More than 70,000 attendees of the COP28 conference from around the world flew to Dubai, one of the global hubs of oil wealth, a shining beacon of development in the desert, to commiserate over the state of the world. Unlike many of the climate “warriors” attending a winter party in the Arabian Peninsula, where the daytime temperatures hovered dreamily between 80–90 degrees Fahrenheit and sunsets glowed over the Persian Gulf, I, at least, had flown commercial.
READ MORE: Biden’s Fuelish Hydrogen Giveaway
Slogans like “Action Builds Trust” and “Action Creates Hope” were printed on billboards towering over the highways and peppered across the COP28 Expo grounds. Alas, “Action Burns Carbon” went unmentioned. Inside one of the technological expo spaces, Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) gave a presentation. While most of its power comes from oil, the company has already built one of the largest solar arrays on earth providing power production for a not-insignificant portion of the city and its surroundings electricity needs.
More than 8 square miles of solar panels darken the desert, and the installation includes a concentrated solar power (CSP) system. These mirror systems have been made famous in the Mojave Desert for vaporizing birds in mid-flight with the massive heat generated by the focused sunlight. As I looked at a model of this system that directs concentrated solar energy at a massive tower surrounded by circles upon circles of mirrors, reflecting the sun’s powerful rays to a peak where they heat molten salt to power a turbine to generate energy, I mentioned to a local woman, dressed conservatively, employed by the power company, that the array must produce an incredible amount of heat. “Yes, in fact, we measured 565 degrees Celsius [1049 degrees Fahrenheit] at the apex of the tower,” she replied. “We have to warn air traffic to avoid the airspace for their own safety.” It appears this “green” energy produces a lot of hot air.
A collection of start-ups and existing energy companies wrangle for both private capital and government money to implement “green technology.” Elon Musk has become a billionaire with the help of U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. subsidizes electric car purchases, increasing the national debt while further enriching Musk. His rocket company, SpaceX, is contracted by NASA to spew methane into the atmosphere out of flaming rockets as they are fired through the “greenhouse” and atmosphere upon which life on earth depends.
With his profits off American debt, Musk flies around the world on a fleet of private jets, taking at least 441 flights in 2023, more than double his number from 2022, a year he burned at least 221,358 gallons of jet fuel on 171 private jaunts. Besides jet exhaust, we never seem to be told just how much carbon is emitted in the building of an electric car. From the diesel burned in the mining and extraction of the rare earth metals to produce the batteries, to the materials to build the frame, seats, and dashboard, every part of every electric car leaves a carbon footprint. (READ MORE: Al Gore for President)
One recent congressional bill included close to $400 billion for “clean energy” and “decarbonization.” The problem is that every one of those dollars spent is a petro-dollar in a fossil-fuel-powered market, where everything bought or sold is shipped and manufactured using carbon-burning infrastructure. Can emissions really go down when expenditures, development, deforestation, manufacturing, mining, and construction are going up?
There are not enough precious metals on earth to build all the batteries needed to “transition” the entire global transportation fleet to electric cars, which are being sold as “zero-emission vehicles” (and subsidize Elon’s private jet travel). The solution provided by the green confidence game is to mine asteroids, bringing back precious metals from space to “solve the bottleneck.” But at what point in time will we be able to launch a rocket into space without increasing greenhouse emissions?
It is impossible to make a solar panel without burning fossil fuels. From the mining, crushing, and melting of the silicon to make the panels, to the massive amounts of carbon and water expended in mining and transporting the cobalt, lithium, and rare earth metals that go into the battery arrays to store the energy, it’s a very carbon intensive process. And so every petro-dollar spent on introducing new technology has a corollary carbon footprint. The trucks and ships that are transporting and delivering all the concrete that builds the foundation of all those industrial wind farms are burning diesel gas.
At the conference, I was speaking to a man who works at Total Energy about one of their solar arrays in southern Texas. They have converted 4,000 acres of what was productive farmland, mostly soybean- and rice-growing operations, into what is now a vast solar array dotted with natural gas wells. With a growing human population with inevitable caloric-intake needs, one has to wonder whether solar panels can be recycled back into food.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that covering huge swaths of the earth with dark colored, reflective, heat- and power-generating panels and mirror arrays that focus the sun’s power at towers full of molten salt that raise the surrounding ambient temperatures to nearly 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit) is going to create a heating effect on the surface temperature of the earth that will, in terms of basic logic, contribute to the ultimate heating of the atmosphere. The scientific discoveries regarding the greenhouse effect were demonstrated in the late 1800s.
Would it be a surprise to discover that harvesting energy from the jet stream with thousands of wind turbines off the coasts of the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe is going to alter the climate and precipitation patterns in Southern and Eastern Europe and perhaps as far away as Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai? Here we are, collectively installing jet-stream-energy-harvesting wind turbines around the world at the same time as we are being told that the jet stream is weakening as the result of climate change. I remember learning about the butterfly effect as a middle schooler: that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can create a downstream effect 1,000 miles away.
Action might build hope, but this collective action, subsidized by taxpayers, looks set to further heat up the atmosphere. I’m not arguing that the status quo is clean and sustainable, but I am arguing against printing billions of dollars and putting generations of future Americans in debt to add more carbon emissions and demand through increased development and manufacture of novel technologies of which we don’t understand the long-term consequences.
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign to break up the biggest monopolies threatening this republic over 100 years ago because monopoly is the enemy of democracy. Do private interests want the American people fighting “carbon” instead of entrenched monopolistic power? The fortunes of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos were all born on the internet, a U.S. taxpayer–funded technology that has allowed these men to take control of so much of our collective spending power, intellect, and government. How did we ever get to the point where, instead of being taxed to control their monopolistic power, Bezos and Musk are instead literally being subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars and subcontracted by the U.S. government on U.S. taxpayer dimes to launch rockets into space. Shouldn’t these men whose wealth was built by taxpayer-funded technology be paying down our national debt, not driving it up?
Even if we weren’t calling loudly for controls on the explosive monopolization rising worldwide, perhaps we could all agree to not subsidize billionaires with taxpayer dollars, which only increases their power to purchase our government away from their elected purpose: to represent the citizens who elected them.
To actually clean up the mess we’ve made, we’d have to ban new manufacture of plastics to create a demand for all the plastic we’ve littered the environment with, develop a 100 percent recycling economy, and prohibit companies from making products that are built to break (planned obsolescence). We’d repurpose manufacturing hubs and prohibit the manufacture and sale of chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides that are killing the living web of life around us, exponentially decreasing a healthy earth’s ability to sequester carbon, increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and making us ill. If we actually wanted to cut emissions, wouldn’t we phase out the personal vehicle model and transition to efficient high-speed rail systems? Wouldn’t we repopulate small-town America by demonopolizing the millions of acres of farmland that have been concentrated into the hands of a few giant corporations that are poisoning and depleting topsoil and return it to small-scale, permaculture-based farming operations that build topsoil and sequester carbon while supplying human caloric needs?
If there were ever a use for AI robots, we would have them working constantly to remove all toxic substances and recyclable materials from the world’s dumps and landfills, because we’ve already produced a global surplus of material that we just need to repurpose instead of building more mines and wasting precious fresh water supplies. Instead of doubling down on a planet-wide mental-conditioning system that would have us accept lies as truth and madness as sanity, let’s create an economy that doesn’t manufacture never-ending debt and a big environmental mess.
At COP28 in Dubai, a myth was propagated that we can spend our way into a “clean” energy future by implementing massive technological development when all of that development is destined to remain dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources. It reminds me of the news that was just reported about a group of “scientists” at the South Pole who were celebrating their use of hot water to drill down 600 meters through the ice to the sea floor. To study melting ice, the “scientists” literally melted the ice.
Andrew Scott is Executive Director of the Open Mind Project, an intercultural and inter-religious diplomatic education initiative.
