AN ASSESSMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY BY ENVIRONMENTALIST DERRICK JENSEN IN HIS BOOK “BRIGHT GREEN LIES”.

A section of the book BRIGHT GREEN LIES by Derrick Jensen is dedicated to debunking renewable systems. Solar, wind, tidal and geoengineering projects all require gigantic convoys of tax dollars, while providing no real reduction in greenhouse gases over fossil fuels. For one thing, all the mining, manufacturing, transporting, assembling and maintaining of these systems add tremendously to the environmental toll. Wind and solar are not dependable sources. And environmentalists lie about how they are taking over in some economies. Their math is bogus, cherry-picking short periods of otherwise slack demand on a sunny or windy off-day to report that renewables carried the burden almost entirely on their own. They then attribute dominance of renewables to the entire country. This, the book says, is how Germany got its reputation in wind and solar. The truth is much more pathetic. Environmentalists have learned to game the system. There is an entire chapter on dams and hydropower, long considered the poster child for renewables and sustainables. The authors show how the dams wreak havoc with animals, birds, fish and insects as well as topsoil and air. The interruption of water flows prevents fish from doing what they must to contribute to the balance, with hundreds of other creatures dependent on them. Silts no longer flow downstream. Flooding no longer feeds the forests, meadows and plains. Species like the huge variety of salmon all over the world, now face extinction thanks to dams. The huge amount of natural resources commandeered to build and maintain the dams makes them far from benign players in the carbon buildup. Not to mention that they are responsible for nearly a quarter of the methane that escapes into the atmosphere from manmade sources. As with every method and means they explore, the chapter ends with the question – call this sustainable? The same story applies in the chapters on wind and solar. It’s hard to tell which one is worse. They consume vast amounts of concrete, steel and rare earths. They are hugely expensive and are only competitive thanks to massive subsidies at every step. They kill endangered species. They are dependent on weather and so are not at all dependable sources of energy. There are scary stats to ponder: Scotland cleared 17,000 acres of 14 million trees to install wind energy systems. Was this a good trade? Not for the first time, the authors show that mathematically, there just isn’t enough space, money or resources to make the whole civilization run on renewables. They say it would take 80 billion metric tons of extraction to effect the switch. The planet would basically have to devote everything it produces for years to come to pull off this conversion. And it wouldn’t be worth it because ultimately, renewables provide a net-zero reduction in carbon emissions per dollar. Not net zero as in carbon reduction, but net zero difference from fossil fuels. It’s an environmental con game for the authors.