The newly released book “Clean Energy Exploitations” helps citizens attain a better understanding that just for the opportunity to generate intermittent electricity dependent on favorable weather conditions, the wealthier and healthier countries like Germany, Australia, Britain, and the U.S. continue exploiting the most vulnerable people and environments globally.
Asians and Africans, many of them children from the poorer and less healthy countries, are being enslaved and are dying in mines and factories to obtain the exotic minerals and metals required for the green energy technologies for the construction of EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.
The same less-developed countries that control the supply chains for the materials to support the current electrification movement of wealthier nations, are mining for these materials in countries with virtually non-existent environmental regulations. This lack of oversight inflicts humanity atrocities and environmental degradation to the local landscape beyond comprehension.
While at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world are living on less than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians and mainstream environmentalists are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity.
To meet the needs of roughly 2.7 billion in China and India, mostly poor people, those countries have over half (1,363) of the world’s coal power plants (2,449). Together they are in the process of building 284 new ones. Whatever emission reductions the U.S., European Union, and western-aligned nations believe they are achieving by using solar panels and wind turbines for electricity is negated by 3rd-world, vulnerable populations reliance on coal-fired power plants.
The poorer and less healthy countries, like China, India, and Africa, are desperately in need of affordable, reliable, and continuously uninterruptible electricity for their billions of residents. Until clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, and hydrogen can meet the five electricity standards of being abundant, affordable, reliable, scalable, and flexible they are nothing more than niche forms of intermittent electricity. Under current technological constraints they are not anywhere near to meeting the five standards of reliable electricity.
We can easily observe the world’s poorest countries to see what lifestyles are like without the thousands of products from oil derivatives that benefit the richer countries. In those poorer countries there are 11 million children in the world dying every year. Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to those products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries.
Read the rest of this piece at CFact.org.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
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