I drive a 2012 v8 Chevy Suburban. On a good day I get 12 miles a gallon so needless to say I am not a friend of GreenPeace. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about the environment, I just know where my carbon footprint actually is.
Over the past 2 years Governor Walz has worked tirelessly to pass, and enforce his California green car initiatives aimed at making Minnesota more environmentally conscious; mandating by law and subsidized by Minnesota taxpayers. To do this he wants to adopt the same failed California green energy initiatives adopted over a decade ago. The initiatives have resulted in an increase for consumers on everything from gas, electricity, and when they have it, water. 2 years ago President Biden announced a ban on the purchase of any polysilicon from the Xinjiang region of China, where about 40% of the world’s supply is mined.
In addition to the Uyghur Muslims, we also know of about 40,000 slaves in the Congo mining cobalt; A material in nearly every electric vehicle. It was terrible when mainly cell phone and laptop batteries consumed the lithium-ion battery market, but when consumers went from a two-ounce battery to an 800-pound electric car battery, slave owners ramped up production. The solar panel supply chain is no different, now that governments have so heavily subsidized, incentivized, and outright mandated production. China has rounded up one million Uyghur Muslims into forced-labor concentration camps to process and manufacture solar panels for the American market.
The assurance of government-funded grants and mandates to purchase new green energy resources has inadvertently created a boom for the market much like the cotton Gin did to American slavery. Green Energy has been at the forefront of the American consciousness since American environmentalism became popular in the early part of the 21st century. Wind, Solar, and Hydro have been touted as the best replacements for traditional energy like coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear by politicians and innovators who utilize them. Inventors like Elon Musk say this is our future, and it’s here now. Musk has shown the potential power of the innovations in Electric Energy by designing breathtaking concepts like the Tesla and making them affordable to average Americans. The reality is that the future is merely a glass menagerie held up by the progressive left. When you peer behind the curtain on how green energy has become so mainstream it is steeped in human rights violations and death.
In an experiment done in the UK back in 2009 called the Human Power Station, the BBC wanted to show just how difficult it can be to make pure green energy. They got a team of 100 cyclists to pedal for an entire day. After one entire day, the team was barely able to even generate enough power to feed the volunteers. Better yet behind the cameras, lights, and microphones, every piece of equipment had to be run with a generator. In the end, the conclusion of Tim Siddall of Electric Pedals, the company hired to supply the bicycles and cyclists, was that “I do not doubt that slavery will return as the world’s energy resources get increasingly scarce.” The implication that the only way to have an eco–friendly future is to bring back slavery.
The reality is we don’t need to bring slavery back, it is already here. For years we have looked at the supply chain for solar panel producers with great concern, and good reason. The U.S. solar industry has four of the largest solar panel makers located in the Xinjiang region of China. JinkoSolar, JASolar, TrinaSolar, and LONGi all source their polysilicon from Xinjiang; a crucial element for the construction of solar panels. This region of China also hosts a large Muslim population known as the Uyghur people. For years reporters have flocked to the region to report on the Chinese Government’s systematic execution of the minority Muslim population, many calling it a genocide. The stories we hear are devastating. The Chinese government is forcing the Uyghur Muslim minority into concentration camps, and then given the “choice” to not live in them by working at solar panel factories.
“All four of the Uyghur Region’s polysilicon manufacturers are implicated in Uyghur forced labor either through direct participation in forced labor schemes and/or through their raw material sourcing,” said researchers from Sheffield Hallam University in Britain in a new major report. They found 90 Chinese and multinational companies implicated in forced labor practices. The researchers said they investigated the entire global solar supply chain.
“At this point, the public is well aware of the atrocities happening to the Uyghur people, and there is no way for these companies to do accurate due diligence in the Uyghur Region, we must assume that all materials coming out of the region are tainted with forced labor.” said a representative from the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
The reason we used china as a major supplier is twofold (1) they have the minerals, and (2) it makes solar affordable. The need to use the cheapest possible labor, enslaved, and the cheapest energy, coal, underscored the underlying physical problem with solar and all renewables, which is their very low “power densities.” Power density is the amount of electricity produced per “unit of land, labor, or capital”. Nuclear is the highest power density energy which allows for the wages of U.S. nuclear power plant employees to be so high despite the low cost of delivered electricity to consumers. France shows that a nuclear-majority system delivers electricity at nearly half the cost of a renewables-heavy system like Germany’s. Almost all the cost of nuclear electricity goes to labor, with a very small amount going to buy a bit of uranium for each batch of fuel every 1.5 years. If the U.S. tried to make solar panels domestically, solar would have a sudden jump upwards in cost to go along with our labor and environmental standards. The result is we can live with slavery so long as it prevents the cost from being passed on to the consumer; Doesn’t that argument sound familiar?
The sad reality is that the DFL and Governor Walz are perfectly fine accepting Slavery and Genocide as the cost of doing business so long as they get what they want. They care more about appeasing their base, and their donors than they do protecting the human rights they so ardently claim to fight for. They aren’t using science or logic to push for the adoption of groundbreaking technology that could change the tide in the war to protect our environment. Instead, he favors sensationalism, and as long as Elon Musk makes owning an electric car sexy, slavery and all its brutality will continue to exist. They are willing to sell out to the minority of green energy advocates at the expense of millions of lives. So long as we continue to perpetuate a market that is inextricably tied to the use of forced labor and genocide to appease radical progressives we continue to condone the use of slavery. We need to let the market decide what direction we move in finding a cheap and reliable renewable energy source. Nuclear, and Hydrogen have proven to be immensely successful yet thanks to Government intervention and regulations both have a high bar for entry.