And upstream too. The Daily Mail looks at the Chinese industrial area supplying the magnets for Europe’s clean wind farms. It’s a wasteland. The Chinese industrial area that is.
The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.
Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.
This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.
But the Chinese don’t vote in British elections. They are not a relevant constituency for the Greens. So who gives a damn?
Now that you know what is behind windfarms, let’s look at what underpins the clean disposal of ships that can longer be broken up in Europe. Half of them are broken up in Alang, India.
Large supertankers, car ferries, container ships, and a dwindling number of ocean liners are beached during high tide, and as the tide recedes, hundreds of manual laborers dismantle each ship, salvaging what they can and reducing the rest into scrap. Tens of thousands of jobs are supported by this activity and millions of tons of steel are recovered. …
The salvage yards at Alang have generated controversy about working conditions, workers’ living conditions, and the impact on the environment. One major problem is that despite many serious work-related injuries, the nearest full service hospital is 50 kilometres away in Bhavnagar. Alang itself is served by a small Red Cross hospital that offers only limited services.
There’s another major ship graveyard on the coast of Madagascar. But it’s in Africa and they don’t vote in Western elections either. Although “environmentalists” are often happy to see oil prices rise because it prices “carbon” out of the reach of consumers, its greatest effect on the Third World has been to raise food prices. The unrest in the Middle East are directly the result of unaffordable food.
But that’s OK. The Voluntary Human Extinction Project believes “the biosphere of the planet Earth would be better off without humans. In VHEMT’s view, the human race is akin to an “exotic invader”, whose population is out of control and threatens other species with extinction, and only removal of the human race can restore the natural ecological order.”
And if there’s trouble in the Middle East, why just get America to bombing the living s**t out of the unrestful natives with B-2 bombers and the sophisticates can thereafter take the lead. Where extinction is concerned, why not just get the natives and the bitter clingers to kill each other. Extinction can wait a little, put off till the next glorious sunset. You know, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
And how can anyone forget the reluctance of those on Cape Code to build wind-farms that might ruin their view? It’s amazing how unattractive Green becomes when it acquires a human face. Or maybe that’s how unattractive the human view becomes when they see the Green Face.
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How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold …And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who say they care about social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend.
If you need a friend, buy a dog.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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I’m of the theory that the planet Earth exists to support human life. If there were no humans, what would be the point of Earth? As far as those wanting to check out of life, I’ll buy them a round. I got a deal last year on .40 S & W . They will need their own delivery system.
Interesting piece. I was just reading something about what wind power is looking like in the US. These wind mill farms quickly turn into unmaintained blights on the landscape with highly dubious power output capabilities:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/the-reality-of-wind-turbines-in-california-video/
So, certainly, at both ends, they are doing more damage than good.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=mafia+in+green+business&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
great hard-hitting post, wretchard. Greenism –the scam of all time? Well, subprime is competitive.
The issue was proper-sized and proper-addressed back when fishermen and duck hunters and national park enthusiasts led on it. These people –the earlier SDierra Club sorts –were not left wing destructors, but simply outdoorsfolk balancing commercial development. Dunno where the commies came from. Oh yes i do.
Thieves fall out. The people who killed the nuclear industry in the US find some of their former henchmen using the same tactics against them.
Who will tell the Chinese Rulers who gather at Beidaihe each July that they need a vista of wind turbines and recycling centers to keep abreast of the worker’s needs?
We know the score
The great Al Gore
Thinks carbon is a killer
While other folks
Think all the jokes
Are dead as Barney Miller
Where once we laughed
We’re now so daft
Some think life should be ended
Not all of course
We’ll save the horse
But man esta delended
Meantime the Chink
In one quick blink
Has gathered all the money
So what the bees
All die with ease
They now have all the honey
Whether or not the Sustainability worshipers have wrenched control, they sure seem to have triggered helter skelter world wide.
Where are the optimistic adults? Are they too late? How come I could not get your discussion going on this several years before it came to this Wretchard? You’ve crossed its path many times, but I do not recall you calling out on their agenda the various architects like VHEMT and The Church of Euthanasia or the Georgia Guidestones, or the political leadership who never uttered a harsh word towards any of these.
W: It’s a wasteland. The Chinese industrial area that is.
The reminder is that the industrial wastelands are in China, not USA, because the Green Movement objected.
My personal view is different. The “Vehemists” from Oregon notwithstanding (radical fringe), and the Deep Ecologists notwithstanding (interesting – and more serious – but still fringe), and the AGW crowd notwithstanding (egregious over-reach but ultimately a trend that should be monitored and tracked) – despite the missteps of the environmental movement, I submit it has done more good than harm.
So far. In my second breath, I would also argue that the Movement 2.0 has been corrupted by political interests with agendas quite distinct from sustaining an environmentally healthy planetary ecosystem.
The Chinese “wasteland” is not a failure of the environmental movement so much as it is a failure of the Chinese government – and, by extension, the Chinese people. Same for the shipyards in India. (How long before the Chinese and the Indians have their Book of Job Moment and begin to object to the effects of industrial pollution?)
The whole thing has a baby-bathwater quality about it. The movement should not be condemned for the failure of sponsors who have co-opted the agenda in a rather clever way to achieve an alternative set of objectives.
Teasing the two movements apart is not impossible, but it does require a certain level of insight, wisdom, and sophistication. I’m thinking BP.
Here’s another latecomer: William McGurn, Vice President of News Corporation (parent to Fox News Channel to the unknowing), writing in this month’s Imprimus newsletter, under the obscure title “The Not So Dismal Science: Humanitarians v. Economists” [Beware -- The Hillsdale folks did not provide a permalink, so copy it if you want to keep it for reference.]
I guess he’s decided it’s now “timely” to relate to us the overly pessimistic influence of the Neo-Malthusians such as Ehrlich and McNamara.
Why is this so late, and written so obscurely? Are we to assume that the Establishment Right also harbors this death wish? Does the sun rise in the East?
Poorer people will be starved to death, or murdered for what they have, as fuel prices soar, food is converted to fuel, and dollars gets printed to keep pace.
Our “Intelligentsia” has a confrontational date with the Almighty, and I think they believe they’ll win. Theirs is the ultimate crime against humanity. DAMNED SKUNCs to my loyal readers.
Oh, for those who don’t know, I’ve long questioned the humanitarianism of the “humanitarians.” Under my masthead reads the following: “If our ‘leaders’ are so humanitarian, how is it that we never hear them direct a harsh word at the Malthusian, Utilitarian and Green nutcases?”
YBR seems to think that there are good guy environmentalists and bad guy environmentalists. Back in the era before the collapse of the Soviet Union, leftists often claimed that there were lots of good guy communists, but bad guy Stalin had hijacked the movement and given communism a bad name. They were full of shit.
All environmentalism is based on the notion that the {environment | nature | gaia} is more important than human well being. But, all political theories must satisfy Cicero’s maxim (and the epigraph of Locke’s Second Treatise, and the motto of the State of Missouri): Salus Populi Lex Suprema Esto. [The Welfare of the People is the Highest Law]. Environmentalism, therefor cannot be a valid political theory.
The variability of wind energy dooms the economics of wind turbines.
The robustness required to endure freak winds — which ALWAYS come — drives investment and repair skyward.
Yet the average available wind energy is pathetic. You’ be better off with solar — and that’s still no bargain.
And then you have to face the destruction of birds. It’s no small thing. Many of the turbine repairs are triggered by bird strikes.
The areas with the best strongest winds are ALWAYS along bird migratory paths. Yeah, they like/ need to coast on the wind, too.
I’d junk the entire field.
Give me nukes.
Much, much safer, especially when calculated per mega-watt-hour.
It’s not even close.
FM@9: All environmentalism is based on the notion that the {environment | nature | gaia} is more important than human well being.
The (albeit fine) distinction is the difference between coincidence and trend.
Humanity generates waste streams – call them impacts. The process of accounting for these impacts is not a philosophical defeat of anthropocentric epistemology so much as it is a technical reality confirmed by empiricism.
Denying the human impact on ecosystems is no more rational than some of the proposed mitigation measures. As I wrote: insight, wisdom, and sophistication yield better response mechanisms.
No doubt about it. Death cult useful idiots are filled with sophistic-ation.
Where’s that 10-10 No Pressure, BBC produced ad, with its having moved on from PC to brazen threatening, that you sophisticates claimed was only a joke? IIRC, Wretchard posted it in late September.
Re: limitations of wind power, an excellent article was published a little over a year ago in the American Thinker. The link follows.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
Living in California, I have seen most of these farms and, each time I do, I wonder why so many of the windmills are immobile, even in times of stiff winds. This article provides a glimpse into why this is so.
walt’s terrible swift sword
i think what ybr is saying is that, because the radicals worship nature but nature without humans in it, that what we are seeing is idol worship, and that there is a tendency to blame the actual calf when the nutjobs worship a golden one.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/the-other-global-toxic-cloud-chinas-pollution/72722/
h/t instapundit, posted last night
@3 Buddy Larson,
As a life member of Sierra Club since 1954, I’m skeptical of These people –the earlier SDierra Club sorts –were not left wing destructors, but simply outdoorsfolk balancing commercial development.
By the mid-1960s, the Sierra Club Bulletin was running articles of more or less disguised Marxism, anticapitalism, ‘social justice’, collective control of resources. And with their huge fundraising, organizing and litigating successes since that time, they’ve paralleled the Democratic Party in moving far left, behind an oh-so-scientific smokescreen.
i hear ya, IS –i had just thought it had taken a bit longer before they ‘turned over’ –
bl@3-Greenism –the scam of all time?
It certainly looks that way to me. Only other scam on such a massive scale that comes to mind are the indulgences sold by the Church back in the day, but at least we got St. Peters Basilica out of that!
I’m guessing that China’s environmentalism will come, but only if and when they get used to being able to afford a full stomach and a warm and well lit house around them.
I’m also guessing that our greenism will have died around the same time, for loss of the same basics.
The question for us is, whether prosperity will return as a result of the greenism dying, or whether the state will continue its self perpetuating plunder of wealth from those who produce it.
The loss of 1/3rd of Europe’s population in the 14th century can be laid at the immediate door of the black death, but behind that is the weakening of their imune systems by the collapse of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP for short).
If we follow the greens in denying the existence of the MWP, then we are left with the impoverishment of the population at the hands of their war mongering kings’ tax collectors and bureaucrats as the only enabler of the plagues.
The taxing of the Champagne trading fairs and the collapse of international trade under taxation, and the expropriation of the funds of bankers and merchants, and the debasement of coinage.
De-ja Vous?
Just a personal guess, and apologies if someone else has commented this before me.
ps
I picked up on a train of lithium bearing pegmatite material in the boulderclay about two miles from home today. That stuff generally contains tantalum minerals too – good job the local greens just got voted out! Next job is to follow it to its bedrock source.
Keith, before you take on any partners, be sure and catch Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart –
YBR, I’ve a little more time tonight. Dealing directly with your clever turn of phrase “insight, wisdom, and sophistication yield better response mechanisms.”
How much insight does it take to understand the need to deny the radical green agenda in order to advance it?
Were the radical greens simply planning to eliminate 12 out of 13 from a herd of 6.5 billion sheep, that might be doable. But accomplish that with 6.5 billion sheeple requites them to follow your advice which happens to match that of pharaoh’s advisers in Exodus 1:10 “Come, let us deal wisely with them.”
So the sophistication of which you speak is much closer to sophistry — as I implied above — than most readers might imagine. Do you realize that the green morality is of the new, sophisticated (adulterated) variety? Ultimately they redefined innocence. Any human not deemed useful is guilty of being a burden on the planet and has no right to exist.
I don’t know you personally, and you may very well look at my notions of the sacredness of innocent human life as being quaint. But the green monsters look at the Judeo-Christian ethic as the ideology of the enemy, thus putting Christians and Jews in the cross-hairs once again. If this is what you think is progressive, that is, the value of human life regressed to the time of the early Roman empire, then maybe you’ve become a monster too.
http://www.wesjones.com/shipbreakers.htm
At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world’s discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone — and maybe they should be.
Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 2000.