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News on the BBC last evening how Japan are going to import 'blue' hydrogen from Australia to generate their electricity. The rather bizarre claim is they will then be a zero carbon society....basically they are exporting their carbon emissions to Australia who will use coal to generate the hydrogen. liquefy it & ship it to Japan. The long term goal is to develop carbon capture to presumably make the hydrogen 'green' in the future.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59525480]
An example of the reality of 'going green'....there isn't an easy & perfect solution.
PS Japan was relying on nuclear for their energy production until the Fukushima nuclear disaster destroyed that plan.
It was an interesting take on the direction Japan is taking, also showing environmentalists concerned at Japan building its latest coal-fired power station & stating that the Japanese are importing 200 million tons of coal each year, largely from Australia. Then as BE says
converting this to nice clean hydrogen off piste! The Green lobbies in the Western Democracies are going to have to wake up to the chicanery that is taking place over countries pursuing net-zero emissions. It is not just about buying a heavily subsidised EV.
Ask the estimated 255,000 (almost exclusively black in terms of ethnicity) cobalt miners, essential for EV battery manufacture, producing an estimated 70% of world cobalt production, how "green" they feel the Democratic Republic of Congo is!!! The tools that they are using are picks and spades. Health and Safety barely exists!
This is a typical quote lifted from the Internet:
"Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children, some as young as six years. Much of the work is informal small-scale mining in which laborers earn less than $2 per day while using their own tools, primarily their hands."
This is without going into the wider extraction of Rare Earth Metals in China and Africa, with the vast associated contaminated & toxic lakes, moonscape areas & great swathes of the local populations with associated health difficulties.
At Government level the approach to going green needs to be much more joined up and honest! Otherwise buying an EV in Europe will simply mean the DRC buying more picks and spades for its population once they reach 6-years of age. As a country we have matured and learned from the children in mines stage, but even now we are unsuspectingly inflicting a similar fate on others, whilst world governments play with smoke and mirrors. When the truth comes out it will make fossil fuel extraction look green by comparison.
"When the truth comes out it will make fossil fuel extraction look green by comparison."
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Getagrip, to some extent you have a point. Not enough research has gone into the environmental impact of 'going green'. The same could 'probably' be said about nuclear, it isn't a perfect solution but it will 'probably' be needed for energy security...i.e. when the sun don't shine & the wind don't blow.