Alan F. E. Thiese

1 April 2022

 

The President of the United States of America

The Senate Majority Leader

The House of Representatives Speaker

The Senior Senator for Georgia

The Junior Senator for Georgia

The Second District Representative for Georgia

 

Greetings Most Honorable Duly Elected Leaders,

 

Today I focus on Defective Decisions.  I am also guilty of doing them.  As I recall during my preparation for this the Fifth Letter to You I was a college student and I decided that I did not have to attend classes on a regular basis.  After some time of this charade My Parents pulled the plug on financing further College Education. 

 

You may be asking why I discuss this with you.  I consider each of you of being guilty of “Defective Decisions” in your role as a Leader in our USA.

 

The following is a quote and it is printed in Green so you can overlook it, however I feel that what You, Mr. President have done and the rest of You have condoned is simply not in the best interest of America. 

                                   Green!!

 

Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators.  So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.

 

Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?"

Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

 

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

 

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

 

All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

 

But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs.

 

A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk.  It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

 

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."

 

Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"

 

I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not.  This construction project is creating an environmental disaster.  Let me tell you why.

 

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

 

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.

 

There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. 

 

"Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

 

Going Green is a lofty goal, but today and in the foreseeable future we really need to be energy independent here in the USA.  While our President is begging foreign countries to sell us fossil fuel, some who are considered  our enemies, it would appear proper to cancel the policies that were enacted just after 20 January 2021 so we here in the USA would not have to suffer because of the “Defective Decisions” made by Our President. 

 

So Congress people, why do I even bother you with this?  Just recently I hear the White House Press Secretary utter a response that directed the questioner to ask Congress regarding a situation in Ukraine because it was not the President’s responsibility.   I suspect that each of you are aware that You have a solemn duty to insure that the Way of Life of the U. S. Citizens is promoted!  I am confident that each of you are also aware that rapid inflation is eliminating any wage increases for  a USA worker that you often trout results in a negative increase in available financial funds needed to support one’s self and/or a family!!

 

In summary Each of You are not really focused on the Citizens of the USA!!

 

I will not address the Border Crisis in this letter simply because that was the first concern of My letter of 21 December 2021 to each of you.

 

I recently traveled on an
Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. and observed the “Changing of the Guard" at the Tomb of the Unknown.  These Heroes know their duty and the purpose of their duty.  After that we Visited “The Wall!”  Each of these Heroes knew their purpose and performed it well.  As You know they gave their lives!

 

 

Again, I say I am asking Each of You to Know Your Purpose just like each of the aforementioned Heroes Did!  You do indeed Serve the American People!!  Please go and do likewise!

 

Thank You.

 

Alan F. E. Thiese