Environment & Energy

NNadir

(37,602 posts) Wed Feb 11, 2026, 07:54 PM Yesterday

Nature Review: The Dark Side of "Green" Technology.

This came in on one of my Nature news feeds.

It's kind of doublespeak that we still call this stuff "green," but that's how it's done, right up to now. Bad habits can be hard to break.

The review:

BOOK REVIEW
09 February 2026

The dark side of green technology: what do electric vehicles really cost?

A powerful book reveals the corrupt deals and human exploitation behind the global scramble for strategic metals.

By Chris Stokel-Walker

A picture from the article (which is not open sourced, but to which I have access through my subscriptions):

The caption:

As global demand for battery components rises, many resource-rich nations such as Indonesia are intensifying mining efforts for key minerals.

The book reviewed is this one: The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth Nicolas Niarchos, Penguin & William Collins (2026)

Some excerpts from the review:

You probably don’t think about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) when scrolling on your phone. Or about the millions of people worldwide whose job it is to dig up and sell vast quantities of metals such as cobalt, copper or tungsten. But you ought to. Electronic devices have turned the metals used in batteries into strategic resources; green technologies such as electric vehicles have accelerated the scramble for them. Metal-rich nations, from Chile to Indonesia, have been pulled into a contest between governments, multinational corporations and armed groups.

Climate change is devastating mining of minerals needed to fight it...

I find the last sentence in the excerpt highly misleading. The idea that so called "renewable energy" has anything to do with fighting the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is a popular item of chanting, but the experimental results of the multi-trillion dollar effort to tear the guts out of the planet for an affectation are clear: The use of fossil fuels is higher than ever; the rate of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is accelerating with positive first, second and third derivatives, and, oh yeah, the planet is burning.

The piling on of thermodynamic nonsense that storing energy is "green" should be obvious to a first year STEM college student, if not to a high school senior. Storing energy wastes energy. It's a law of physics.

An excerpt from further down in the from the review:

...The book is not a heartwarming read. Niarchos is pessimistic about the future. There is no indication that global power dynamics will get better any time soon, or that the lives of those involved in the supply chain of these critical minerals will improve. The United States, in Niarchos’ words, abdicated its interest in obtaining the key minerals needed for battery technology during the 1990s and early 2000s — at one point selling off most of its reserves of cobalt and lithium. Niarchos says that this ‘void’ gave the Chinese government and businesses the leeway to muscle in on Africa, South America and southeast Asia, where much of the world’s exploitable raw-mineral resources lie. The United States sold more than 20,000 tons of strategic reserves in cobalt from 1993 to 2000, alongside a 36-million-kilogram stockpile of lithium after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Taking advantage of that vacuum, and Europe’s apathy in the battery industry, China was producing 78.5% of the world’s refined cobalt by 2023.

Niarchos comes to a dramatic conclusion about the nation he had spent four years reporting on while trying desperately to convince his jailers that he is, in fact, a journalist and not a spy. “People had been gaslit, lied to, and repressed for so long that their senses of reality had been irretrievably warped,” he writes...

One can still hear here that energy storage makes so called "renewable energy" viable. There is no evidence of this; wind and solar remain, after decades of hype and the expenditures of vast amounts of money, trivial forms of energy, producing just 18 Exajoules of energy (as of 2024) combined out of a world energy demand in 2024 of 654 Exajoules, with 519 (79.4% in "percent talk ) coming from fossil fuels. The purpose of the affectation about so called "renewable energy" was nothing more than to attack nuclear energy (31 Exajoules in a climate of vilification.)

Don't worry though. Be happy. An "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke informed me just yesterday that soon they'll be building fusion reactors in New York

One hears these things, and one doesn't really want to believe it.

New York is the place where the viable Indian Point nuclear plant was shut for some reason or another, raising the carbon intensity of that State's electricity, which over the last 12 months 352 grams of CO₂ per kWh, 110% higher than that of France (30 grams of CO₂ per kWh. France, of course, generates almost all of its electricity using fission reactors with a spectacularly low loss of life to pollution from electrical power generation.

(The figures are available at the Electricity Map.)

I really think that people should stop writing articles about the tragedy or the reactionary affectation for so called "renewable energy" that call it "green" energy. It isn't "green." It isn't sustainable. It's not even "renewable." And given the Moss Landing fires which risked hydrofluoric acid generation in the world's largest battery facility, one should question whether if and when so called "renewable energy" ever approaches a scale that matters, if it will be safe. (Not to worry, the world will probably run out of cobalt to dig before that happens.)

Have a nice day tomorrow.

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