The Green New Deal would not work without fossil fuels

Vic Forbes:

Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil, and natural gas. They need to think about what they wish for.

First, there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore. People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted. Coal saved the forests from this fate.

We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons, and with ingenuity, we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead, and tin and alloys like brass and bronze. But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminum, refined metals, plastics, petro-chemicals, and poly pipes would be impossible.

Making wind turbines and solar panels would also be impossible without fossil fuels. A wind turbine needs lots of steel plus concrete, carbon fiber, and glass polymers as well as many other refined metals — copper, aluminum, rare earths, zinc, and molybdenum. Solar panels and batteries need high-purity ingredients — silicon, lead, lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, silver, manganese, and graphite, all hard to make in backyard charcoal-fired furnaces. Transporting, erecting, and maintaining wind and solar farms plus their roads and transmission lines need many pieces of diesel-powered machinery.

Every machine on Earth needs hydro-carbons for engine oil, gear oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, hydraulic oil, and grease. We could of course use oils from seals, beeswax, and whales for lubrication. The discovery of petroleum saved the whales from this fate.

Roads would be a challenge without oil-based bitumen. The Romans made pretty good roads out of cobblestones (this would ease unemployment). But hard labor would not sit well with aging Baby-Boomers or electronic-era Millennials.
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Those who are pushing for the Green New Deal have no idea what they are proposing when they say they want to eliminate fossil fuels.  They are dangerously ignorant.  There could be no electric cars without fossil fuels to make the steel and the other materials to go into their construction.  The same goes for windmills and solar panels.