Green deal jobs

The push to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar faces two big obstacles. First is what to do when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing and the second is transportation in areas like trains and planes. The solution is to use hydrogen for fuel to supplement the wind and solar. This requires the production of enough solar panels to both run the power plants and run transportation. A conservative estimate is that this will require 8 billion solar panels and the US currently has 1.5 million. Under current law these panels would have to be made in China so the expected jobs will not be there. They are made in China because they require certain metals like neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium and praseodymium. Mining of these metals is an extreme environmental hazard and China is willing to contaminate their ground water to produce these and the US is not. The claim that the new green deal will provide jobs to produce panels and wind mills is not likely unless the US is willing to mine those metals here. The situation is so bad in China that the mines are about to contaminate the Yellow River, a major source of drinking water. Processing rare earths is a dirty business. Their ore is often laced with radioactive materials such as thorium, and separating the wheat from the chaff requires huge amounts of carcinogenic toxins – sulphates, ammonia and hydrochloric acid.