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March 20th, 2022 
Awake Goy 
Batteries, they do not make electricity
– they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal,
uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So,
to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
Also, since forty percent of the
electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it
follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered,
do you see?”
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it
takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound
gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The
only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does
not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device,
like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries,
rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries
are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species
use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to
store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic,
heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in
their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide,
and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two
battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in
landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries
be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash,
here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging.
That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy.
You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured
battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or
light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak
small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out,
pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it
cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined
flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak
from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture;
it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the
landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries,
there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and
motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them
are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle
single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those
of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you
to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar
panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally
destructive production costs.
A typical EV 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-gallium- diselenide, 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.
The solution? Lead simpler lives and
use less energy.
Source:supplied
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