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.