Solar panel lead in the groundwater and wind turbine fiberglass in your lungs.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
20 years after voters rejected ‘toilet-to-tap’ water, Los Angeles Democrats brag that they will be the first city in the state to pipe toilet water to faucets for the sake of the environment.
As part of the city’s version of the Green New Deal, a majority of Los Angeles water will be ‘toilet-to-tap’. California Democrats, who refuse to build new dams or do anything to expand water resources, are set to spend at least $12 billion on what they describe as “locally sourced” water which certainly sounds nicer than toilet water. The environmentalist elites will go on drinking bottled water and it will be the city’s poor drinking out of the toilet.
Environmentalists insist that nothing can go wrong even though a 2019 NIH hosted survey noted that “there have been relatively few health-based studies evaluating the microbial risks associated with potable reuse” and that California wants to achieve “a benchmark level of public health protection of 1 infection in 10,000 people per year.” That’s 1,000 people in Los Angeles County. The risks include “pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and protozoa” transmitted via a fecal-oral route” including Hepatitis A. A new reservoir might cost $4 billion, but environmentalists would rather spend three times as much on their toilet-to-tap plan.
‘Toilet-to-tap’ is just one of the multitude of ways that environmentalism creates an environmental hazard, threatening public health and undermining life in California.
No state has been as in love with solar power. With over 700 solar power plants and hundreds of thousands of residential solar panels, Californians enjoy an expensive and unreliable energy supply that leads to regular brown-outs. Solar panels generate their energy during the day, when most people aren’t home so that it goes to waste while being useless at night.
But in Hotel California, you can’t check out of subsidizing China’s exported solar industry.
As of 2020, California Democrats imposed a solar mandate requiring all new homes to have solar panels which added over $10,000 to the cost of a new home putting home ownership even further out of the reach of most people and making a mockery of talk of “affordable housing”.
The California Public Utilities Commission has admitted that the state has far more solar panels than it needs, but has argued that it should “dramatically overbuild solar” and then let it go to waste. Wasting a lot of energy has become the best way to stop waste and save the planet.
But that’s not all that’s going to waste.
With a lifespan of 25 years, the early generations of solar panels have begun to clutter up the state’s landfills. Ironically, only about 10% of the solar “green energy” solution are recycled and the rest represent a serious toxic waste hazard. Behind the illusion of clean energy is the grimy reality that solar panels break down and just turn into poisonous and dangerous trash.
Recycling, itself a scam, often just sends our waste abroad to poor countries. A New York Times article described how in Africa, laborers “break them open with machetes and drain the acid into the ground by hand” which “pollutes the soil and water with lead, which can lead to brain damage.” Actual recycling of solar panels is unworkable because it costs more to recycle them than it does to make them. So it’s just more economical to bury solar panels in landfills.
Faced with a growing toxic solar panel problem, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control reclassified them. In a press release typical of the state’s environmentalist puffery which always boast about being the first to pursue some disastrous policy, DTSC boasted that it was the “first in the nation” to “add hazardous waste solar panels to its universal waste program.”
Meredith Williams, DTSC’s director, claimed that lowering hazardous waste restrictions on solar panels was “another great step forward in our state’s efforts to put environmental protection first – both for the health and safety of our people and natural resources.”
California Democrats were boasting of being the first in the nation to ignore the environmental risks of an environmental policy in the name of the environment. The planet was being destroyed to save the planet. And people were being exposed to toxic chemicals to prop up the solar panel industry, its woke investors who finance the Democrats, and Chinese manufacturers.
California solar has become too big to fail. With billions in state subsidies and massive amounts of money seized from homeowners to fund the solar scam, the threat of lead and cadmium leaching into groundwater can’t be permitted to stop the environmentalist solar disaster.
As each generation of solar panels ages into oblivion, the solar trash problem will boom. And it’s just getting started. The hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar panels will either end up in the trash or will require spending twice as much up front to subsidize their eventual disposal.
At least.
While California Democrats fight to shut down the state’s nuclear power, they double down on solar which as Michael Shellenberger has argued, “produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste.”
California’s solar subsidies will not only put homeownership further out of reach but are set to cover the state in toxic trash. Solar panels are worthless as energy and they’re worthless as trash. Governments have to mandate and subsidize their installation and then their disposal.
The situation isn’t much better with the ubiquitous wind turbines whose blades can’t be recycled.
Much as solar panels are filling up landfills, so are wind turbine blades. And those blades which “can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing” will first have to be cut up with a “diamond-encrusted industrial saw” and then hauled away on tractor trailers to massive landfills.
Fiberglass blades aren’t biodegradable and burning or crushing them releases toxic fibers that have been linked to everything from skin reactions to lung disease.
Inhaling fiberglass dust is potentially dangerous. Especially from something the size of a jet wing. That just leaves one option. The same option as for nuclear power. Bury them.
Wind turbines, which were supposed to save the environment, are piling up in rural areas in Wyoming, Iowa and South Dakota.
“The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” an energy company executive admitted.
So much for clean energy saving the planet.
Environmentalists agonize over the 85,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in the United States when a single wind turbine blade can weigh 12 tons. It’s estimated that by 2020, wind turbine blade waste will amount to over 2 million tons or 1% of landfill capacity.
The green agenda isn’t saving the planet, it’s destroying it and harming people.
Environmentalism is an environmental hazard that threatens both the ecosystem and public health. From the solar panel lead in the groundwater to the wind turbine fiberglass in your lungs to the toilet water in your sink, there’s nothing ‘clean’ about the environmental agenda.
mortimer says
California, the lunatic asylum of the Western world. You just have to BELIEVE in something there … it doesn’t have to be true. Only believe … in anything you like. I love watching Mark Dice interviews of Californians who have strong opinions on everything, but they make it up if they don’t know. Most of them have little understanding or knowledge about American institutions, laws or who the current president did previously or what the nation’s constitution says. They are as naive as swans.
There’s no intellectual rigor in California that can’t be laid aside by SWEEPING FEELING or a utopian, ideological BELIEF.
CogitoErgoSum says
Yeah, l love watching Mark Dice. He’s just a guy using his laptop in his kitchen but the man uses his brains too. As for California, it’s full of people seeking pie in the sky who just end up getting splatted in the face with one that tastes like … it came out of the toilet.
Wellington says
That’s a great description, mortimer, about California being the lunatic asylum of the Western world. Minus California, everything else the same, even including the putrid cities which are NYC, Philadelphia, and Chicago, America would so much more be grounded in reality.
California at mid-20th century was the promise and future of America. Now, it is easily the weakest link in America and pulling the rest of America down. The cause of this is the mental disease which is Leftism.
James Lincoln says
Wellington,
You are correct regarding California.
I was there in the mid-1980s – and it was nothing like it is now…
gravenimage says
This is generally true of my state. How I wish this were not the case.
Wellington says
So-called green energy is rooted in much error if not outright scam. Fossil fuels, especially as refined by Western technology, are not the monster that idiots like Biden and AOC have made them out to be. Indeed, fossil fuels have added far more to the quality and extension of life than does any detriment they have.
Mankind needs energy. The Left feels badly about this because, ultimately, the Left hates humanity.
The Left’s stupid “fall-back” plan is the great error which is green energy. It’s just one more example of Leftist nonsense, i.e., nature good, civilization bad.
Big picture here: Minus the Western Left on most anything—education, gender, bathrooms, pronouns, sports, the First and Second Amendments of the American Constitution, Islam, et al., the West would be so much better off. Rather stunning that as bad as Islam is for freedom, common sense, women’s rights, et al., the Western Left is even worse because it is the ultimate enemy within (and including all the transgender nonsense which is presently destroying women’s sports). AND, it is important to realize that one of the two major political parties in America, still the most powerful country on Earth (but not if Bidenistas continue to stupidly influence most everything) has now been largely taken over by the idiocy of Western Leftism (this would include most of the federal government, including the FBI, which per another article of today at JW does indeed need to be dissolved).
This must all end or America will end and if America ends all the West will end and the West is the greatest and most productive experiment in human history—China, Japan, the American Indian world, sub-Saharan Africa, certainly the Islamic sphere of mankind, et al. come nowhere close, even all combined, to what the West on its own has achieved. A new dark age will descend upon mankind as no other dark age ever has if the best of the West is no more. Guaranteed. And “leading the charge” here against the West is modern Western Leftism. One knows this or should know this.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, screw green energy. Whatever benefits it has are far outweighed by its negatives as Greenfield’s article here in part demonstrates.
CogitoErgoSum says
As a side note, I think it’s interesting that scientists do not really know for sure how oil is made. It’s called a fossil fuel because it was thought that it is made from organisms that died and fell to the bottom of the oceans and then those dead organisms were subjected to immense pressure. But I now see that NASA says a moon of Saturn, Titan, may contain more oil than we have on Earth. Maybe Titan once had life or maybe life is not necessary to create oil at all. Anyway, just thought that was interesting and maybe there is a way for us to create more oil – but, yes, pollution will still be a problem. The solution to that is cleaner engines and ways to capture the carbon emissions – and I think that’s where we should be focusing our attention.
somehistory says
I recall an old ad that had drawings of dinosaurs walking about, then falling over, feet in the air and then melting< turning into oil< draining to the middle of the earth, and then being pumped up through those nice oil derricks in Texas and OK
There is more that scientists don't know than what they do
CogitoErgoSum says
Yes, Sinclair still uses a dinosaur for their brand. It’s probably because the bones of dinosaurs and other animals were found in tar pits. However, the reason the bones were there is because the animals got stuck in the tar. It’s very unlikely that oil came from dead dinosaurs. When people keep saying “follow the science” they need to realize that science means knowledge and our knowledge can change over time as we discover new things. It’s good to keep asking questions about what we think we know.
gravenimage says
My understanding is that this was mostly plant matter–certainly not as dramatic as dinosaurs, though.
Westman says
I remember being in New Zealand and observing coal with beautiful interlayer impressions of leaves with vein detail, and they were just throwing them in the stove. Almost every piece you would crack open between layers had an impression.
somehistory says
That’s sad. Lost forever. and they could have said so much.
Joseph says
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/on-energy/2011/09/14/abiotic-oil-a-theory-worth-exploring
Here is the Abiotic theory on the source of petroleum.
CogitoErgoSum says
I remember reading the story about Eugene Island in the Wall Street Journal. Maybe getting more information from Titan about the type of oil it holds will help solve the mystery. May not help in getting us a fuel that does not cause air pollution but it will still be something good to know.
Westman says
There is a serious error in the story:
“Recycling, itself a scam, often just sends our waste abroad to poor countries. A New York Times article described how in Africa, laborers “break them open with machetes and drain the acid into the ground by hand” which “pollutes the soil and water with lead, which can lead to brain damage.” Actual recycling of solar panels is Unworkable….”
This is BATTERY recycling, not solar panels. There is no released acid while smashing crystalline panels with machetes.
somehistory says
Someone in Texas filmed a wind turbine after it was struck by lightning. It made a corkscrew smoke design until it burst into flames and crashed.
and Glenn Beck says that CA has decided to charge citizens who own their own water wells for water they pump out. they were sent letters explaining it all. First, they have to send in 300 dollars to register their well…which the state already knows they have; and then, according to the size of their property and well,, they must pay a monthly fee based on their usage; and if they don’t, they are fined an additional amount.
So very glad I don’t live there. the citizens who own their wells…and the water….should not comply. Take it to court as unconstitutional, as it amounts to imminent domain. without compensation to the owners of the water.
Westman says
Obviously the State of California claims ownership of all water above and below ground, the citizen water rights being secondary. Taxing the citizen for using his own water right is an act of desperation to lower farm usage of underground water in the Central and Imperial valleys. Clever but catastrophic to food prices and farms.
Here is an interesting article about a San Joaquin Valley family farm being driven out of business by drought.
https://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-drought-decimating-farm-100506553.html
gravenimage says
Yes, disgusting.
Infidel says
This usage of lead in solar panels is laughable. Years ago, when I used to work in the (non-solar) semiconductor industry, one of the issues we faced was the migration of our IC package leads from lead (Pb) based to non-lead contacts. Which created logistical issues, since the latter has higher melting points than the former, and so while customers currently buying lead packages couldn’t buy the non-lead, customers who had converted and wanted the non-lead (for environmental reasons) would not buy the lead. And as anybody who’s worked in manufacturing knows, when you don’t have the right product mix, it can cost ya
I recall the controversy over Los Angeles’ “toilet-to-tap” water. Maybe there could have been a path for that, if distilled, but given all the mismanagement that happens in that state, voters rejected it for a good reason: they didn’t trust waste water to not come out of their faucets
I have zero faith in wind, and don’t support it at all. Solar does have promise – as a provider of the excess energy that we need in summer, such as in powering ACs that need to be more active as it gets hotter. But other than that, this energy source is more suited to tropical and equatorial regions, and is not a good alternative at all for countries in our latitudes
Westman says
Some folks are likely afraid that through some “impossible” screw-up, toilet-to-tap might be kidney-to-mouth. Of course for those willing to drink camel urine as medicine that may not be a problem.
It seems that every electronic component I purchase has the CA cancer warning. Maybe even water causes cancer in CA?
Infidel says
Probably b’cos it still contains Group 2B elements like Cadmium or Mercury. Incidentally, even that ‘lead-free’ program that I talked about was not a single transition: there was supposed to be a future transition to complete ‘non-halogens’. Thing I wondered was – if companies were gonna be forced to bite the bullet to make a transition for environmental reasons that had nothing to do w/ the company’s own productivity, why have intermediate transitions which would only exacerbate the inventory mix over time?
Westman says
Indeed. Maybe their decisions were gedanken, never tested, so they let those regulated bear the cost of each step-wise transition, moving forward if it succeeded and placing blame on the regulated if it failed.
gravenimage says
Environmentalism is an Environmental Hazard
……………………………
Daniel Greenfield is sadly correct. Ad I say this as someone who has carefully recycled for decades and who has seriously considered installing solar. But much of this is not nearly as effective as touted–and sometimes actually does more harm than good.
Westman says
One of my university disciplines was Physics which, after 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the storage problem, turned me off on nuclear power. Now it seems that we have no choice when knowing “renewables” on the same scale will create an even bigger mess.
If we go that direction I hope it’s with Thorium fuel cycle reactors and not Uranium or Plutonium. Fusion Energy has been a 75 year failure and won’t be ready, if ever, in time to supplant fossil fuel.
James Lincoln says
Westman,
If electric vehicles are going to be forced upon the US public – in large numbers – our current electric grid will not support this.
Nuclear power will have to be in the mix in order to prevent power brownouts, blackouts, etc…
Infidel says
Which they won’t touch! And yes, people talk about powering Teslas by plugging them in, but there is no way our present grid can charge up Teslas if their sales explode. Thankfully, those cars are too expensive for most of us to afford
somehistory says
One family drove their electric car to Florida and needed a new battery….which was going to cost them more than the car had.
What a headaceh.
somehistory says
headache, and i have one. 🙁 so many typos
Jon Sobieski says
Final disposal of wind blades and obsolete solar panels is swept under the rug. But the problem is going to get bigger every year and eventually it will be an issue that cannot be hidden. What are the Germans doing with all their old solar panels?
Andrew Blackadder says
Even the loud mouthed morbidly obese savior Of The Left Saint Michel Moore made a movie about how bad Solar Panels are as they sit in the middle of the Mohave Desert killing birds and falling down in storms and generally being a total waste of time and money and his merry gang of blind followers were all over him for exposing the truth abut Wind Farms and you can find that film on You Tube,its called The Human Planet.
Infidel says
The killing birds thing is a wind energy boondoggle, not a solar one. Solar’s biggest boondoggles are the disposal of panels that no longer work, as well as the amount of real estate needed for them to be effective