[✔️] June 4, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Solar Panel recycling, Economic system, fracking study from 2015

[Richard Pauli]

/*June*//*4, 2023*/

/[ BBC - shows there is great opportunity for industrial recycling  ] /
*Solar panels - an eco-disaster waiting to happen?*
By Daniel Gordon
The Climate Question podcast, BBC Sounds
While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in 
reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 
years.

Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed 
of and replaced.

"The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. 
Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count 
both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion 
solar panels.," says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at 
the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar 
panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle 
them is lacking...
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a 
looming global environmental disaster.

"It's going to be a waste mountain by 2050, unless we get recycling 
chains going now," says Ute Collier, deputy director of the 
International Renewable Energy Agency.

"We're producing more and more solar panels - which is great - but how 
are we going to deal with the waste?" she asks.

BBC Sounds - The Climate Question - How renewable are renewables?
It is hoped a major step will be taken at the end of June, when the 
world's first factory dedicated to fully recycling solar panels 
officially opens in France.

ROSI, the specialist solar recycling company which owns the facility, in 
the Alpine city of Grenoble, hopes eventually to be able to extract and 
re-use 99% of a unit's components.

As well as recycling the glass fronts and aluminium frames, the new 
factory can recover nearly all of the precious materials contained 
within the panels, such as silver and copper, which are typically some 
of the hardest materials to extract.

These rare materials can subsequently be recycled and reused to make 
new, more powerful, solar units.

Conventional methods of recycling solar panels recover most of the 
aluminium and glass - but ROSI says the glass, in particular, is of 
relatively low-quality.

The glass recovered using those methods can be used to create tiles, or 
in sandblasting - it can also be mixed with other materials to make 
asphalt - but it cannot be used in applications where high-grade glass 
is required, such as the production of new solar panels.

Boom period
The new ROSI plant will open during a boom period for solar panel 
installations.

The world's solar energy generation capacity grew by 22% in 2021. Around 
13,000 photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are fitted in the UK every month - 
most of them on the roofs of private houses.

In many cases, solar units become relatively uneconomical before they 
reach the end of their expected lifespan. New, more efficient designs 
evolve at regular intervals, meaning it can prove cheaper to replace 
solar panels that are only 10 or 15 years old with updated versions.

If current growth trends are sustained, Ms Collier says, the volume of 
scrap solar panels could be huge.

"By 2030, we think we're going to have four million tonnes [of scrap] - 
which is still manageable - but by 2050, we could end up with more than 
200 million tonnes globally."

To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total of 
400 million tonnes of plastic every year.

Recycling challenges
The reason there are so few facilities for recycling solar panels is 
because there has not been much waste to process and reuse until recently.

The first generation of domestic solar panels is only now coming to the 
end of its usable life. With those units now approaching retirement, 
experts say urgent action is needed.

"Now is the time to think about this," says Ms Collier.

France is already a leader among European nations when it comes to 
processing photovoltaic waste, says Nicolas Defrenne. His organisation, 
Soren, partners with ROSI and other firms, co-ordinating the 
decommissioning of solar panels all over France.

"The biggest one [we decommissioned] took three months," Mr Defrenne 
recalls.

His team at Soren has been experimenting with different ways of 
recycling what they collect: "We're throwing everything at the wall and 
seeing what sticks."..
- -
At ROSI's high-tech plant in Grenoble, the solar panels are 
painstakingly taken apart to recover the precious materials inside - 
such as copper, silicon and silver.

Each solar panel contains only tiny fragments of these precious 
materials and those fragments are so intertwined with other components 
that, until now, it has not been economically viable to separate them.

But because they are so valuable, extracting those precious materials 
efficiently could be a game-changer, says Mr Defrenne.

"Over 60% of the value is contained in 3% of the weight of the solar 
panels," he says.

The team at Soren are hopeful that, in the future, nearly three-quarters 
of the materials needed to make new solar panels - including silver - 
can be recovered from retired PV units and recycled - to help speed up 
production of new panels.

Currently there is not enough silver available to build the millions of 
solar panels which will be required in the the transition from fossil 
fuels, says Mr Defrenne: "You can see where you have a production 
bottleneck, it's silver."...
Meanwhile British scientists have been trying to develop similar 
technology to ROSI.

Last year, researchers at the University of Leicester announced they had 
worked out how to extract silver from PV units using a form of saline.

But so far, ROSI is the only company in its field to have scaled up its 
operation to industrial levels.

Moreover, the technology is expensive. In Europe, importers or producers 
of solar panels are responsible for disposing of them when they become 
expendable. And many favour crushing or shredding the waste - which is 
far cheaper.

Mr Defrenne acknowledges that intensive recycling of solar panels is 
still in its infancy. Soren and its partners recycled just under 4,000 
tonnes of French solar panels last year.

But there is potential to do a lot more. And he's making that his mission.

"The weight of all the new solar panels sold last year in France was 
232,000 tonnes - so, by the time those wear out in 20 years, that's how 
much I'll need to collect every year.

"When that happens, my personal goal is to ensure France will be the 
technological leader of the world."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519




/[ some history of capitalism from The New Republic  ]/
*How Big Business Hijacked Freedom*
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explain how industry groups foisted 
free-market fundamentalism on the American public and demonized the 
alternatives.
Jack McCordick
March 29, 2023
THE IDEAS Q&A
Take practically any Democratic policy of recent years, and you can find 
conservatives sounding the same tune. Marco Rubio condemned Biden’s 
Build Back Better legislation as “Build Back Socialist,” while Glenn 
Beck deemed his student loan relief program “a socialist failure.” 
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz called Biden’s stimulus plan “a Trojan 
horse for socialism,” while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the same 
thing about the Green New Deal. As the historian David Austin Walsh 
noted a few years ago, “One of the binding agents holding the 
conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century 
has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism 
built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real 
difference among them.” What accounts for the ubiquity of this argument 
in American political culture?

In their new book, The Big Myth, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik 
Conway examine the origins and development of the “quasi-religious” myth 
of “market fundamentalism.” Focusing on the efforts of business titans, 
industry groups, and conservative intellectuals over the past century, 
Oreskes and Conway demonstrate how the belief that markets work best 
without government interference and that markets, not governments, best 
guarantee our freedoms, went from fringe to mainstream in American 
politics and culture. How, they ask, did onetime union leader Ronald 
Reagan come to sing hosannas to “the magic of the market,” with many 
Democratic leaders sounding an only slightly less breathless tune?

I recently spoke to Oreskes and Conway over Zoom. During our 
conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed 
the roots of this ideology, why the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor 
should be retired once and for all, and whether the fever of market 
fundamentalism is finally starting to break.

*Jack McCordick: *What do you think has made market fundamentalist 
ideology not just palatable, but actively attractive to so much of the 
American public for so long, given all the ways that it goes against 
people’s basic material interests?

*Naomi Oreskes:* There are two important things. One is the power of 
saturation. If you say something enough times, and you say it in enough 
different ways, and you recruit spokespeople who seem credible or 
likable, you can get people to believe things, even when they’re not 
true. Whether it’s skin creams that will make you young, or a weight 
loss program that will make you lose weight, people are susceptible to 
the power of suggestion, and propaganda takes advantage of that.

The other reason why it works is because it appeals to virtues, and 
particularly it appeals to the virtue of freedom. Americans of all walks 
of life, all sizes, shapes, and colors, believe in freedom. It’s a 
deeply held American value. So you tell people a story about how the 
marketplace is not only magical and has these amazing powers to solve 
problems, but it also protects your freedom.

*J.M.: *Recent books on the influence of American billionaires—such as 
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains—focus on 
the last half-century or so. Your book begins much earlier. Why do you 
start the story in the early twentieth century?

*Erik Conway: *We started where we did because the National Association 
of Manufacturers was such a big player for us. Initially, NAM comes into 
existence in the late nineteenth century to promote tariffs, which is 
not exactly the anti-government NAM we’ve come to know. But then they 
very quickly went into opposition to child labor law, and that’s where 
we pick up the story because that’s where we find the beginning of this 
ideology of business freedom and their efforts to convert that into an 
understanding of American freedom overall.

N.O.: And NAM invents this ideology out of whole cloth. It’s a pure 
invention. You don’t find “free enterprise” in The Constitution, you 
don’t find it in the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights, 
and you don’t even really find much discussion of it in any of The 
Federalist Papers. So it’s a fabrication, but it’s a fabrication that 
builds on our commitment to the idea of freedom. They take the term 
“private enterprise,” which is what people used to talk about, and they 
change it to “free enterprise,” and then they try to construct a story 
that without “free enterprise,” the whole edifice of American democracy 
crumbles. They make it a defense of American democracy, even though what 
they’re arguing for is actually profoundly anti-democratic.
*
**J.M.:* Your 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, examined how 
corporate-backed scientists obscured the truth about climate change, 
tobacco, acid rain, and other major issues. How has writing The Big Myth 
helped you better understand the phenomena you investigated over a 
decade ago?

*N.O.:* I don’t think it changed the way I viewed the key players in the 
story of Merchants of Doubt. What it changed was my understanding of 
just how deep the story was. There was a point in writing this book when 
we thought the story would start with Ronald Reagan. And then we quickly 
realized that it was much older, especially because NAM was this key 
player. NAM is actually still fighting climate action today: I just 
recently learned that they’ve been fighting disclosure rules about 
conflict minerals. NAM was this obviously key figure that quickly took 
us back into the 1930s. In Merchants of Doubt, we thought that the 
tobacco industry had really invented these strategies of disinformation, 
of experts for hire, all that stuff. But it goes back much, much further.

*J.M.:* A metaphor that constantly appears in American discourse is that 
of the “marketplace of ideas.” What does your book have to say about how 
we should understand this metaphor?

*N.O.:* One of the things that comes out in our story is just the 
unbelievable hypocrisy and venality of some of these people who are 
publicly defending competition, saying that competition lets the best 
man win, that it brings out the best, is meritocratic, etc., but in 
reality, are working behind the scenes to manipulate so many things in 
ways that deny competition.

When they decide to promote free-market neoliberal ideology at the 
University of Chicago, they don’t put out an advertisement or call for 
proposals. They handpick individuals who they believe who they know will 
help them give credibility to their arguments about capitalism and 
freedom. And then they systematically fund them, including Milton 
Friedman, who becomes one of the most famous economists of the 20th 
century. It’s not a competitive process. Friedman does not rise to the 
top because he competes in the marketplace of ideas.

*E.C.: *The marketplace of ideas is rigged just as casinos are rigged in 
favor of the house.

*N.O.: *But at least when you go to a casino, you know that it’s rigged. 
But you don’t know, when you read Ayn Rand’s novels, for example, that 
she’s also writing censorship codes.

*J.M.: *You argue that we should not be concerned with “capitalism per 
se,” but rather with “how we think about capitalism, and how it 
operates.” What would a well-regulated capitalism look like to you?

*E.C.: *One of the ways we initially thought about framing this work is 
around the idea that there are many varieties of capitalism. The 
particular problem in the United States is the kind of extremist, 
anti-regulatory policies of the business world. We used to have a much 
larger union penetration, and therefore the wage inequality we see now 
was far less bad. We see it throughout most of the European countries: 
They still have elements of the system that are capitalist, but they are 
not the extreme forms that we have. But we’ve bought into this binary 
that it’s either unregulated free-market capitalism or communism. And 
that’s just not the truth of the matter.

*J.M.: *Do you see any signs that the fever of market fundamentalist 
ideology is beginning to break?
*E.C.: *I think so, because as far as I can tell, the leadership of both 
parties no longer buys this mythology of unregulated capitalism. The 
Trump Administration imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and on other 
countries as well, and the Biden administration kept them. Republicans 
are trying to regulate tech companies, because they think they’re being 
unfairly censored, even though, as far as I can tell, censorship is a 
red herring. But they seem to be serious about it. And there’s the Biden 
administration’s climate plan: instead of going with market-based 
solutions, they’re subsidizing desired industries and making sure that 
those chosen industries are national industries. They have this idea of 
reshoring a new green production economy. None of those are free-market 
ideas. So something’s changing. What it will become in the future is the 
part I can’t see, but I think it’s true that the market fundamentalism 
fever is breaking.

*N.O.: *Yes, although with that said, you can still find it on the pages 
of The Wall Street Journal. One of the things that’s tricky is that the 
Republican Party is kind of in a bind now, because so many of the things 
they’ve argued for clearly have failed. There’s this tension, because on 
the one hand, as Erik said, there are Republicans who like protective 
tariffs. And when their own interests are at stake, you certainly see 
conservatives and Republicans at the federal trough, just like everyone 
else. But at the same time, they’re still committed to this 
anti-government ideology. You saw that really clearly in Sarah Huckabee 
Sanders’s response to the State of the Union, where it was all big, bad 
federal government.

Among Democrats, Biden is really departing from what has been the 
mainstream Democratic position under Obama, and before that, Clinton. 
Clinton really bought into the deregulatory ideology, with in some cases 
pretty severely bad consequences. I think a lot of people have seen the 
ways in which the ideology of market fundamentalism has failed us. 
Climate change is the obvious issue, but there’s also the opioid crisis, 
the lack of affordable housing in major American cities, income 
inequality, and so many other examples of where these policies haven’t 
worked.

Jack McCordick @jackmccordick
Jack McCordick is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
https://newrepublic.com/article/171434/big-business-hijacked-freedom-oreskes-conway-interview 



/[The news archive - looking back at idiocy of old ]/
/*June 4, 2002*/
June 4, 2002: President George W. Bush dismisses an EPA report on the 
threat of human-caused climate change, deriding what he called "the 
report put out by the bureaucracy."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/us/president-distances-himself-from-global-warming-report.html 




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