"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.
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.
Mark Mills’s "Life Impact of Renewables," published under the Manhattan Institute, purports to offer a sober evaluation of the environmental and human costs of renewable energy. What it delivers instead is a selective, rhetorically loaded critique that too often substitutes ideological framing for balanced analysis.
To be sure, Mills raises valid concerns about the material intensity of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries—particularly regarding mining impacts and the global supply chains behind clean energy technologies. These are real issues that deserve rigorous attention. Unfortunately, his treatment is anything but rigorous. The report downplays the equivalent (and often greater) impacts of fossil fuel infrastructure while assuming renewables must be perfect to be valid alternatives.
Where Mills is most misleading is in his cherry-picked comparisons. He frequently cites total tonnage of materials used in wind turbines and EVs without normalizing for energy output over time, geographic impact, or life cycle emissions. Such omissions exaggerate the scale of renewable impacts while leaving fossil fuels remarkably unexamined. The result reads less like a data-driven energy critique and more like a polemic designed to undermine climate policy through insinuation rather than substance.
Moreover, Mills shows little interest in the economic or geopolitical benefits of decentralized and domestic renewable energy—such as energy independence, rural employment, or resilience in the face of global oil shocks. His refusal to acknowledge these upside dimensions makes the report feel less like a cost-benefit analysis and more like a partisan editorial in think tank clothing.
In conclusion, while Mills deserves credit for reminding us that renewables are not impact-free, "Life Impact of Renewables" fails the basic test of intellectual honesty: it holds clean energy to an impossible standard while letting legacy fuels off the hook entirely. As such, the report does more to cloud the public discourse than to enlighten it.
No comments:
Post a Comment