And the way you get them is strip mining. You … pick up a large chunk of earth, you put it into a solution where you get these rare earth materials to come out of solution, to solidify, so you can use them, but then you’re left with this big toxic sludge. And somebody’s got to go into the toxic sludge and pull these pieces out, and you have to keep doing this with the whole mountain.

This is why it’s strip mining. It changes the environment, that you have to completely go through it, and you get this toxic sludge lake that’s produced. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they have a tendency to use child labor. Young children, 8, 10, 12, 14 are wandering through this toxic material, looking to pick up things in Southeast Asia. In a lot of places it’s done by slave labor. 

So if you’re interested in social justice, these things are not very social justice-oriented. If you’re interested in environmental cleanliness, these things are not environmentally pure. It takes energy to do all this. 

And the argument sometimes is the energy savings, or I should say the carbon dioxide savings, that you get by going to these sort of carbon dioxide-free energy sources. When you get the turbine and the solar panels, it takes more carbon dioxide to transport the energy, to extract the energy. It takes more nonclean and green energy to get them out than it’s going to produce. 

So like I said, at the end of the day, we’re all told it’s clean and green because you see it’s spinning there or you see the panel sitting there, it’s not producing gases. But to get to that stage, there has been an awful lot of disastrous and environmental and social efforts that have gone on behind the scenes.  

If they do as the OPs link says.. they deserve to be thrown out of office.

Strip mining for rare earths to mimic what ethanol does.. converting solar energy into fuel.. only difference is that growing crops sequesters carbon.. whereas strip mining for “renewable energy production” does not.

How can you explain it otherwise?