The environmental lobby are finally starting to wake up to what many of us have been saying for decades.
The so-called transition to so-called renewable energy is not just an act of economic suicide. It’s also an act of environmental vandalism on an industrial scale. Rainforest Reserves Australia have released an astonishingly useful map. Full credit to them. It is an impressive bit of work. What this map shows is that it will take 31,000 wind turbines, 28,000 km of high voltage transmission lines, 7,800 km of undersea cables, 44,000 km of new roads for the construction crews to use, and something like half a billion new solar panels covering an area larger than Sydney. All needing to be built in the name of saving the environment.
Their reason for creating this map is to try and highlight habitat destruction and the environmental threats posed by this massive scale roll out of solar and wind projects. And they’re not wrong. But in the process, they’ve highlighted the complete madness that the Liberal, Labor, Greens, and I’m sorry to say, most of the National Party members have all signed up to without many people really understanding the sheer scale of what we’re talking about when we talk about these renewable energy targets.
Spend some time scrolling around on this map and you’ll begin to get a sense that what’s already been built so far, marked in orange in the case of wind turbines that are already in operation, well, that’s dwarfed by the number of new wind turbines that have been proposed and are yet to be built, marked in yellow. The same is true of solar farms. The area that still needs to be covered in future toxic waste dwarves what we’ve already covered in future toxic waste. And yes, we already knew that. But this map makes it far easier to comprehend the sheer scale of the environmental vandalism involved.
Already some corners of the media have gone into damage control, pointing out, for example, that the area to be covered, if you make some very generous assumptions, is just .12% of Australia’s agricultural land. Aha. But that’s only one very small part of a very large and destructive tale.
But before we dive deeper into that tale, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So if you appreciate what I’m doing here with the Topher project, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books which are all about government power and civil disobedience along with my DVD of my multi-award-winning documentary Battleground Melbourne, all about the madness of what went down during Covid in Melbourne, Australia. Plus, there’s my t-shirts and my hoodies, all available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And all of it helps me to keep the Topher project going.
What gets me about this map is not just the scale of the environmental vandalism involved in meeting our renewables targets. It’s the hypocrisy of the people who are trying to defend it all as not that big of a deal. No sooner had this map started to go viral among people who are opposed to the net zero fantasy like me, then the rebuttal came out. The footprint of all these wind turbines and solar panels are just .12% of the agricultural land in Australia.
Well, that is a dishonest statistic because it uses the narrowest possible definition for the footprint of these wind turbines and solar panels, but the broadest possible definition for agricultural land in Australia, which therefore encompasses vast amounts of marginal land, irrigation infrastructure, and all the farm infrastructure such as fences, roadways, and all the rest of it. But honestly, whatever.
That’s not what pisses me off here. What pisses me off is that all over this country, we, the people of Australia, are being locked out of state and national parks and forests, no longer able to go four-wheel driving or fishing or in some cases even bushwalking or rock climbing, all in the name of protecting the environment. While wind turbines are being built on ridgelines and great big corridors are being felled through national parks for all of the power lines and access roads and associated paraphernalia that go with each and every one of these projects.
If you so much as pick a native flower in a state park in most of Australia, you could cop a massive fine because even such a small and innocent act, well, it’s regarded as a sin against our new god, Gaya, the environment. But the same people who insist that driving a four-wheel drive along a rocky pathway is going to be the end of the lesser spotted n also insist that there’s nothing to see here. As they propose to build literally thousands of wind turbines around the country, including some, many inside those very same protected areas that the Australian people are being locked out of.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how much goes into a single wind turbine. Here’s a time-lapse video of a foundation being laid for one, just one wind turbine. Now, this video is from the San Roman wind farms in Texas from nearly a decade ago. And this is a relatively small turbine compared to the ones being built today because it’s only 87 m tall. Now, since the whole point of these things is to reduce CO2 emissions, let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we?
The foundation 3 meters deep and nearly 22 meters in diameter. It contains more than 68 tons of steel, which by the way, each ton of steel requires about 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions to make depending on the exact method used. So there’s about 100 tons of CO2 emissions just in the steel that’s in just the foundation. Forget everything else. And that’s to say nothing of the mining and refining and transporting that went into getting the iron and the coal in the first place from which the steel was then made.
Then there’s the concrete. You need cement for that, which is ground up limestone mixed with some other stuff. Then there’s the aggregate and all the rest of it. They used 520 cubic meters of concrete in this foundation. And again, depending on the particulars, they emit between 200 and 500 kg of CO2 emissions per cubic meter of concrete. Now, I’m going to call it 333 kg per cubic meter for easier calculations, which means that about 170 tons of CO2 have been emitted just for the concrete in one wind turbine.
I’m not even going to begin to talk about the towers and the blades and the transport and the roads and the power lines and the turbine itself and the lubricants. I’m just talking about the foundations here. Now, this will be back filled and covered in, and in the end, all you’ll see is the mounting point for the tower itself, the tiny footprint. But to get to that point, there’s been over 270 tons of CO2 emitted, which is roughly the same as driving a large family car, 135,000 km or three and a half times around the equator of the planet. But remember, we’re doing all of this to save the planet.
Me personally, I’m not actually worried about CO2 emissions at all.
So, I’m going to put all of that to one side. What bothers me is that for years, we’ve been told off for our consumption, for all that mining and manufacturing needed to support our supposedly unsustainable lifestyles. We’ve been told to retreat from the wilderness, leave it be to protect it, as if the mere presence of a human being is going to bring bad juju. And yet the solution that these very same environmentalists are shoving down our throats involves mining and manufacturing on a scale that dwarfs everything that the human race has done up until now.
The University of Technology Sydney claims that we would need a sixfold increase in mining of critical minerals to make the renewable transmission a transition a reality. There are other estimates that put it far higher. That means we are going to have to go into areas where there aren’t mines, wherever the minerals happen to be that we haven’t started mining, and we’re going to have to go and mine it in those places, no matter how sensitive or environmentally significant those places may be. And we’ll do it to save the planet, of course.
But what they’re still not talking about is the fact that all of this mining will only enable the transition the first time. What do I mean by the first time? What I mean is most of the materials being used in these wind turbine foundations will need to be replaced every 50 or so years. Now again, the turbines have to be replaced every 20 years, but I’m talking about the foundations. The lie is that once these foundations are in place, they’ll last forever. And when the wind turbine is decommissioned, we’ll just bolt a new one right on top.
The reality is that the cyclic loads that a wind turbine creates on its foundation cause micro-fracturing to occur and between 10% and 30% of the foundations of each wind turbine cannot even be reused a second time which means that those ones would have to be replaced after just 20 to 25 years whenever that first turbine reaches the end of its life. Now to be fair, that does mean that between 70% and 90% of them can be reused a second time. But as age and degradation continue to increase, a lot more will need to be replaced after the second turbine, say 50 years. And a few of those foundations might even make it to 75 years. Maybe some might even make it to 100. But after that amount of time, every single one of these foundations is going to have to be replaced.
Which means that a small army of trucks are going to have to make their way back into that pristine natural environment and not only build a new foundation, they’re going to have to remove the old one. Unless we’ve suddenly decided that we’re okay with just leaving it all there. And yes, it can be broken up and the steel can be recycled. Even the concrete can actually be crushed and used as aggregate in future foundations. But all of that requires energy, not to mention heavy machinery and manufacturing. And none of that’s being spoken about honestly yet.
We’re talking about what it’s going to take to make the transition, but we’re not yet talking about what it’s going to take to sustain it. Now, to be fair, again, the same is true of base load power such as coal and nuclear power plants, which also have a life in their case of between 60 and 80 years typically. So, you might say, well, what’s the big deal? It’s just the same.
Well, the big deal is the difference in energy density and capacity factor.
To deliver a given amount of energy to the grid, you either need a relatively small footprint for a nuclear or a coal power plant, or you need a vast footprint in the form of a whole bunch of these wind turbines with a whole lot of concrete foundations compared to what fossil fuels would require. So this recycling and remanufacturing issue for renewables is massive compared to coal. All that mining and manufacturing needed for the renewable energy transition to happen. That’s just to do it for the first time. Then it will have to be done and redone roughly every 50 or so years on average even for the foundations and every 20 or to 30 years for the solar panels not to mention the turbines and the blades and the towers and turbines and everything else. And that never stops happening.
Now, take another look at this map and realize that even the foundations of every one of these dots is going to require replacement every 50 years or so. And ask yourself again, are we really saving the environment here? And all we’ve looked at so far are the foundations and just the foundations of the wind turbines. We haven’t even started on the solar panels. We’re being sold a lie that all the mining, refining, manufacturing, transporting, not to mention all the land clearing, and all the power lines needed are somehow saving the environment. And the beauty of this map is that we can see the scale of that lie more clearly.
Now, how did we get here? Well, it all started with the lie that human emissions of CO2 were going to be the end of life as we know it. And after that lie, well, if there’s an existential crisis, well, then no price, no amount of hypocrisy, no amount of environmental vandalism, and no amount of lying is too high a price for us to pay if we’re saving humanity.
This is something I used to talk about quite a lot, and perhaps I should start talking about it again. It’s a thing called noble cause corruption where people excuse themselves for engaging in all manner of dishonest behavior because it’s for a noble cause. And if you truly believe the future of humanity is at stake, then is there really any harm in lying about what it’s going to take to save humanity?
Now, of course, many of them don’t actually believe what they’re saying. They’re just cashing in on the climate gravy train while they can, but that’s a topic for another video entirely. I urge you to spend some time looking around this map for yourself and then share it with others, especially with people that you know who actually support this net zero renewable energy transition. Show them the map and ask them, “Is this what environmentalism really looks like?”
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported. Please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
Thank you for watching to the end. Please like, subscribe, comment what you think and what you’ve found in your area on that map.
