The much touted green energy economy and Net Zero goals are built on the dirty little secrets of slavery, child labour and environmental destruction, according to H. Sterling Burnett of the libertarian U.S. think tank the Heartland Institute. Those pushing Net Zero, like the Democrats in the U.S. and green energy elites profiting from mandates and subsidies, know child and slave labour is used to produce the minerals their green technologies demand. “They claim to care about it, but their actions belie their words,” charges Sterling Burnett.
It is time these issues were brought into the forefront of the Net Zero debate. Many societies around the world are hurtling towards the disastrous goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Years of relentless virtue signalling and hysterical climate scare mongering has set the scene for a collectivist re-ordering of society under the ridiculous notion that 80% of our current cheap and efficient energy sources can be replaced in less than 30 years by windmills and solar panels. In his eye-opening essay in Saturday’s Daily Sceptic, Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch, noted that it has long been clear that inhabitants of the Westminster Village had been happy to hype up fears of climate purgatory “and to fib about the road to redemption”.
Furthermore, noted Montford, a huge pipeline of wind projects is in place already, each eligible for an astonishing array of hidden subsidies. “Once built, they will suck wealth from our economy and hope from our society,” he observed.
Sterling Burnett writes that – according to the International Energy Agency – offshore wind requires more scarce minerals, rare earth elements and other critical metals per kilowatt hour of energy produced than any other source of electric power generation, renewable and non-renewable alike. Onshore wind and solar are the next that need critical mineral resources. The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad and almost all the refining is done by China alone.
A single onshore wind turbine requires up to three metric tons of copper and magnets, continues Sterling Burnett. Thousands of pounds of ore must be mined to produce a single pound of rare earths, while between 200,000 to 1,500,000 pounds of earth must be moved to produce the lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and other trace elements necessary to produce a battery pack for a single electric car. Billions of tones will have to be mined and refined to produce the large scale battery facilities providing backup power when wind and solar are offline. Sterling Burnett doesn’t mention it in his essay, but all these batteries will need to be replaced within 10 years, despite there not being enough lithium and cobalt to provide for the first round of manufacture.
Montford is in no doubt what the future holds if we continue along this path: “If we do not reverse course soon, our children will never know the wealth we have enjoyed until now, just poverty, rationing and hardship. And all because everyone is too scared to challenge the lies.”
Until that day comes, the relentless growth of the modern windmill business looks set to condemn ever more children to life in the mines. The conditions under which many of these materials are produced from mine to finished products are appalling, notes Sterling Burnett. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a large percentage of the world’s cobalt is mined under appalling conditions at small mines. “Child labour is not the exception, but the norm there,” he writes.
He continues: “Increasing the demand for cobalt will increase pressure on cobalt mines to produce more, meaning either more children will be put to work, or existing child labourers will be forced to work harder under dangerous conditions.” In the U.S., the Biden Administration acknowledged the problem of slave labour in China, having signed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act in 2021. But the reality of today’s supply chain, combined with insufficient intelligence on the ground, “makes it almost a certainty” that the green energy transition will be built with mineral, rare earth elements and parts using Chinese slave labour.
In addition, writes Sterling Burnett, a prominent form of modern slavery is climate imperialism, or eco-colonialism, with restrictive energy policies conceived and promoted by politicians in western economies being forced on some of the world’s poorest. “Though branded as environmentally friendly, these outlandish policies deny economic growth to those who most need it,” he writes. “In moral terms, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued penury and early death.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Because they don’t actually care about the plebs at all. Just virtue signaling amongst their own clique.
Remembering the days in which I had to do assessments and presentations for CAPEX for projects, If I had presented then what the Net Zero idiots present today, I wouldn’t have been in employment very long. It appears today that the costs, fiscal (outlay and payback) environmental (material abstraction, recycling and emissions etc.) Innovative improvements to the existing systems, and even the most basic cost analysis, is a thing of the past.
Lies are truth.
Corruption is honesty.
Slavery to extract tonnes of earth and minerals is freedom and ‘green’….
SNAFU
Danger is safety
Apart is together
Death is breath
Sickness is health
And you will be happy
I have an idea…… why doesn’t some enterprising journalist challenge Charlie-Boy in Windsor on the subject? He’s very fond of displaying his Eco Nutter credentials …. in contravention of our Constitution.
King GlobalWarming I might be busy giggling over Mein Koran and the poetic ‘morality’ therein…
I’m not too scared to challenge the lies. Maybe I am stupid, but the desire to repeatedly point out to my acquaintances the doom scenario of continuing along the path of Net Zero is just too strong to resist.
I have never particularly liked facilitating my own downfall.
I can understand your sentiment, but consider this quote from R. Reagan:
“To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.”
Reagan also said 9 words to fear are; Trust me I’m a politician, I’m here to help.
Reread my comment. Perhaps I wasn’t too clear.
Reread and understood. You were clear but I misconstrued based on your last sentence, and being in a hurry to get out the door.
I am probably of a similar ilk, where I am ignorant of the light that is the net zero cult of today. But have you noticed the vast majority of the people who believe in this stuff, have never worked in a manufacturing environment, never made anything, brought all they own from shops or online. They have this attituded that if I want something then I just look on line with absolutely no idea of the How, Why, When, Who, What, or Where it came from, just as long as I get it. They have no idea how fragile the foundations are, on which their lives are built.
If your part of the eco bubble, a large windmill or solar panel manufacturer for instance, or any other of the add on suppliers for this massive industry, you are guaranteed public money though world governments for an indeterminate amount of time! So what does the environment or slave labour matter? By the time all this falls apart you’ll be rich and living the high life somewhere warm and sunny.
Renewables? ….more like unreliables!
Net zero is being pushed by people with money. When you have so much money you can live outside of the society which gave you that wealth, why would you care for that society when the money keeps pouring in.
And are they going to stop spending other peoples’ money to implement it?
NET ZERO is simply the new pretend to save the planet slogan. ——-It is impossible to achieve this nonsense but that does not stop silly western politicians who pander to the UN and the Sustainable Development politics from spending trillions on it all paid for by YOU. The only thing NET ZERO will achieve is POVERTY.
Poverty. The ultimate zero.
Pol Pot would be envious.
I can’t get the link to Burnett’s article to work or find it by searching. But I think a little perspective is in order to respond to this windpower alarmism.
A single onshore wind turbine requires up to three metric tons of copper and magnets, continues Sterling Burnett
A windmill lasts about 25 years. So that is about 1/8th of a tonne a year. The UK uses over 14,000 tonnes of copper every year. If we are really concerned about reducing our consumption then perhaps windmills are not the place to start.
The Danes decommissioned a 25 year life expectancy turbine field after 15 years.
Wind turbines in the southern North Sea are money for old rope for my industry, one of the most mobile sea bed’s on the planet. Every six months or so a survey is required of the footings of each turbine to see how much erosion has taken place.
Obviously the actual life will vary and presumably increase as we get better at it. Even 15 years amounts to less than 1/4 tonne a copper a year.
The thing is that the life of a typical offshore turbine will not increase. They are put in one of the harshest environments on the planet.
Correct! All turbines are put in harsh environments, that’s where the best winds are!.. 25 years is an absolute maximum, 10 years is a good average for a turbine in the real world (which is where they all have to be, not in a manufacturers testing facility)
Freezing conditions are the pulverisers of turbine blades,..HAIL..especially so! good maintenance can limit their demise and aerodynamic viability to a 4 year replacement cycle! That’s a lot of replacements! The leading edge of the blades get badly damaged and are not economically viable after around 3 years but can be pushed longer with filler and paint!
Remote, No easy access, health and safety, expensive specialised crews, expensive repairs, hundreds of feet up or out at sea (hundreds of feet up) in intermittent weather conditions,miles of underground infrastructure, constant running and maintenance expenses!
What.. could possibly go wrong with the green future??
If so-called extractionism is bad, it must also be bad when employed to construct windmills. Otherwise, it’s just the usual, tired It’s bad when you do it to accomplish something you want to do and good when I do it to accomplish something I want to do construction. Considering that windmills are not only eyesores but also not exactly terribly useful and not even ecomonically viable without massive goverment subsidies, they look like a low-hanging fruit wrt reducing copper usage.
That’s another ‘popular’ standard pseudo-argument. Figuratively spoken, pricking one’s fingers with a needle doesn’t hurt much. But that’s certainly not a reason to do it.
And what about all the copper required for the electric cables from the windmills to some point on the grid?
I am not surprised at all.
In the early days of Covid, when I was still willing and able to comment on ‘progressive’ sites like Guardian, Zeit&co, I shared the World Bank report that forecasted 150million people being pushed back into powerty through OUR Lockdowns alone and asked whether that is OK with these ‘progressives’.
Unequivocally, they all said yes, and that their 80 yr old relatives lifes are far more important than 100 young brown peoples ones far away.
I stopped reading those rags and deleted my accounts there thereafter, as I then finally realised and accepted, that no reasonable discussion there was possible or intended with regard to Covid et.al.
Excellent article highlighting the real world catastrophic suffering this whole appalling agenda is leading to – and not just in those places which most buy into it such as the UK.
It is worth remembering that for decades now both individual countries (again, and of course, including Britain) and UN agencies such as the World Bank and IMF have precluded the sort of modern industrial and agricultural investment and assistance in eg Africa that from the 1960s on pulled India out of cyclical famines and into a relatively thriving economy in a very short period of time.
The absolute epitome of this sort of Green-based irrationality and cruelty took place in 2002, when the EU sought to prevent several African countries on the verge of a devastating famine (13 million threatened with 300,000 forecast to die in the immediate future) from accepting GM food aid from the US.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-disapproves-of-us-gm-food-aid-to-africa/
Net Zero indeed.
Net Zero – the new religion
Child & Slave Labour – happening far away
And also for white schoolgirls in cities across the UK.
It’s all about feeling and appearing to be morally superior, especially superior to the ‘peasants’ who must be directed and told what to do, ‘for their own good’.