Listening to Obama and other alternative energy activists around the world, people might think that wind power represents the hope of a clean planet; free from the corrupting effects of oil and coal, but a report published by the U.K. Daily Mail paints an ugly picture of the dark, polluting side of wind energy.
The dirty secret about wind power
One thing activists in the West don’t mention when they talk about a future that is free of fossil fuels is that a huge portion of their alternative energy products come from Communist China. This fact has two huge implications.
First, this means that green energy jobs are a myth. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean present an optimistic future where hundreds of thousands of new jobs are created for their nations when “green” energy like wind power is encouraged. Unfortunately, as revealed in a Renewable Energy World expose, Western economies cannot support the production of so-called “green energy” products like wind turbines because – like virtually everything else – building them in Western nations costs too much.
Enter China where large deposits of rare earth metals and either slave labor (or nearly-slave labor) coexist, allowing companies to create wind turbines, solar panels, and other alternative energy equipment cheaper than they can be made anywhere else in the world.
The other implication associated with producing “green” power products in Communist China is that the Chinese are not bound by the self-imposed environmental factors that have stifled manufacturing in the developed world. In other words, the Chinese do not seem to care what happens to the environment as long as they are shipping out billions of tons of exports in exchange for Western currency.
In other words, wind is not nearly as “green” as politicians and environmental activists want the general public to believe.
Wind power: An environmental nightmare
The Daily Mail story takes readers to Baotou China, a place where plants process rare earth metals as part of the process of producing magnets for the thousands of wind turbines produced with funds from American, British, and other government subsidies designed to make wind power viable.
Baotau is just one example of how smokestacks, free of environmental regulations, spew out toxic smoke without any apparent attempt to “scrub” their output of harmful chemicals and gasses. Toxic waste in Baotau is pumped onto the earth’s surface, forming a toxic lake of industrial sludge.
According to a representative of Greenpeace China, speaking to the Daily Mail, there is not even one step in the process of producing magnets from rare earth metals such as neodymium that does not represent a calamity for the environment.
All for money
Chinese industrialists working for Chinese government owned companies, annually dump an estimated 7 million tons of toxic chemical and radioactive waste into the sprawling six-mile-wide, 100 foot-deep toxic lake that has poisoned farmland for miles around and sickened untold thousands of area residents.
They do it all for money. Money paid by Western companies receiving government subsidies designed to make wind power artificially affordable.
Bad news for the people
The bottom line of the Daily Mail story seems to be this: wind power is bad for people and for the environment. Bad because people have to pay the high taxes required to subsidize the purchase of wind generators by private corporations. Bad because the inefficiencies of wind power generation make electricity cost twice as much. Bad because Chinese workers and citizens have to live, work and die in cesspools of toxicity in order to help the West “save the environment.” Wind power is bad for the environment because the land is poisoned for many decades to come.
From now on, people should listen with intense skepticism to politicians and environmentalists touting clean and green wind power.
