On clean energy industries

Food is our energy source. We want our food to be very clean. Food is the bona fide clean energy. Food industry is the bona fide clean energy industry. However, the processes of producing and handling food is far from clean.

Food grows from dirt, dirty dirt. To give food enough nutrients, we apply manure on the plants. Manure is a nice name for shit, shitty shit. Food is what we want to eat. So are other animals and germs. To kill pests, we apply pesticide to the plants. Pesticide kills enough cells in the pests to kill pests. They also kill enough cells in our bodies to damage our health. You might say, it is where science can help. By genetically modifying plants, pests will not touch plants anymore. So we don’t need pesticides anymore. Pests are wise enough to avoid those genetically modified plants for they are poisonous. Those same plants are tasteless to humans. Who like genetically modified tomatoes? Our tastebuds tell us those tomatoes are no good. But we don’t have much choice.

Growing food is a dirty business. Processing food is no better. Who want to slaughter cows and pigs? We leave all the dirty and bloody businesses to professional butchers behind high walls. We only mention the slaughtering when we condemn the practices, to highlight our moral superiority.

How about food waste? We dump them in the compost bin to be carried away a week later. What happen to the food waste later? In the summer time, the food waste already decompose into smelly substances in compost bins. The final outputs are shitty materials, with shitty smell.

Food is the most common clean energy we consume. Yet we need shit, or shit like materials to produce them. Food eventually decompose into shit in our guts, or shit like materials in compost bins and compost sites. The whole food processing is far from clean. It is one of the dirtiest and shittiest processes.

You might say food is a special kind of clean energy. You will work on clean energy that is really clean, such as battery for electric cars and solar panels to generate electricity. Well, batteries are so toxic. Even garbage dumps, which accept most dirty stuffs, would refuse batteries. Places that produce solar panels are among the dirtiest places on the earth. Solar panels are mostly produced in China, where ordinary people don’t have much political power and don’t have much say on environmental issues.

From physics, specifically from the entropy law, it is easy to understand why the production process of clean energy is usually very dirty. When the final product is very clean, i.e., low entropy, it must generate a lot of waste, i.e., high entropy, in the process.

Yes. Some clean energies are cleaner than others. Hydro electric power is an example. The sun heats water into vapor. Vapor forms rain drops or snow flakes and falls back to the ground.   The water from high up places has a potential energy, which can be transformed into electric energy. All the initial energy comes from hell fire burning on the sun, not on the earth. The main work to utilize hydro power is the building of the dam, which is highly efficient in terms of energy cost. That is why hydro electric power is really so clean. That is also why hydro electric power is the only popular clean energy on the earth.

The whole clean energy industries are heavy on initial investment and light on maintenance. Some people find the building part of the industries dirty. They don’t like them.  But if one doesn’t like the building part of the industries, there is very little else there.

Most clean energy industries are heavily subsidized by the governments. This means most clean energy industries are supported by tax dollars from other sectors, including dirty energy sectors. If clean energy industries are supported by taxation from dirty energy industries, are clean energy industries really clean?