Links tagged “china”

SOROS: "The continuing conflict between the US and China complicates matters because we ought to work together on climate change and on developing a vaccine against COVID-19...we must find a way to cooperate on fighting climate change and the novel coronavirus."

FACT: "China’s carbon emissions have steadily increased, according to climateactiontracker.org, and are projected to keep rising. China is also rapidly building coal power plants, signaling that the country has no intention of ending its status as the number one producer of carbon emissions."

Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives...A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.