Destroying the Earth to Save the Earth

By Bob Ellis on December 15th, 2009

High power Ni-MH Battery of Toyota NHW20 Prius (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Typical liberal logic: destroy the earth to save the earth.

This report from PBS indicates the rare elements necessary to build eco-friendly cars are themselves an ecological disaster to mine.

It doesn’t look very green. Rare earth processing in China is a messy, dangerous, polluting business. It uses toxic chemicals, acids, sulfates, ammonia. The workers have little or no protection.
But, without rare earth, Copenhagen means nothing. You buy a Prius hybrid car and think you’re saving the planet. But each motor contains a kilo of neodymium and each battery more than 10 kilos of lanthanum, rare earth elements from China.

Even the elements to build wind turbines are creating doom:

Green campaigners love wind turbines, but the permanent magnets used to manufacture a 3-megawatt turbine contain some two tons of rare earth. The head of China’s Rare Earth Research Institute shows me one of those permanent magnets. He’s well aware of the issues.

And like other places, the Chinese government has to subsidize wind energy to make it remotely workable. Rule of thumb: an industry that can’t maintain economic viability without government subsidies is usually an unnecessary waste of time.

If we’d had our current government in 1902, we’d see Washington subsidizing horse-drawn wagons and carriages.

Doesn’t it just seem like God has to be laughing at our stupidity, sometimes?

We belly-ache about a non-existent problem and go through all sorts of gyrations to fight this phantom that we otherwise probably wouldn’t employ…and these extra gyrations produce real (not imaginary) environmental problems. That’s truly stupid.

Of course, we could dump this cap and trade nonsense, along with the other socialist, counterproductive leanings of the liberals in our government…to get our industrial base back on its feet so we could start producing more of the things some other countries make such a mess of while producing. But no, that might actually make some sense, and worse still, might make America stronger, so liberals couldn’t possibly abide that.

Which is why we need to sweep every liberal possible from Washington in 2010 and 2012, so we can quit strangling our own country. It might just help the world, too.

Toyota looks near Bathurst for rare minerals (cbc.ca)
FoxBusiness: Trade Gap Widens Sharply in Sept. (foxbusiness.com)
Peer-Reviewed Study Finds That Global Warming Would Save Millions From Potential of ‘Death By Cold’ (c3headlines.com)
China Tightens Grasp on Rare Earth Metals Vital for Green Technologies (treehugger.com)
Hybrids fuel fears of metal shortage (thestar.com)

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