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"Green New Deal" - needs it's own thread


Muda69

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This Environmentalist Says Only Nuclear Power Can Save Us Now: https://reason.com/video/this-environmentalist-says-only-nuclear-power-can-save-us-now/

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Calling climate change an existential threat to humanity, congressional Democrats have proposed a policy package called the Green New Deal. It would mandate that 100 percent of U.S. energy production come from "clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources" like wind and solar by the year 2050.

But some environmentalists say Green New Dealers are neglecting one obvious source of abundant clean energy already available: nuclear power, which the Green New Deal FAQ wants to phase out along with such fossil fuels as oil, gas, and coal.

"It's when the conservationists became environmentalists that everything went bad," says Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress, a pro-nuclear research and advocacy nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. "It stopped being about the environment. It became about controlling society."

Shellenberger started his career in energy advocating for more government subsidies to wind and solar. He pushed for a new Apollo Project of $300 billion in federal research and development funding to make renewable energy sources cheaper than coal within a decade.

From 2009 to 2015, the Obama administration took up that call and put billions of dollars into renewable energy subsidies. That, Shellenberger says, opened his eyes to the fact that no amount of government funding can overcome the inherent drawbacks of renewables.

When California invested heavily in wind and solar, Shellenberger says it led to energy price increases at a rate about six times faster than the national average, despite the falling cost of solar panels.

Shellenberger says that the allure of nuclear power is its "energy density"—he estimates that the energy consumption of the average human being from birth to death can be provided by a single 12-ounce soda can's worth of uranium. He believes a nuclear renaissance could unlock a world of clean energy abundance, an idea he explores further in a document he co-authored, titled "An Ecomodernist Manifesto."

He contrasts his pro-growth, urbanist "ecomodernism" with the Malthusian, neo-primitivist "dark green" environmentalism that he thinks motivates many proponents of the Green New Deal.

"If you want to save the natural environment, you just use nuclear. You grow more food on less land, and people live in cities. It's not rocket science," says Shellenberger. "The idea that people need to stay poor…that's just a reactionary social philosophy that they then dress up as a kind of environmentalism."

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https://cowboystatedaily.com/2019/08/07/wind-turbine-blades-being-disposed-of-in-casper-landfill/?fbclid=IwAR1JYouAbKTUpx3Le2Dma5rJ5Y08btnW6qF88quZupUBLgIJJcXPu40YM8I

Decommissioned windmill blades

The Casper landfill will soon be the home of more than 1,000 decommissioned wind turbine blades and motor housing units. 

According to Cindie Langston, solid waste manager for the Casper Regional Landfill, the materials will be deposited in an area of the landfill designed to hold construction and demolition material. 

CRL is one of the few landfills with the proper permits and certifications to accept the decommissioned turbine materials. 

The turbine disposal project, which started this summer, is slated to continue until the spring of 2020, bringing the CRL estimated revenue of $675,485. Such “special waste projects” bring in about $800,000 a year, which helps keep CRL rates low, Langston said.

The wind turbine components are being delivered by InStream Environmental, a company that recycles and disposes of other companies’ waste streams. The company is retrieving the blades from two different wind farm locations.

Each turbine blade will need between 30 and 44.8 cubic yards of landfill space, using a total of 448,000 cubic yards of the 2.6 million yards set aside for construction and demolition material. The components are made of a fiberglass material that is one of the most inert, non-toxic materials accepted at CRL, Langston said. 

The average lifespan of a wind turbine is 20 to 25 years, and wind farms repurpose and recycle 90 percent of the materials in a wind turbine unit. The only materials not recycled are the fiberglass blades and motor housings. Nationwide, there are nearly 50,000 wind turbines, with 2,700 being decommissioned since the energy boom of the 1970s. 

Researchers at Washington State University are looking for ways to reuse the fiberglass components of aged-out turbines, but no practical commercial applications have yet been found. There is some hope that ground up blades can be used to create building materials, among other things.

To prevent acres of abandoned and decaying wind farms, Wyoming laws require companies provide bonds to cover the cost of decommissioning and disposal of turbines once they are taken out of service or abandoned.

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The Economy Keeps Growing, but Americans Are Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, and Energy: https://reason.com/2019/10/09/the-economy-keeps-growing-but-americans-are-using-less-steel-paper-fertilizer-and-energy/

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Environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel remembers the moment his research trajectory changed. Over dinner one night in 1987, his friend and colleague Robert Herman, a physicist with a wide range of interests, wondered aloud, "Are buildings getting lighter?" That apparently simple question inspired the pair to begin looking into the "material intensity" of the modern world.

In 2015, Ausubel published an essay titled "The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment." He had found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. Total annual U.S. consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly prior to 1970. But since then, consumption had reached a peak and then declined.

This was unexpected, to put it mildly. "The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that [a few colleagues] and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010," Ausubel wrote. "We found that 36 have peaked in absolute use…Another 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall."

A few years earlier, a writer and researcher named Chris Goodall had noticed something similar in the United Kingdom's Material Flow Accounts, "a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics," as the Guardian put it. He summarized his findings in a 2011 paper titled "'Peak Stuff ': Did the UK Reach a Maximum Use of Material Resources in the Early Part of the Last Decade?"

Goodall's answer to his own question was, essentially, yes: "Evidence presented in this paper supports a hypothesis that the United Kingdom began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade, well before the economic slowdown that started in 2008. This conclusion applies to a wide variety of different physical goods, for example water, building materials and paper and includes the impact of items imported from overseas. Both the weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003."

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The conclusion from this set of graphs is clear: A great reversal of our Industrial Age habits is taking place. The American economy is now experiencing broad and often deep absolute dematerialization. 

Is the rest of the world dematerializing? It's a hard question to answer definitively because there's no equivalent of the detailed and comprehensive USGS data for countries other than America. There is evidence, though, that other advanced industrialized nations are also now getting more from less. Goodall, of course, found that the United Kingdom is now past "peak stuff." And Eurostat data show that countries including Germany, France, and Italy have generally seen flat or declining total consumption of metals, chemicals, and fertilizer in recent years.

Developing countries, especially fast-growing ones such as India and China, are probably not yet dematerializing. But I predict that they will start getting more from less of at least some resources in the not-too-distant future.

 

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