<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>June</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 4, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"><i>[ BBC - shows there is great opportunity
for industrial recycling ] </i><br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>Solar panels - an eco-disaster
waiting to happen?</b><br>
</font> By Daniel Gordon<br>
The Climate Question podcast, BBC Sounds<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be
disposed of and replaced.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent
a looming global environmental disaster.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"We're producing more and more solar panels - which is great - but
how are we going to deal with the waste?" she asks.<br>
<br>
BBC Sounds - The Climate Question - How renewable are renewables?<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
These rare materials can subsequently be recycled and reused to
make new, more powerful, solar units.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Boom period<br>
The new ROSI plant will open during a boom period for solar panel
installations.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
If current growth trends are sustained, Ms Collier says, the
volume of scrap solar panels could be huge.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
To put that into perspective, the world currently produces a total
of 400 million tonnes of plastic every year.<br>
<br>
Recycling challenges<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"Now is the time to think about this," says Ms Collier.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"The biggest one [we decommissioned] took three months," Mr
Defrenne recalls.<br>
<br>
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."..<br>
- -<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
But because they are so valuable, extracting those precious
materials efficiently could be a game-changer, says Mr Defrenne.<br>
<br>
"Over 60% of the value is contained in 3% of the weight of the
solar panels," he says.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."...<br>
Meanwhile British scientists have been trying to develop similar
technology to ROSI.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
But so far, ROSI is the only company in its field to have scaled
up its operation to industrial levels.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
But there is potential to do a lot more. And he's making that his
mission.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<br>
"When that happens, my personal goal is to ensure France will be
the technological leader of the world."<br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519">https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65602519</a><br>
</font> </p>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"> <br>
</font> <br>
<font face="Calibri"> <i>[ some history of capitalism from The New
Republic ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>How Big Business Hijacked Freedom</b><br>
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explain how industry groups
foisted free-market fundamentalism on the American public and
demonized the alternatives.<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">Jack McCordick<br>
March 29, 2023<br>
THE IDEAS Q&A</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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?<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Jack McCordick: </b>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?<br>
<br>
<b>Naomi Oreskes:</b> 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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
<br>
<b>J.M.: </b>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?<br>
<br>
<b>Erik Conway: </b>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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>J.M.:</b> 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?<br>
<br>
<b>N.O.:</b> 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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>J.M.:</b> 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?<br>
<br>
<b>N.O.:</b> 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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>E.C.: </b>The marketplace of ideas is
rigged just as casinos are rigged in favor of the house.<br>
<br>
<b>N.O.: </b>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.<br>
<br>
<b>J.M.: </b>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?<br>
<br>
<b>E.C.: </b>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.<br>
<br>
<b>J.M.: </b>Do you see any signs that the fever of market
fundamentalist ideology is beginning to break?<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>E.C.: </b>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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>N.O.: </b>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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">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.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">Jack McCordick @jackmccordick</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Jack McCordick is a reporter-researcher at The
New Republic.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://newrepublic.com/article/171434/big-business-hijacked-freedom-oreskes-conway-interview">https://newrepublic.com/article/171434/big-business-hijacked-freedom-oreskes-conway-interview</a></font>
<p><font face="Calibri"> </font> </p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
<i>[The news archive - looking back at idiocy of old ]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>June 4, 2002</b></i></font> <br>
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."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/us/president-distances-himself-from-global-warming-report.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/us/president-distances-himself-from-global-warming-report.html</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri">======================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
class="moz-txt-tag">*Mass media is lacking, many </span>daily
summaries<span class="moz-txt-tag"> deliver global warming
news - a few are email delivered*</span></b> <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><br>
=========================================================<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>*Inside Climate News</b><br>
Newsletters<br>
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every
day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s
top headlines deliver the full story, for free.<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/">https://insideclimatenews.org/</a><br>
--------------------------------------- <br>
*<b>Climate Nexus</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*">https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*</a>
<br>
Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News
summarizes the most important climate and energy news of the
day, delivering an unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant
reporting. It also provides original reporting and commentary on
climate denial and pro-polluter activity that would otherwise
remain largely unexposed. 5 weekday <br>
================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>Carbon Brief Daily </b><span
class="moz-txt-star"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up">https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up</a></span><b
class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b> <br>
Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon
Brief sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to
thousands of subscribers around the world. The email is a digest
of the past 24 hours of media coverage related to climate change
and energy, as well as our pick of the key studies published in
the peer-reviewed journals. <br>
more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief">https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief</a>
<br>
================================== <br>
*T<b>he Daily Climate </b>Subscribe <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*">https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*</a>
<br>
Get The Daily Climate in your inbox - FREE! Top news on climate
impacts, solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered week days.
Better than coffee. <br>
Other newsletters at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/">https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/</a>
<br>
<br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri">
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
<br>
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/">https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe <a
class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:subscribe@theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request"><mailto:subscribe@theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request></a>
to news digest./<br>
<br>
Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only. It does not
carry images or attachments which may originate from remote
servers. A text-only message can provide greater privacy to the
receiver and sender. This is a personal hobby production curated
by Richard Pauli<br>
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for
commercial purposes. Messages have no tracking software.<br>
To subscribe, email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated
moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:contact@theclimate.vote">contact@theclimate.vote</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:contact@theclimate.vote"><mailto:contact@theclimate.vote></a>
with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe<br>
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote">https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote</a><br>
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://TheClimate.Vote">http://TheClimate.Vote</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://TheClimate.Vote/"><http://TheClimate.Vote/></a>
delivering succinct information for citizens and responsible
governments of all levels. List membership is confidential and
records are scrupulously restricted to this mailing list. <br>
</font>
</body>
</html>