Unobtainium Critique of Renewable Energy by Black Hooded Mark Mills

"Life Impact of Renewables" by Manhattan Institute's Mark Mills is still being widely shared in the MAGA universe. It was forwarded to me a month ago It might be a good thought experiment to question what is the half-life of a half-truth in half of a polarized society? But let's stick to math and science.

Does X - any object or technology - have environmental cost inputs? Certainly. A gold ring or smartphone has more costly inputs than a plastic ring or a corded dial up phone. Solar panels and wind turbines are not immune.  Everything has a break-even point to pay off the cost of the inputs. It's a time and math equation.

https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8

https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8

ARS TECHNICA's Science author John Timmer already rebutted this insidious critique of investment in renewable energy in 2021.  So if you watch the cringy attack by Mark Mills on renewable energy investments, read Ars Technica next. But I have a few things to add third.

Should I keep going after Alexander Clapp? Or just accept his Waste Wars surrender? Nameless, Faceless Buyers to Him are My Peeps.

Nobody at last week's E-Waste World Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, mentioned Alexander Clapp or his "Waste Wars" book.

Jim Puckett was there, refused to speak about it.

Clapp cites me in 2006 as a source, but won't take my Linkedin invite, let alone speak about what I learned in the 19 years since (20 actually, since my 2006 quote was already dated).

I've got a lot of interesting new stuff to talk about. It's interesting how non-interested Alexander is, both in the sense of his lack of interest in the truth and African and Asians lack of interest in his racial profiling of their Tech Sectors.

Hopefully one of Alex's family members who wrote reviews of his book on Amazon (and transparently didn't hide their family relation) read this, by searching for him.

He's a total fraud. But probably unintentionally... probably meant well, probably yearns, as I do, to be an environmentalist.  But he didn't interview any buyers... they - the market - is nameless, faceless. But I really wish he had the guts to talk to me, like Oli and Adam and even Kevin McElvaney did. Clapp is the biggest intellectual coward of any person I've tried to confront. Sad. 

A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?

A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025), was pursuing a Ph.D degree at the University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door, throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentecostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.

Ten Years Since 2015: The Agbogbloshie Fever Broke

From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.

The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.

But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).

 https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/

E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.

This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do.