NOT an interview w/ Vaclav Smil, Mulvaney on solar, a visit to Hawk Mountain
NOT an interview with Vaclav Smil, Mulvaney on solar's "green halo" and a visit to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
This week I was in Reading, Pennsylvania to present to the sales team at East Penn, one of the world’s biggest makers of lead-acid batteries. It was a short trip east, but a good one. While in PA, I took the opportunity to visit Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a wonderful place located about an hour north of Reading. While I was there, I made a 60-second video that I posted on Twitter and on YouTube about the visit. You can find it here. As you can tell from the photo above, I’m writing a about Hawk Mountain in this edition of this “news” letter. Since getting back to Austin on Tuesday night, I’ve been recording podcasts, (several great guests are coming up in the next few weeks), writing, and catching up on yard work, grocery shopping, and laundry. With Lorin teaching full time, both of us have been stretched pretty thin. But I’m enormously grateful for my work and the opportunities that are coming my way. The speaking business has been particularly busy. We’re not yet to the end of May and I already have about 40 engagements on my calendar. Now to business. Three items today:
Dustin Mulvaney on solar’s “green halo”
Ugh! Wind turbines at Hawk Mountain
This is NOT an interview with Vaclav Smil
I have great admiration for Vaclav Smil and his books. But Smil is—how to put it politely?—not much fun. Unlike virtually every other well-known author or public intellectual, Smil doesn’t care about publicity, social media, podcasts, or being on TV. A few weeks ago, I read an interview Smil did with the New York Times. The interview was keyed off of his latest book, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going. I have met Smil and corresponded with him several times over the years. I’ve also frequently cited his work in my books and articles. He was one of the first people I put on my target list when I started the Power Hungry Podcast. But I also knew it was unlikely that he would come on the show. After reading the piece in the Times, I emailed him and asked him to be on the podcast. In his reply, he made it clear he had no interest in doing so. We exchanged a few more emails, which I won’t disclose because he made it clear he doesn’t want more publicity.
After thinking about his replies, I decided to do a podcast without him. In this episode, I discuss my favorite books of his (I have 13 of them), his distaste for publicity and politics, and read some excerpts from the interview he did with the Times, which give a good sense of Smil’s temperament. One of my favorite lines was in response to a question about the ludicrous claims being made by a discredited Stanford academic who continues to claim that the US can run its grid solely on renewables by 2035. Smil replied “Check the China statistics. The country is adding, every year, gigawatts of new coal-fired power. Have you noticed that the whole world is now trying to get hands on as much natural gas as possible? This world is not yet done with fossil fuels.”
It was a fun episode and pretty short: about 14 minutes. Here’s a link to the audio. Here’s the interview on YouTube.
Dustin Mulvaney: Solar sector is "flying blind" on supply chains
Dustin Mulvaney is the author of Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justiceand an associate professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University. In this episode, Mulvaney talks about the “green halo” that exists around solar energy, the millions of tons of solar panels that will be discarded over the coming decades, and the threat solar poses to desert wildlife. I wanted to talk to Mulvaney because he has been one of the few academics to take a clear-eyed look at the solar sector. That hasn’t earned him many friends in the alternative energy world, but his analysis of the industry has been straightforward. One area that we discussed in detail was the supply of polysilicon coming from China’s Xinjiang province, where the Chinese government has been committing genocide against the minority Uyghur Muslims. Mulvaney explained that about 45% of the world’s supply of polysilicon has been coming from Xinjiang. But he said, “that doesn’t mean 45% of the solar panels have Xinjiang polysilicon, because what happens is some of that stuff is sold on the spot market. And then it’s blended with other manufacturers, many of which are probably in China, but could even be others. So the idea is that maybe 60, 70, or 80%, of all PV modules actually have material from Xinjiang. And even if it’s only a small percent, because they blended it with other polysilicon. So that’s why this problem is very extensive.”
The Xinjiang issue and related issues, Mulvaney said, show that the solar sector is largely “flying blind on PV supply chains” because it is so heavily dependent on China. I enjoyed talking to Dustin. Here’s a link to the audio. The podcast is also on YouTube. Please give it a listen and share it.
Gray Catbird (and ugh! wind turbines) at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
One of the many joys of my job is the travel. Not the hours sitting in seat 12F of a jetliner, but the travel that allows me to meet new people, see new places, tour factories, refineries, and mines, and yes, look for birds. On Monday, I landed in Philadelphia and had a few hours before I needed to be in Reading for dinner with my friends from East Penn. So I headed straight for Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton. I’d heard about Hawk Mountain many times. As a sign near the entrance explains, it’s the world’s first refuge for bids of prey. The entrance fee was only $10, but I became a member (for $60) because I want to support entities like Hawk Mountain. With bird populations around the world in steep decline, we need more people to be interested in protecting them. Alas, very few people on Wall Street, or in the NGO-industrial complex, appear interested in actual protection. Instead, they push bogus claims that the wind sector is only killing a few birds, or that cats, or buildings, or the hydrocarbon sector kill birds, too, so there’s really no need to worry about Big Wind’s deadly effect on our birds and bats. Such claims are contemptible. With the "staggering declines" in our bird populations, we need to be protecting our birds and bats, not subsidizing their slaughter.
Those thoughts (and more than a little anger) came to me when I got to the top viewing spots on Hawk Mountain. The views of the surrounding woods and farms were amazing and as I scanned the surroundings, I jokingly thought to myself, “this place needs more wind turbines.” Then, as I looked more closely, I could see that the ridge to the north-northwest of Hawk Mountain was blighted with a row of several dozen wind turbines. It was a sickening site. It led me to record a short video that I posted on Twitter and YouTube.
There weren’t many birds flying around when I visited on Monday afternoon. I didn’t see any hawks or eagles. There were a few Turkey Vultures soaring nearby and fair number of American Robins were in the woods. I did see two species that I haven’t seen in a while: a Gray Catbird and a Hermit Thrush. I’ve seen the latter in our yard here in Austin but I haven’t seen a Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) in a very long time. (The photo above was taken in 2017 in Illinois.) The Gray Catbird is a member of the Mockingbird and Thrasher family. Audubon.org says it is found in:
Undergrowth, brush, thorn scrub, suburban gardens. At all seasons, favors dense low growth. Most common in leafy thickets along the edges of woods and streams, shrubby swamps, overgrown brushy fields, and hedges in gardens. Avoids unbroken forest and coniferous woods...Rather plain but with lots of personality, the Gray Catbird often hides in the shrubbery, making an odd variety of musical and harsh sounds -- including the catlike mewing responsible for its name. At other times it moves about boldly in the open, jerking its long tail expressively. Most catbirds winter in the southern United States or the tropics, but a few linger far to the north.
Diet: Mostly insects and berries. Especially in early summer, eats many beetles, ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, crickets, true bugs, and other insects, as well as spiders and millipedes. Nestlings are fed almost entirely on insects. More than half the annual diet of adults may be vegetable matter, especially in fall and winter, when they eat many kinds of wild berries and some cultivated fruit. Rarely catches small fish. At feeders, will eat a bizarre assortment of items including doughnuts, cheese, boiled potato, and corn flakes.
Have a good weekend.
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