient as buffalo chips; and have promoted that belief for a very long time. Personally I feel we are best served by creating wireless power grids, and putting our money into smaller and safer nuclear reactors.


The sad irony of all this of course, is that the entire modern Green movement sprang from the detritus of anti-nuclear arborists and environmentalists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, clutched their collective pearls over the horrors of nuclear waste. Granted, I am no fan of nuclear waste, but we have come far farther in re-purposing that (into energy by-the-way) then we have on what to do with batteries. And I'm not even talking about the big, shinny, new batteries mind you; I'm talking about the old ones chucked-out of every"batteries not included" game and toy that have befouled parents every Christmas and birthday for the past 80 years. And the flashlights, and car batteries, and the... I could be here listing "and the-s" until that solar panel the size of a Volvo biodegraded in your local landfill; it would make little difference.


We humans have choices to make if we want to maintain modernity as we know it. Do we kill ourselves with one poison, or do we kill ourselves with another? Whichever poison we choose, the Green poison has not offered me any comfort that would justify the cost, risk or aggravation. For me the Green movement is a very dangerous genie. And we all know what happens when genies get loose in the world without a plan to contain them; they prey on human frailty, ego, and hubris. Let's leave this one in the bottle for as long as humanly possible.


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