Environmental Progress, a nonprofit organization co-founded by investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, in collaboration with The Blind Spot and Italian analyst Enrico Mariutti, argue in a recently released report that Chinese-made solar panels are about three times as dirty—in terms of carbon emissions during their production—as what has been claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body for assessing climate change science.

“People say solar panels don’t produce carbon emissions, but they do. And now, a major new investigation by Environmental Progress, drawing on the research of @enricomariutti, finds that solar panels made in China produce at least 3x more carbon emissions than IPCC claims,” Mr. Shellenberger wrote in a tweet on July 24.

Specifically, the IPCC claims that the carbon footprint of solar panels—most of which are made in China—is about 48 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilowatt-hour (kWh). But Environmental Progress said in a bombshell report that research carried out by Mr. Mariutti suggests the true carbon emissions are closer to 170 grams to 250 grams of CO2 per kWh—between three to five times higher than reported by the U.N.

“For 10 years, the @IPCC-CH has been presenting misleading evidence on the carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy,” Mr. Mariutti said in a Twitter post on July 24.

The IPCC didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report based on independent calculations.

‘Dirty Secret’

In April, Mr. Mariutti, an analyst specializing in economics as well as climate and energy policy, published a report titled “The Dirty Secret of the Solar Industry.” In the report, he argued that the IPCC was vastly underestimating the amount of carbon generated by Chinese-made photovoltaic cells because it was basing its calculations on a Europe-based, low-carbon supply chain rather than the coal-reliant production processes in China.

“We are investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in technologies that are low-carbon only because someone wrote it down somewhere,” Mr. Mariutti said in the executive summary of his report. “There aren’t any national or international authorities who have bothered to understand on what basis and how this ‘paper knowledge’ was assembled.”

The problem is that most of the carbon intensity data that the IPCC—and governments—rely on for solar panels are based on modeling that’s likely to have vastly underestimated the carbon emissions of solar power because of a lack of transparency, or simply inaccurate or “made-up” data from Chinese manufacturers, according to the Environmental Progress report.

Over the years, China has become a dominant force in the production of solar panels. For example, about 97 percent of the global supply of solar wafers—a key component of photovoltaic cells—are made in China.

However, China’s growing share of the solar panel market hasn’t come about because of innovation.

“The majority of experts consulted by Environmental Progress agree that China’s competitive advantage did not lie in an innovative new technological process, but rather in the very same factors the country has always used to outcompete the West: cheap coal-fired energy, mass government subsidies for strategic industries, and human labor operating in poor working conditions,” according to the group’s report.

When he first released his independent report in April, Mr. Mariutti said in a post on Twitter that he was motivated to publish his findings “in light of the acceleration of European climate policy, which threatens to condemn Italy to irreversible decline.”

He said he felt it was his duty to make his research public in order to inform public policy decisions.

“In the last 10 years, the IPCC has systematically underestimated the carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy by pretending that photovoltaic modules are produced in Europe rather than in China,” he said at the time.

“By recalculating the carbon footprint of a photovoltaic system on the basis of a predominately coal-based energy mix, it is possible to estimate that the global average carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy is at least 200 [grams of CO2 per kWh].”

Mr. Shellenberger, for his part, has long warned about the holistic environmental impacts of the solar panel industry.

Solar Panel Waste Tsunami

In 2021, Mr. Shellenberger told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” that the economics of solar panel production, deployment, and recycling shows that the technology has a “toxic” and “dangerous” dimension, while its advocacy is driven by ideological leanings rather than by sound science.

“We’ve been in a sort of hypnotic trance,” Mr. Shellenberger said at the time, referring to what he characterized as the misguided belief that solar power is an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional forms of power generation such as nuclear.

“It’s a spiritual pursuit,” he said. “There’s the idea that … we’ll protect the natural environment by being dependent on natural energy flows like sunlight. It’s not a scientific view. It actually is worse for the environment.”

A Harvard Business Review study concluded that solar panels are being replaced faster than expected because of various economic incentives, and warned of a rising mountain of solar panel trash “of existentially damaging proportions” unless incentives are adopted to drive down the high costs of recycling.

The Harvard study cited estimates by Garvin Heath, senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who told PV Magazine that it costs $20 to $30 to recycle a panel, versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill. Harvard Business Review concluded that the bright promise of more widespread adoption of solar energy as an environmentally friendly alternative “would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.”

Asked about the study, Mr. Shellenberger confirmed the high recycling costs but said that they’re just one part of the end-of-life burden of solar energy. The panels contain heavy metals such as lead, which can be released as a toxic cloud if the panels shatter during disposal.

“It’s hazardous waste,” he said at the time.

With the proliferation of renewable energy sources, especially solar power, in the United States, the issue of tackling waste has become a growing concern.

The United States currently has an estimated 149.5 gigawatts of solar capacity installed nationwide.

Research firm Wood Mackenzie expects the country’s total installed solar capacity to hit 378 gigawatts by 2028.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

The United States currently has an estimated 149.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity installed nationwide. In the first quarter of 2023, the country installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity, which is its “best first quarter in history,” according to a June 8 press release by research firm Wood Mackenzie. Over the next five years, Wood Mackenzie expects America’s total installed solar capacity to hit 378 GW by 2028.

China is the biggest solar manufacturer in the world and a key supplier of panels to the United States. But trading with China comes with human costs like slave labor.

Last year, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) withheld 1,642 electronic shipments valued at $841 million, including solar panels, due to the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act that sought to counter the use of forced labor when sourcing from China. In March, the CBP released 552 pieces of equipment worth $345 million.

The stalled import of solar panels from China caused delays in solar project development programs. But with the release of part of the withheld shipments, the Chinese solar panels will now make their way into American projects.

Besides the human rights issue in the manufacturing process, the solar industry has another hurdle that is yet to be resolved and which is soon touted to be a global ecological nightmare.

Most solar panels have a lifespan of around 25 to 30 years. As these panels stop working or are retired, they pose a significant challenge as countries have to make sound arrangements to deal with the massive amounts of solar panel waste.

Burgeoning Solar Waste

Based on numbers from Yale School of the Environment, solar panels due to retire by 2030 in the United States would cover around 3,000 American football fields.

In a May 13 interview with CNBC, Suvi Sharma, the CEO of Texas-based Solarcycle, stated that solar energy is “becoming the dominant form of power generation” while citing an EIA report which said that 54 percent of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity in the United States this year will come from solar.

However, nothing has been done to make the solar industry “circular,” Sharma said, referring to recycling. At present, there are over 500 million solar panels in America, with tens of millions expected to be added in the coming years.

A 2019 study published in Renewable Energy estimated that the country will see roughly 9.8 million metric tons of solar panel waste between 2030 and 2060.

In China, solar panel waste has become a major issue. Over the past years, China scrambled to boost the production of solar panels without properly maintaining technology standards. As a result, many of these panels are becoming unusable before the end of their expected lifetime.

The scrapping rate of solar panels in China is estimated to have reached around 30 percent per year, Fang Qi, an investment consultant living in the United Kingdom, told The Epoch Times on April 4.

In March, Liu Limin, deputy secretary of the PV specialized committee of China ECOPV Alliance, predicted at a forum that China’s solar module waste will hit 18GW by 2030 and 253GW or 20 million tons by 2040.

Recycling Solar Waste

Solar panel waste presents a substantial pollution problem. The panels consist of numerous toxic chemicals like cadmium telluride, lead, hexafluoroethane, and more. A chemical created as a byproduct of solar panel manufacturing is silicon tetrachloride which can lead to burns on the skin.

Putting solar panel waste in landfills presents a long-term risk to the environment as the toxic minerals and metals can end up seeping into the ground.

However, this is what is being done right now. At present, around 90 percent of defective or end-of-life solar panels are sent into landfills. This is because the costs of recycling solar panels are far higher compared to just dumping them.

According to Sharma, this gap will be “closing over the next five to 10 years significantly” due to a “combination of recycling becoming more cost-effective and landfilling costs only increasing.”

California is the biggest residential solar market in the United States, and as of mid-2022, the state had only one recycling plant that accepted solar panels.

U.S.-based solar panel manufacturer First Solar believes recycling will become profitable. “I’m very confident we will get the costs of recycling below landfill,” the company’s chief quality and reliability officer Patrick Buehler said in an interview with WSJ last year.

According to First Solar, it can recover nearly 95 percent of a solar panel’s materials by weight. The recovered materials can then be used to make semiconductors for brand-new panels.

Another aspect of the distribution network is that when waste management costs are added, the price of individual solar panels will also move up.

Practical and efficient energy policies need to be adopted by lawmakers. There are many drawbacks presently concerning the solar industry ranging from dependance on China’s slave labor to effectively getting rid of old panels.

Unless actual progress is made in the entire supply chain, it is not recommended to deploy solar panels on a large scale, and develop a dependence on such environmentally unsustainable technology.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Although the shockwave’s origin is unknown, astronomers think it came from an ejection of energetic and highly magnetized, superheated gas discharged from the sun, which is also called a coronal mass ejection (CME).

According to Space Weather, the ejection may have been unleashed from sunspot AR3165, which fired at least eight solar flares into space on December 14 that caused blackouts over the Atlantic Ocean. Even though scientists are not yet sounding the alarm, a crack can remain open for hours and allow solar winds to flow through.

The sunspot was seen sizzling on December 14 and then discharged an M6-class explosion that struck Earth. M-class flares are classified as medium-sized but these occurrences can create short radio blackouts like what happened over the Atlantic.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Solar Dynamics Observatory, a probe analyzing Earth’s sun, caught the eruptions from the sunspot – a dark area cooler than other portions of the surface, which pours out streams of plasma.

Brilliant flashes of light were spotted coming from the sunspot, which possibly sent the shock wave toward Earth. Shock waves happen when a rapid pulse of solar wind rakes through the lagging solar wind. They are made up of compressed and heated gases.

CMEs can expel billions of tons of corona material from the sun’s surface. The material contains plasma and magnetic fields. These eruptions have the power to cause space weather that can intervene with satellites and power grids on Earth and can be detrimental to unprotected astronauts.

Earth’s magnetosphere is situated in its magnetic field, which stretches thousands of miles into space. Its magnetism affects everything from worldwide communication to animal migration and weather patterns. The sun appears to be moving into an active period of its 11-year cycle of activity that started in 2019 and is predicted to peak in 2025.

Solar flares, which are blasts of electromagnetic radiation that travel at the speed of light, normally reach Earth within eight minutes of appearing from the sun’s atmosphere. The most powerful class is X flares, followed by M class ones, which are the ones seen on December 14.

“Three more M flares: An M6, M3 and M2 all from AR3165. That makes 8 M flares so far today. They seem to be getting bigger, is an X flare in the offing? Stay tuned,” Solar physicist Keith Strong wrote on Twitter.

Shock waves could trigger geomagnetic storm similar to Carrington Event

The shock wave that cracked Earth’s magnetosphere could trigger geomagnetic storms. These geomagnetic storms can warp Earth’s magnetic field and send satellites crashing to the planet. They can also destroy electrical systems and disable the internet.

Geomagnetic storms happen after a solar flare if the exchange of energy from the sun reaches the space surrounding Earth through solar wind. The biggest geomagnetic storm in recent history was the Carrington Event in 1859, which unleashed roughly the same energy as 10 billion one-megaton atomic bombs.

After crashing into Earth, the strong stream of solar particles fried telegraph systems around the globe and created auroras brighter than the light of the full moon that appeared as far south as the Caribbean.

If a similar incident were to occur today, scientists warned that it would make trillions of dollars worth of damage, spark widespread blackouts and imperil thousands of lives.

NASA reported that a geomagnetic storm in 1989 ejected a billion-ton plume of gas that produced a blackout across the entire Canadian province of Quebec. But this may not even scratch the surface of what the sun is capable of hurling at Earth.

Scientists are also examining the cause of a series of unexpected and massive spikes in radiation levels registered in ancient tree rings across Earth’s history. The theory is that the spikes could have originated from solar storms 80 times more forceful than the Carrington Event.

Follow Space.news for more news about shock waves and solar storms. Watch the video below to know how a solar storm could wipe out the world’s internet.

This video is from the The Prisoner channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• New study finds cosmic shock wave 60 times larger than the Milky Way.
• Sunspot unleashes a dozen solar flares in a day, causing radio blackouts worldwide.
• Scientists discover new solar waves that move three times faster than they thought possible.

Sources include:

• DailyMail.co.uk
• LivesSience.com
• Brighteon.com
• NATURAL NEWS

For some reason, the Biden-Harris regime thought it would be a good idea to trot out their minions to the Sunday talk shows to discuss the bill. The results have been comical so far. ABC’s Jonathan Karl grilled Karine Jean-Pierre about it and it didn’t turn out well. But even the moronic press secretary did far better than Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on CNN’s State of the Union today.

When asked about how Americans will see lower costs today, Granholm went into an odd, repetitive response about how Americans need to buy expensive junk such as electric vehicles, solar panels, and other “green” products. These technologies often require massive expenditures to acquire and install, far beyond the means of the vast majority of Americans.

Even for those who can afford this stuff, the net effect from the tax credits will not outweigh the costs in the short term. It may take years, even decades for any cost-savings to materialize, tax credits or not.

“Immediately, people will be able to lower the fuel costs in their home through the 30% tax credit you can claim in 2022 for installing energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, energy-efficient appliances,” she said. “That is right away. And, on top of that, of course, if citizens want to install solar panels on their roofs so that they can generate their own power, that’s another 30% tax credit. And, of course, there’s the tax credits that are at the dealership for the automotive sector, for electric vehicles.”

Watch:

Inflation? What inflation? Can't afford to pay for anything? Well, no worries, says Jennifer Granholm. You'll receive a tax credit for installing an electric charging station in your home. pic.twitter.com/cAbkJH8vRI

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 14, 2022

This is how disconnected the Biden-Harris regime is with the people. Their answer to how Americans will benefit today is to tell them to spend a ton of money on green products. I guarantee Jennifer Granholm isn’t worried about rising potato prices like the rest of us.

It’s getting crazier and the Biden-Harris regime are not even trying to fix things. If you are concerned about your wealth or retirement and want to move $25,000 or more to precious metals, contact our America First sponsor.