Archive for the ‘Rare Earth Minerals’ Category

SOLAR PANELS/WIND TURBINES WASTE

Monday, January 8th, 2024

 

Green Energy Waste Overlooked In Climate Agenda
The amount of waste piling up from solar panels and wind turbine blades can be measured in tons. And the industry is just getting started.
Almost all spent solar panels in the United States end up in landfills, and many first- and second-generation panels are already tapping out, well ahead of their anticipated 30-year lifespan.
Added to that will be an estimated 9.8 million metric tons of dead panels to deal with between 2030 and 2060, according to a study published in Science Direct.
Tossing a solar panel into a U.S. landfill currently costs about $1, maybe $2. To recycle that same panel, the cost balloons to $20 to $30, according to an estimate reported by PV Magazine.
Wind turbine parts present a similar challenge, with thousands of blades having already found their way into dumps and fields in Texas, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Iowa.
It’s no small feat to dump a blade. The length of a single wind turbine blade can be more than 200 feet or longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 747, according to the Department of Energy. Offshore wind rigs are even larger.
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PRAGER U – HOW MUCH ENERGY WILL THE WORLD NEED?

Saturday, August 26th, 2023

 

5 Minute Prager U Video –  HOW MUCH ENERGY WILL THE WORLD NEED ?

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U.S. TAKES ON COBALT’S INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Friday, August 25th, 2023
Fracking for fossil fuel energy in the U.S. is supposed to be way too dangerous !  Look at mining for cobalt for batteries for green energy in the Congo!!!  Nancy

In Quest for Battery Metals, U.S. Takes On Cobalt’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’

U.S. officials are offering grants to companies willing to support workers in Congo’s dangerous informal mining sector

By Alexandra Wexler and Yusuf Klan

Aug. 24, 2023 7:00 am ET


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(6 min)

The U.S. is turning to a much-criticized source as it races to secure supplies of battery metals to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles. 

To do so, it is homing in on cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s informal mining sector, where miners, sometimes including children, often work with no safety equipment in dangerous, hand-dug mines. Congo supplies around 70% of the world’s cobalt, a key metal in the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs, with about a third of that coming from these so-called artisanal miners.

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VIDEO – TRUMP RALLY JULY 1, 2023

Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

 

VIDEO      TRUMP RALLY IN PICKENS, SOUTH CAROLINA  JULY 1,  2023  
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VIDEO- COBALT MINING AND CHILD SLAVE LABOR

Sunday, June 11th, 2023

 

Perhaps everyone of us who has a smart phone or who  uses rechargeable batteries should consider giving reparations to these modern day child slave workers.  A  real eye opener  for Green Energy !!  Please watch the video and share with your contacts.    Nancy 
VIDEO – COBALT MINING AND CHILD SLAVE LABOR
 year ago

Your Smart Phone Was Made By Child Slave Labor

Your Smartphone Is Powered by Child Labor at Cobalt Mines in Africa. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has accused several tech and auto industry giants of turning a blind eye to child labor. In a damning report released on Tuesday, the organization found that major brands, including Apple, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen, were allowing cobalt mined by children into their products. Cobalt — a metallic element that is found mostly in minerals — is a key component in the lithium-ion rechargeable batteries that power electronic devices such as laptops, smartphones, and electric cars.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in central Africa, is the world’s top cobalt producer, accounting for more than half of the planet’s supply. According to the DRC’s government, 20 percent of the cobalt exported by country is extracted from mines in the southern province of Katanga.

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WHAT’S BEHIND THE PUSH FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES?

Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

 

The negatives for EV’s just keep piling up. The possibility  that forces to be would be able to curtail our movements by shutting down or limiting our access to the electric grid just never occurred to me ! Sounds crazy, I know, but look how easy it was to lock down our  economy and severely limit our activities for two years just by using fear.     Nancy  
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: 

This coerced conversion plan is clearly a disaster if the goal is to provide the American people a better way to travel.  But what if the goal is something other than converting to a “better mousetrap?” Could it be that a coalition of globalists, environmental fundamentalists, and totalitarian-leaning politicians are conspiring to limit the freedom of Americans and control their ability to move about? After all, it is a lot easier to shut down, curtail, or monitor a centrally managed electric grid than it is to close 115,000 gas stations. Americans might want to wake up and think about the risks of buying into the virtue-signaling conversion to EVs.  The way of life that we have enjoyed for over a century may very well be at stake.
February 27, 2023

What’s behind the push for electric vehicles?

The modern internal combustion engine is an engineering marvel.  These power plants run incredibly clean.  According to the EPA, overall gasoline car tailpipe emissions are now about 98–99% less than for cars in the 1960s.  Many current gas-powered cars get well over 35 miles per gallon and have highway ranges of over 500 miles.  Refueling takes five minutes, and there are 115,000 gasoline stations in the U.S.

So why the huge push by the U.S. government to convert to electric vehicles?  It is curious, given that E.V.s are actually inferior to gas vehicles for most uses.  (Perhaps a case could be made for hybrid vehicles in short-range, high-density urban settings.)  Also, beyond vehicle performance, there are other serious negative side-effects of this E.V. conversion.  To recap, here are some of the problems with widespread conversion to E.V.s:

Environmental Damage — Several studies have shown that when factoring in the production process and electricity generation needed to charge the batteries, E.V. conversion can be more damaging to the environment that gas vehicles.

Rare Earth Mineral Mining Problems — The mining of rare earth minerals such as lithium and cobalt for E.V. batteries causes a great deal of environmental damage.  Much of this is done in foreign counties that don’t have good environmental oversight.  Furthermore, to meet the international goal of two billion E.V.s by 2050 would require triple the amount of annual lithium currently mined for all purposes.  Disposal of spent batteries can have toxic environmental effects, and mitigation of this issue hasn’t been thought through or planned.

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OUR MILITARY – CAN IT DEFEND US ?

Monday, February 20th, 2023
This is a very sobering analysis of our country’s military preparedness.  Nancy 
  1. Manufacturing victory
US Grand Strategy Requires an Industrial Revival
By Sean Durns   February 10, 2023

There is good news and bad news in American foreign policy . The bad news first: The country’s defense industrial base is hollowed out, leaving the United States without the weapons that it would need in future conflicts and barely able to maintain a precarious peace in the near term.

The good news: The problem is fixable, and doing so would not only strengthen America’s defenses but boost the economy by creating durable jobs.

On all fronts, in other words, America would stop writing checks it can’t cash.

We simply don’t have the industrial capacity to maintain our current policy menu indefinitely, which includes aiding Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression and boosting Taiwan to forestall an invasion from China.

Indeed, a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., detailed the challenges facing the defense industrial base. That study , titled “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment,” concluded that “in the event of a major regional conflict — such as war with China in the Taiwan Strait — the U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense.”

Some of the report’s findings are bleak.

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ELECTRIC VEHICLES – WHY SO FEW PEOPLE WANT ONE

Sunday, September 11th, 2022

 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One

They wouldn’t need huge subsidies to sell if they really were a good choice, and consumers know that.

by Bjorn Lomborg  Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” September 9, 2022

We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?

In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China.

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THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE SCAM

Thursday, August 11th, 2022

 

 The Electric Vehicle Scam

Apr 9

This is an article that intrigued me on an another forum. It contains some thinking that was new to me. Give it a read and see what you think.

The Electric Vehicle Scam

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris | Jan 15, 2022 | Climate
Change, Feature 1, Lifestyle, Politics

The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections to operate electric vehicles (EVs) or the increased rates that they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required, but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it. Electric vehicles will never become the mainstream of transportation!

In part 1 of our exposé on the problems with electric vehicles (EVs), we showed that they were too expensive, too unreliable, rely on materials mined in China and other unfriendly countries, and require more electricity than the nation can afford. In this second part, we address other factors that will make any sensible reader avoid EVs like the plague.

EV Charging Insanity

In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time?

ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes why installing electric car charging stations in a city is impractical:

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REPLACING AN ELECTRIC CAR BATTERY – GOOD LUCK !!!

Monday, July 18th, 2022

 

Florida teen learns hard lesson when electric vehicle quits: replacement battery costs more than car itself

July 18, 2022 | Todd Jaquith

A 17-year-old in Florida got a rude awakening when she found out that the replacement battery for her used electric car would cost more than the vehicle itself.

Avery Siwinski is just an average teenage girl who was thrilled when her parents coughed up the money for an $11,000 used Ford Focus electric car, a 2014 model EV with 60,000 miles on the odometer. It seemed like a great choice at the time: gas prices and inflation are skyrocketing, and driving an electric car around town was the perfect way to save on money and save the environment at the same time.

But, according to KVUE 10 News, Siwinski only had the car for six months before it started having issues. That’s when the flashing symbols started to appear on the dashboard. It’s a lot like when your phone quits on you—but in this case, it’s your car, the one you rely on to get you from place to place.

And it turns out fixing your electric car is a lot pricier than repairing an iPhone.

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