Author Michael Shellenberger called President Biden's renewable energy push an "environmental nightmare" and urged the administration to restore American energy independence. On "The Brian Kilmeade Show" Tuesday, Shellenberger explained the negative impacts of renewables on the environment and economy despite liberals' rhetoric on the issue.Â
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: It's a total environmental nightmare. It's one of the biggest scams of maybe the last 50 years, the idea that renewables are good for the environment. They're absolutely terrible for the environment. Solar and wind require three to four times as much land to make the same amount of electricity as natural gas or a nuclear power plant. You just read the huge quantities of materials and mining that's required for solar, wind, electric cars. The problem is the energy is too diluted from sunlight and wind. It's not energy-dense enough. So you have to grind up all of this nature, all the natural environment to be able to produce sufficient amounts of energy. It's not going to happen. Right now about 10% of minerals on earth are used for energy. If you go to renewables, it's going to go up to 50%. That is inflationary. That is going to cause inflation in two ways by making the energy itself more expensive, and then also by making electricity in particular more expensive because of the unreliable nature of sunlight and wind.Â
I'll say one other thing which is that we had a major bipartisan effort in this country from the 1970s until the early 2000s to discover how to frack for oil and gas in shale, a rock formation about a mile underground. One of the greatest innovation success stories in American history. We wanted to become into energy independence. We did. We produced huge. We're the biggest producer of oil and gas in the world and yet President Biden refuses to allow expanded oil and gas production at a time of the worst energy crisis in 50 years. Instead, he wants us to become dependent on Chinese minerals, 90% of them refined in China. They control the monopoly on critical minerals. It's insane to sacrifice this hard-won energy security in the United States for dependence on Chinese renewables.
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