Blowin' in the Wind

Things are so depressingly complicated. If you make all cars electric, where does the electricity come from? Mostly coal, nuclear  and hydroelectric plants. Is that good?

And consider these stats from Perry regarding the cost of building wind energy turbines:

 

Look at just one part of a turbine, the generator, which uses considerable rare earth elements (2000± pounds per MW).

The mining and processing of these metals has  environmental consequences that are unacknowledged and ignored by the wind industry and its environmental surrogates. For instance, just the rare earths of a typical 100 MW wind project would generate approximately:

1. 20,000 square meters of destroyed vegetation,
2. 2 million pounds of CO2,
3. 6 million cubic meters of toxic air pollution,
4. 29 million gallons of poisoned water,
5. 600 million pounds of highly contaminated tailing sands, and
6. 280,000 pounds of radioactive waste.