Replacing One Heavy Industry with Another

Many believe the "green" energy industry is inherently cleaner than the fossil fuel industry. There's no reason to believe that's the case. It's another form of heavy industry. It will produce waste and pollution too. There's no reason to believe it's inherently moral. That's delusional.

It would be great if fossil fuels could be 100% replaced with solar and batteries, and the panels and batteries could be easily recycled, and the mining and processing operations needed for that industry were clean. So far, though, there isn't even a uniform approach to recycling solar panels. The industry and governments didn't apparently even think about that problem. There's also no uniform process for recycling or scrapping batteries.

If fossil fuels can't really be replaced, it seems like a fools errand to try to shift the economy. The big problem right now is energy storage. Storing oil is cheap and easy. Storing coal is even easier. Storing electrical energy is expensive and resource intensive.

There's a belief that batteries will eventually improve. All the types of battery chemistry have a theoretical limit, and then many real world limits that sometimes make them unusable. Some, for example, have to operate at very high temperatures, others in a very limited temperature range. Some are inherently dangerous and include toxic materials.

That said, there might be a recipe for cheap, effective batteries that aren't toxic or are easy to recycle. The recipe for white LEDs took about 30 years. The first LED was in the early 1960s. The recipe for the blue LED was found in the 1990s and that enabled the white LEDs.

Canada might build a wind powered ammonia plant to store "hydrogen" in the form of ammonia. Today, an oil spill is a problem, in the future an ammonia spill might be a similar or worse problem.

Anyway, all this stuff seems like an attempt to continue living the high life but pretend it's all moral and good and green.