Climate climatologist David Legates claims that vehicles with wind, solar, and electric power are n’t the clean electricity achievement that many say.
” The potassium, the hall, all of the rare earth metals that are needed for the batteries, that are needed for the solar panels, that are needed for the wind turbine… are called unique earths”, Legates explains on” The Daily Signal Podcast” . ,
He claims that remove mining, which involves adding significant amounts of earth to a solution, yields these rare earth minerals. What remains is a” dangerous sludge lake” after the materials are extracted.
The process of remove mine changes the setting, adds Legates, a visiting fellow who serves on the Science Advisory Committee for the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation. A Heritage report on rising sea levels was co-authored by Legates, a professor professor at the University of Delaware.
Legates, who is a guest on this episode of” The Daily Signal Podcast,” discusses his new book,” Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism,” co-authored with E. Calvin Beisner, explains how wind turbines and solar panels are made. He likewise identifies what the finest form of energy actually is.  ,
Examine the lightly edited transcript or talk to the radio below.
Virginia Allen: Mr. Legates, welcomed up to” The Daily Signal Podcast”.
David Legates: I appreciate it. It’s a joy to be present.
Allen: I’m really excited today to talk about your text” Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism”. If you could, clarify who this book was written for.
Legates: It’s written for people who are genuinely interested in learning some of the research, but not necessarily having their minds held underground as a result of a comprehensive science conversation. So it’s more than just a brief attempt at talking about environment. It is much more in-depth, but it does n’t require a PhD to do so. D. in science to understand everything.
Allen: What do you think are some of the most common myths around the topic of climate shift that you- all definitely try to tackle and handle in this book?
Legates: We’re told that carbon monoxide is a special environment power, but part of the problem is. No. That essentially, if you put more carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, temperatures go up, you get more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more droughts, more floods, more all of the bad stuff that people do n’t want to see.
And if carbon monoxide were to be kept at a minimum, between 350 parts per million and 286 parts per million, life would be fine. We would n’t experience tornadoes or hurricanes. All these negative items would stop happening. As [ancient President ] Barack Obama predicted, the seas and temperatures would stop rising. Magic occurs as well.
And the problem is it’s not connected directly to carbon monoxide. In all of this, carbon monoxide plays a small role. So that’s one of the take-home emails, in my opinion, is that carbon monoxide is n’t the climate control handle.
For most of culture history, we’ve really seen that air temperatures turns and carbon monoxide follows. And that makes sense because liquid becomes warmer as the heat temperature rises. More carbon monoxide is being emitted. And so as your heat of the sea fall, carbon dioxide is given off by the sea, the atmospheric amounts increase.
So carbon dioxide follows, as has previously historically been the case. Does warmth rise as carbon dioxide does, the question is today. And the answer is well, significantly.
However, the majority of the carbon monoxide absorption rings are now saturated. The addition of some makes a lot of sense, but what that means is that, fundamentally, if there were no carbon dioxide or no house chemicals present in the atmosphere. But as you start to increase more and more and more, you get less of an effect. Furthermore carbon dioxide by the time we are where we are definitely not useful is also by this point.
Thus, we might experience a degree Celsius of warming if we now double carbon dioxide, which would be it. And truly it’s not for the socioeconomic impacts that individuals want it to have.
Allen: This is incredibly intriguing. The most prevalent explanation I have heard is that different things increase carbon emissions and raise the temperature, which has negative effects. When you speak to people who are very invested in the environment movement, climate fairness, whatever you want to visit it. But you’re saying that, for one, it’s but little, and actually even is the same, the temperature is rising and then that increases the level of coal emissions within the environment.
Legates, that’s correct. The interesting thing is that when I first started researching climate change in the late 1970s, it was global cooling. At that time we were told that global cooling would bring about more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more floods, more droughts, more of all the disasters.
So the question is, What is it? Are you experiencing more disasters as a result of warmer weather, or are you experiencing more disasters as a result? Or were we statistically somehow on a saddle point that said it was perfect at the time and if we went warmer or colder, both would get worse?
The equator-to-pole temperature gradient is what we call the climate-related climate change phenomenon, which is what drives the majority of the storms and other factors that cause variability. The temperature at which the equator is relative to the pole is determined by this.
Now, if you have a very warm equator and a very cold pole, you have a lot of temperature contrast, and that brings about a lot of storminess. Global circulation would stop if the pole and equator were at the same temperature in an extreme world.
In a warmer world, the equator slightly warms because it’s already warm, there’s a lot of water around, and the atmosphere contains a lot of water vapor. And for a number of reasons, it takes a lot of more energy to raise the temperature of warm, moist air. However, with a little bit of energy input, it’s very simple to warm the air in polar regions.
The interaction between warm, dry air coming out of the Gulf of Mexico and cold, dry air coming out of the world has a lessened equator-to-pole temperature gradient, which means that the contrast is lessened. That would diminish things like hurricane activity, that would diminish tornadoes.
In reality, a world with warmer weather is one with less turbulence. And in particular, civilization has always performed better in warmer weather when we compare it to civilization.
You develop a civilization when you’re not looking for food, clothing, shelter, and security. Essentially, in extremely cold conditions, your quest for food and keeping yourself warm takes up all of your time. However, in warmer weather, you can get more food, have more security, and be more likely to take good care of yourself. This gives you more time to develop technology, the arts, and other aspects of civilization.
Allen: And correct me if I’m wrong, but what we’re seeing right now is not necessarily unique. These cycles of warming and cooling have been observed before.
Legates: Yes. In fact, that’s what we’ve had, was the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the Modern Warm Period, was a Little Ice Age as well. Thus, temperature has fluctuated. The precipitation cycles. We go through floods and droughts and back to floods again. Hurricane goes through cycles. For instance, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation indicates that there were many hurricanes in the 1970s and the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, respectively. Then they started to come up again.
This is why almost everything cycles through, and that’s because of the planet’s inconsistency. We are not a linear system, as is the theory. We are a nonlinear system that brings about chaotic, unpredictable behavior in which higher order terms, which are difficult to predict, start to take over. When Ed Lorenz was attempting to simulate a simple climate back in the 1960s, he discovered that.
And this allows for system variability to be created. And it’s a lot of cases why we have El Nino, La Nina events, why we have the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and so forth with things that just simply flip back and forth with apparently no forcing, but nevertheless, it’s because of the second order, higher order terms associated with climate.
Allen: One of the things you all address and specifically mention in the book is a source of energy. Let’s start with the wind and solar system. There’s a lot of conversations around those and there’s a huge push toward wind and solar. What details did you discover throughout the book and also include in the book in relation to those sources of energy?
Legates: Well, in reality, what we discovered was not novel. Everybody thinks wind and solar are clean, green, renewable—there’s no problem with it, it does n’t produce any gases to the atmosphere. There are issues with it.
How can you obtain the lithium, trillium, and all of the rare earth minerals needed for the solar panel batteries and wind turbine batteries? Well, they are called rare earths not because necessarily they’re rare, but they do n’t exist in seams like coal or copper and so forth. They can be found almost anywhere.
And strip mining is how you obtain them. You … pick up a large chunk of earth, you put it into a solution where you get these rare earth materials to come out of solution, to solidify, so you can use them, but then you’re left with this big toxic sludge. And you have to continue doing this with the entire mountain and someone has to go into the toxic sludge and extract these pieces.
Strip mining is done because of this. It changes the environment, that you have to completely go through it, and you get this toxic sludge lake that’s produced. They have a tendency to employ child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Teenagers aged 8 to 14 are sifting through this toxic material in Southeast Asia as they look for things to pick up. In a lot of places it’s done by slave labor.
These things are not particularly social justice-focused, so if you’re interested in social justice, you might as well be. These things are not environmentally pure if you’re interested in maintaining the environment. It takes energy to do all this.
And the argument can sometimes be made about the energy savings, or better yet, the carbon dioxide savings, that you can obtain by using these kinds of carbon dioxide-free energy sources. It takes more carbon dioxide to transport the energy, to extract the energy when you get the turbine and the solar panels. It takes more nonclean and green energy to get them out than it’s going to produce.
We are all told it’s clean and green at the end of the day because, like I said, it’s not producing gases because it spins or because the panel is sitting there, as I said. However, to get to that point, there have been a lot of disastrous and unsuccessful environmental and social initiatives that have taken place in the background.
Allen: What about car batteries for electric vehicles, like in a Tesla? How does that compare to using gasoline to power your car?
Legates: Well, that’s the other problem. … And we have this in Delaware. We are working hard to resist the fact that we have an EV mandate. However, part of the problem is that these rare earth minerals are required to be used to make the batteries, and as a result, you have to go through the same procedure to do so.
Second of all, I think I saw somewhere it takes an inordinate amount— I ca n’t remember offhand how much—it takes an inordinate amount of strip mining to get just one car battery.
Where does the energy that is needed to power the battery come from? So the issue becomes how much energy you’re using and how much carbon dioxide are we still producing if you’re using fossil fuels to power the battery and generate the electricity to load it? And therefore, your clean and green car really is n’t clean and green after all.
What’s the other issue, besides what happens if you’re in an accident? First responders are discovering that not every car’s batteries are located in the same location. The power connections are n’t in the same place. It’s simple to put water on it with gasoline or diesel because it will start the fire. You ca n’t cool lithium fires down because they will burn effectively for a long period of time. I mean, essentially, as you remove the water, lithium will immediately fire up again in contact with the atmosphere. And so you end up with these extremely hot flames that ca n’t be extinguished.
Another issue they’re having is that when you get into an accident, the victim is hurt. You’ve got to use the jaws of life to go in. You now light everything up if the jaws of life somehow connected the battery or any wire connecting it. The first responder can be killed, and the passenger in the car can be killed as well.
That’s not usually a problem with gasoline cars. That’s undoubtedly a issue with electric vehicles.
And the final thing is that under extremely cold conditions, we’re discovering that they do n’t run well. We saw in Chicago, and for example, batteries just do n’t hold the charge as long.
In Delaware, we’re requiring all school buses to use electric vehicles, and one of the strange things about that is that they ca n’t quickly recharge them. Therefore, the school bus companies advise that we need two buses to transport students to school and then bring them home. Because taking them to school and bringing them back, there’s not enough time to recharge them before we have to take them home. So our fleet needs to have twice as many buses as possible.
Simply put, it adds up every single time.
Even in Delaware, we’ve got now a requirement: If you build a new house, you have to have a connection for an electric vehicle inside that house, whether you have an electric vehicle or not. Each apartment complex must have a location outside that’s not on the street to park a car and recharge the electric vehicle if you build a new apartment complex, depending on its size.
So now it costs much more to build a house or an apartment complex because it requires building the infrastructure to have an electric vehicle recharged, despite the fact that neither the house nor the apartment complex have electric vehicles in real life.
Allen: I find it really fascinating that you- all, in the book, link sources of energy with economic stability in a region. Describe how the energy sources we choose affect an area’s poverty or its potential success.
Legates: Well, that’s a part of the problem because one of the factors that has helped people out of poverty has been technology, and that is also because cheap energy has been available.
I mean, in the 1800, you had approximately 10 % of the population of the planet above the poverty line. About 90 % of the population is above the poverty line in 2020, according to the government. How did that occur? That happened because of technological developments. However, you had to have cheap energy in order to make technology go. If energy is really expensive, the technology you’ve developed ca n’t be used, or, perhaps, only the very wealthy can access it. The poor ca n’t. Everyone has access to energy and, as a result, they have access to the technology because of making energy affordable, which is one of the things fossil fuels have been able to do.
Before that, we had to rely on beasts from the field to generate excess energy, slavery because you had to hire someone to do the work, or you had to use whaling because whale oil could be used.
And when petroleum came along, the need for slavery was nonexistent—although people will still do it because it’s ingrained in human society. However, slavery, the need for it because of cheap labor, the need for whale oil, the need for animal products, and other factors, all contributed to our progress, which ultimately resulted in the lifting of the majority of the world’s poverty.
Allen: What is the tried-and-true, most successful, and cleanest forms of energy that would be the most cost-effective and not harmful to our environment if you were prescribing,” All right, we should start relying most heavily on this form of energy and this form of energy,” as you would say in a prescription?
Legates: Nuclear. Nuclear energy is probably the future, and it ought to have been it. There were problems in the US, so why did n’t it occur. Three Mile Island at the same time the movie” The China Syndrome” came out sort of put a kibosh on it.
However, if you take a look at France, for instance, you’ll see that a lot of it runs on nuclear. It has a much smaller spatial footprint, which makes it easier to have more land for agriculture and more land for animals to live on.
I mean you look now, what we’re doing in Delaware, for example, is we’re converting agricultural farmland over to solar factories. So we’re removing land from agriculture and installing solar panels everywhere. In Iowa, for instance, they are doing the same thing. One of the things you’re seeing is that corn that’s produced is going to biofuels and ethanol. That could have also have been the food that could have been provided for people.
So, with nuclear, not only is it reasonably safe— I mean, we can argue this point, but I think most people agree that nuclear is as safe as anything else, especially with modern nuclear, because it has a much smaller spatial footprint, allowing you to receive the same amount of energy over a smaller area. It does n’t require as much space. So there is still room for growing food, allowing nature to exist in the same way it did before, and allowing people to grow. It’s probably where we should have been all along.
Allen: The book is” Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism”. What would you like readers to take away from this book, Mr. Legates, if there were only one or two, please?
Legates ‘” Climate… The Case for Realism” is the title of the book. Climate change always happens. Climate change has always occurred and will continue to occur. Do n’t get so caught up in the debate over how to stop climate change; it’s like trying to stop the sun from rising. It’s never going to happen.
There has never been a situation on Earth where the temperature and precipitation have always remained constant. It has always been variable. And so when you’re told that we’re going to get more hurricanes, more of this, more of that, that’s all not going to happen. We go through cycles, as you already mentioned. We exhibit various traits. And as things change, things stay the same in a sense.
So we’re going to experience variability and change, but the climate is also variable. Climate changes, and that is not always a bad thing.
Allen: Excellent. Again, the title of the book is” Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.” You can purchase a copy today.
