My Thoughts on the Green Energy “Scams”

Merriam Webster definitions:
Thoughts: the intellectual product or the organized views and principles of a period, place, group, or individual. Note: Referring to the environmentalist’s green energy movement as a “scam” is based on many years of reading, all my real life experiences and decades of analysis of what I have seen and read.

Scam: a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation

Some examples of green energy scams:
Wind turbines never generate enough energy to pay for their cost of production. Plus it requires more energy (petroleum) to produce them, install them, maintain them and replace them than they will ever produce. The blades are not biodegradable and therefore take up many square miles of a landfill out west FOREVER. They are an eyesore, kill birds by the millions and damage the environment when they break down and leak lubricants. And they are made in Germany!

Electric/hybrid cars cost more to purchase and maintain than a comparable gas powered vehicle, are not as dependable as a comparable gas powered vehicle, cost more to operate than a comparable gas powered vehicle and the power grids in residential neighborhoods are nowhere near adequate to support charging stations for multiple residents with electric/hybrid car recharging stations. Regarding charging stations in public places, who pays for them? Answer: the rest of us. Electric/hybrid vehicles require an extraordinary amount of rare earth minerals to be produced, which must be mined, usually in non-environmentally friendly mines in non-environmentally friendly countries (extra pollution). Note: these non-environmentally friendly countries are also non “reasonable labor law” friendly countries (major child labor and worker exploitation violators).

The “Paris Climate Accord” is a major “world class” money scam. The “obiden administration” rejoined this “agreement” with a commitment to contribute $100,000,000 of US taxpayer dollars! They did this after America, under President Trump’s leadership exceeded all the “Paris Climate Accord” standards on our own without any help from any other member of the agreement! And with the current administrations changes in policies in its first days in office we will immediately began to contribute to the world’s pollution problems. Two examples:
Cancelling the Keystone Pipeline will dramatically increase the cost of transporting crude and dramatically increase emissions and environmental damage. Rail cars versus a pipeline! That is a “no brainer”! Cancelling the pipeline combined with stopping fracking on all federal land will (has already begun) make us be an energy importer instead of a net energy exporter (which President Trump did for us in only one term in office). Net result of these actions will be higher gas, and everything we eat or use prices, dependance on foreign countries that are not environmentally friendly and do not like us and huge oil tankers polluting our seas transporting the oil here.
These three examples prove beyond any doubt that the only reason to do any of this is to make sure the international billionaires who support these policies can put more billions in their pockets. AND GIVE BILLIONS TO THE POLITICIANS WHO ENACT AND ENFORCE THESE POLOCIES!

Regarding another environmentalist’s green energy program, their obsession with recycling. It is not as bad as the other “environmental programs” noted above, but it still has its problems:
I was born in the old rural south where we knew something about recycling, but it was not the recycling we hear about today. We recycled “coke” bottles (if it was a soft drink, we called it a “coke) because we had to pay a 2-cent deposit on the bottles or trade an equal number of empties for the drinks we were buying. This was a lot because a 6 pack of “cokes” cost 25 cents, so we brought the empties back (when we had the rare opportunity to buy some). This recycle had nothing to do with the environment. It was because the bottling companies reused the bottles because it was cheaper to do that then buy new ones every time. We got flour in large cloth bags because our mothers and grandmothers cooked a lot of bread (there were no 7-11s nearby with handy loafs of fresh bread or large grocery chain stores with loafs of bread and canned biscuits). The flour bags were cloth with patterns which our mothers and grandmothers washed and used to make us shirts. All glass jars were saved because our mothers and grandmothers reused them to preserve fruits and vegetables. Paper bags were reused to store things in or wrap things (plastic bags did not exist). Bits and pieces of metal or tin were thrown in a pile somewhere in the yard until someone would pile them in their truck and take them to the scrap yard for a few pennies or maybe even a dollar or two if you saved up a lot of “scrap iron”. Even used oil had uses. You used it to lubricate things (WD 40 and spray cans did not exist), in extremely hot dry summer months you sprinkled it on the dirt road that ran right in front of your house to keep down the dust and if needed you used it to “treat” the always present yard dog if it had the bad luck to get the mange or a bad case of fleas or ticks. There was no such thing as “garbage service”. What little garbage we did produce was burned in a barrel in the back yard (we did not have plastic or other toxic trash) and/or thrown in a convenient gully on your or a friendly neighbor’s property to slow erosion. It was all “common sense” at the time and the environment came through these times OK. Recycling today should also be based on “common sense “based on today’s needs.

Today we have too many modern conveniences to even mention them all here. Unfortunately, many of these have a cost to the environment so we all have an obligation to try and minimize this cost, but it must have a reasonable “return on investment”. For example many municipalities are acknowledging that glass recycling is a net loss to the environment and economy. The cost to recycle it, in labor and resources, is a lot more than any potential product of the recycling is worth. With increasing fuel, energy costs and labor cost I expect the list of recycling products that are more costly to do (financially and in energy cost) is going to grow. Fortunately for environmentally friendly folks like me there are recycling locations in many of our communities with “convenience centers” open to the public to accept household garbage and various approved recyclables such as paper, mixed paper, cardboard, and plastic. Unfortunately, when I take our recyclables, I often notice that some people “ignore” the posted guidelines. They do not break down their cardboard and place items that are not recyclable in the bins. This will eventually force many municipalities to reduce or stop recycling! Please do your part and do what you can for our environment!

We do need to do everything we can to protect our environment and be able to enjoy all the modern conveniences that we have today. But the actual cost to the environment for anything that we do CANNOT EXEED THE NET BENEFIT TO THE ENVIRONMENT BEYOND A REASONABLE AMOUNT!