Green Energy, Gray Areas, When Clean Energy Isn't Clean Enough S:2E:16

Wind and sun feel free—until you follow the wires and trucks back to the mine. We dive into the messy middle of “green” energy: where panels get built, how turbines retire, and who pays the hidden bill when incentives, grants, and labels make the math look cleaner than the supply chain really is. From a small town’s solar canopies over parking lots to the realities of rural co-ops without rebates, we map the gap between feel-good tech and the full lifecycle cost.

We talk through the big levers shaping adoption—utility incentives, the Inflation Reduction Act, and greenwashing that rewards partial fixes.  Along the way, we examine turbine blade disposal, nacelle oil and wiring, and the wildlife impacts that come with large wind and solar projects. Cheap new generation can still carry hidden environmental and social price tags when end-of-life and upstream emissions aren’t part of the spreadsheet.

None of this is a case against cleaner power—it’s an argument for better design and honest accounting. Rooftops and parking canopies beat greenfield sprawl. Standardized components and built-in recyclability make decommissioning safer and cheaper. Policies that pay for verified outcomes—not buzzwords—drive real gains in air quality, grid resilience, and public health. Join us as we sort the tradeoffs, ask harder questions, and sketch a plan that actually protects people, water, and habitats.

If this conversation made you think, follow the show, share it with a friend, and send us your take. Your ideas help shape what we explore next—subscribe and leave a review to keep the debate honest and the dialogue moving.

email: boomerandgenxer@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:19

And the mother and a daughter questioning, are we even related? My name is Bobby, and my co-host is my mom Jane, and we're here to entertain you for a little bit. Hello, Mom.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Hello, Bobby. I should say hello from across the country. Yes, absolutely. And is it a beautiful day there today? Um, it's cold, but at least the sun is out. Man, that makes a difference.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Sun wasn't out today here, and it's raining and all muddy and mucky, but you know what? We're okay with it.

Why Green Energy Is On Our Minds

SPEAKER_02 0:49

It's beautiful out. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and we're going to talk about something today that has to do with both of those things, uh, especially here in the Midwest. And that is uh, we're gonna talk about some green energy.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Okay, let's uh tackle this topic and see how many of our listeners we can piss off.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

I'm telling you, because you know, you drive through Iowa, especially Iowa, you can't help but notice the landscape has been changing over the last uh, I don't know, decade or so. And uh you see these giant wind turbines basically everywhere you look. And even in my small town here, of course, we have the wind turbines, but now uh the city has started transitioning to solar energy as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Ah, okay. All right, where are they where are they gonna put that? I mean, there's a big footprint for solar, right? I mean, you gotta you gotta have a lot of land for that, unless you stack them, but you can't stack them because then you take the sun away from the panels.

Solar Canopies And Small-Town Tradeoffs

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Yeah, definitely. And what what my city, you know, I won't call it a city, it's a town. I mean, we're not that big. They're small town, but we have apparently we have these parking places in our quote unquote downtown, uh, these parking lots. And what the city has done is they've decided that they're gonna put solar canopies over these parking lots.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Hey, I you know what? I don't think that's a really bad idea. I really don't. If you're gonna put them on the roof of an existing building or an existing parking lot or something like that, I don't think that's a bad idea. I mean, I'll take the sun's energy in many states, uh, including both Georgia and Iowa, the utility companies will help you fund green energy, whether that is with a wind turbine or whether it is with solar. And in Iowa, what state are you living in?

unknown 2:57

What?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

There's grants out there. There's grants out there for territory. I thought you were saying at the state level.

Incentives, Grants, And ROI Reality

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Oh, no, I'm saying that the utility companies in those states have grants available to help you pay for those things. I know the utility company that I have in Iowa does not because it is a cooperative and they're too small for that. And so they do not offer any type of rebates, any type of assistance to go green. Now, you go to the bigger cities where you have these big distribution companies, they get money from the government to help, you know, pay for other people to help hold the energy levels of the grid down. And so that's available to them. Listen, I think, I think uh solar energy is is a cool thing. I would go solar if I could. Oh yeah. And unfortunately, I've had a solar company come out in Iowa and it just wasn't cost effective for me because the the um return on investment just wasn't there. And so I had to take a look at that. Now, somebody could say, well, you should have done it anyway, because it's good for the earth. There's a lot of good stuff for the earth that you aren't doing either, folks. So you might want to stand down. So I'm really not taking any criticism for that. If you go green, that's wonderful. I'm happy for you. Good for you. But um, I just couldn't, it wasn't, it wasn't uh there was no RE uh ROE for me.

The Hidden Costs Of Solar Manufacturing

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Well, I might I might rain on your I might rain on your parade a little bit here with the solar panels because while overall they seem like a good idea, um, they actually require more energy and fossil fuel burning equipment to mine, manufacture, and transport than they save. Uh, you know, another argument is that the toxic chemicals that are used in the actual manufacturing process, they actually do more harm than good as well. So overall, even solar panels, they they really they just don't compute.

End-Of-Life Problems For Turbines

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Well, you know, they they do take a lot of resources and a lot of land use. And, you know, people think that building wind turbines and solar panels are all that. And and don't get me wrong, I I would go for solar panels if I could, but they do require mining of rare minerals, and they do cause uh reclamation of a lot of land. And unfortunately, the reclamation takes so much, so many years because you're not only disrupting the land, you're disrupting that ecosystem and you know, using non-renewable resources to make those things. And so I get you there. I'm I I don't disagree with you. One of the other things that maybe you'll touch on is not only the cost the of the resources and the land use to make them, but what do you do with them once they expire? Whether it's solar panels or whether it's a wind turbine, the nacelles have a lot of people think these things just run. They have a lot of oil in them, they have a lot of wiring in them, they have a lot of things in them, and you kind of go, there is nothing green about these. But anyway, even the turbine blades, you know, they're trying to find an answer for that. Now, here in Iowa, they were burying them. And uh, I don't know what company it was, don't care. Just know that I've seen it. And now they're looking at how do we recycle these things? And maybe there is a way to grind these up and make them into something else. I don't know. I haven't looked that up. But you know, green energy isn't just, oh, hey, let's take the air and make it our friend, and let's take the sun that's free and let's all kumbaya around it. It isn't that way, folks.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Yeah, and you know, one way to put it, um, you know, for our listeners to really understand is let's take lithium batteries. So lithium batteries were made, you know, they're supposed to be longer lasting and and more friendly to, you know, we're not wasting as many batteries. Now, one question that came up is why can't lithium batteries be recycled? So we we can recycle, you know, a lot of batteries. Lithium is one that we cannot recycle. And here's why lithium, while the batteries do contain a lot of um minerals and and things that that are needed, uh, you know, that we could maybe extract. The problem is is that lithium batteries they freaking explode. So when they try to go and and reuse these and take them apart and recycle them, it's such a dangerous and costly thing to do that it's cheaper just to get rid of them somehow.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, it's very labor intensive. And so where you're not, you know, where you go, well, you know, we could still recycle them. It is so labor intensive, it is not cost effective to do that. You have safety issues, and not only that, but now if you do have an explosion and it gets on the ground, you've got poisoning of the soil. And now you've got, you know, you got to call hazmat to come in and clean it up or something like that. And there's just, you know, I I just think that sometimes it people think it's a good deal, and it's, you know, oh, we need to hug these trees and be good to Mother Earth. Listen, if you're making decisions based on building a home or what, you know, what you're doing for energy and things like that, I always say, listen, if you're if you're gonna do anything, please fare on the side of Mother Earth. We need to take care of this earth. We don't do a good job at it. That's pretty clear. On the other hand, sometimes just saying, oh, we'll do this, or we'll go with green energy, or that's an environmental issue, there's a lot more to it.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

There it there really is, and and a lot of people don't understand, you know, you go into these communities, and I'm talking, you know, even communities like in other countries, okay. You go into these communities that actually depend on and live off of the actual land that they live off of. You know, they they harvest, they fish, they hunt, they live there, they use, you know, mother nature uh as uh a meaning of life. You go into these communities and let's say uh they find a cobalt mine under one of these communities. So what do they do? They displace the community. They displace the community, they raise the land and they dig for that cobalt. Now, while they're doing that, yeah, they're probably gonna employ a lot of locals, you know, to go into those dangerous mines and get get that cobalt out. Because when we think of mining here in America, we think of you know, these big trucks and these machines that do it. Uh, that's not how it always goes in other countries. A lot of this is done by hand, a lot of this is done with rudimentary machinery, and not only does it destroy the environment, it destroys communities, it destroys sometimes entire, you know, people's villages, people that have lived off the land for thousands of years, and it also creates-I don't know if you know this, but it also creates um armed conflict communities. You know, you see this a lot with the blood diamonds, the diamond mines, where you know, they go in and and people are murdered over these things. Well, the same thing happens in these communities where these resources are found. All of a sudden, you know, as with any resource that produces money, there's going to be conflict over it.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

There's going to be people with bigger guns, people with more money, people who have the resources and the bullets to come in and say, Well, now this is our mine. You're going to work for us. And if you don't, we'll just shoot you and take it anyway.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

And we see that a huge problem.

Subsidies, Labels, And “Greenwashing”

SPEAKER_00 11:21

We see that down south with the cartel. And uh, whether people like it or not, that does happen down south uh by the Mexican border. So let's not act like it doesn't. But you're just talking about a different substance that they're mining for. Now it used to be gold, right? Go west, young man. There's gold out there. And so it used to be gold, and people were killing for that. You know, whether it's food, whether it's gold, whether it's, you know, uranium, whatever it is, the fact of the matter is, is you always kind of follow the money because people will do whatever it takes to make money. So some of the things that critics have argued also is that, you know, the government does give these companies money to go green, you know, because I was wondering if you were going to get into this. Yeah. It's such a political, political topic that companies can receive, you know, various forms of financial support from the U.S. government to implement environmentally friendly uh practices and develop, you know, what they call clean energy technologies. Now, they may call it that. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's true, but these incentives, they're established through legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRA, and the bipartisan infrastructure law. Those include tax credits and grants and loans that are uh some are grants too, but some of the loans don't have an interest rate association uh associated with them. And so, you know, there is some criticism there that um, you know, it's too expensive without subsidiary uh uh subsidies. It's too expensive without that. So if the government wasn't giving them grants or they weren't getting grants from somebody else, you know, a lot of proponents say it's really just very cheap source. Uh not really, because uh fossil fuels receive hidden subsidies, also.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

It's in another way, it's like the the FDA um episode that we did, you know, they can label something as green energy, and in reality it has one component in that entire system that's more green than normal. And so now the whole system is labeled as green energy, and now they get the grants for it.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

And I think a lot of the myths about renewable or you know, green energy are being debunked. Um, you know, whether it's you know, you can't get rid of the residuals from this or the waste from this, or it's leaching into our water system, which without our water, what are you gonna do? I mean, come on. And that's one of the most important. And Iowa has some of the worst water in the nation.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Yeah.

Wildlife Impacts And Grid Complexity

SPEAKER_00 14:14

And that has to do a lot with farming. Now you can blame the farmers all you want, but it's been corporations uh that have, you know, made things like your seeds roundup ready. You can't even buy them unless they're roundup ready, which leaches into the ground and you're eating it. And I could go on and on about that. But you know there's a there's a lot to it. There's a whole chain of events here. And one other thing that I wanted to mention, and maybe you were gonna bring this up, is the wildlife impact. Wind turbines, whether we like it or not, kill birds. A large solar farm uh can disrupt habitats. Impacts compared to, you know, other energy sources might seem minimal, but they're not. Because in the Midwest here, we do have a lot of uh wind farms, and you know, they're tracking it and showing that the the bird flight patterns are changing. Now, I don't know what that does to us. I have no idea. We have said this before, we are not scientists, and we really don't know anything. We just like to talk about it. But there are some additional impacts, and so before you all get behind and do a march regarding all this shit, uh stuff, excuse my language, all this, I know, all this stuff, you know, really let's think about it for just a minute and really track it all back. You know, onshore wind and solar are often the cheapest new electricity generation options. Um, now that's according to the UN and their stuff isn't worth the paper it's written on, and other reports. And there have been some grid improvements. And so, you know, you they used to have a lot of grid failures because the electricity had to be fed into a grid, right? Right. And fossil fuels, you know, they have massive costs. We know that, and that's including pollution and and climate impact. And you know, we have some you know, volatility with foreign supply, and that's the other thing I wanted to mention is um the supply chain for green technology involves significant manufacturing. Well, if they're gonna be manufacturing, guess what they're putting in the air? And what are you manufacturing? Oh, we're manufacturing stuff for green energy. Oh, thank you for that smokestack you got going. That's you're you know, or what you're leaching into the waterways. So that's my bitching and moaning about this because I I think that we can all do our part, but you know, as a society, we've kind of gotten ourselves here.

Emissions From EV Batteries And Schemes

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Yeah, and you know, speaking of the the leaching into the air, so you know, they talk about the electric cars and things like that. Um producing one electric vehicle battery can emit 60 to 90 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt hour. That's huge for one battery for one to produce one battery, that's more than the cows poop, like that everybody's complaining about all those cows. Oh my gosh, and you know, on top of the government overreach and and the grants and all that bullshit that comes with this of people lying about it, you know, there's there's big Ponzi schemes when it comes to renewable energy as well. And I keep saying renewable. I want to say I gotta quit saying that because none of this is renewable. Once we mine those minerals and things that and metals that we need, they're freaking gone, they're not regrowing underneath the earth. Those took millions of years to to form. That this is not renewable energy.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Well, it's it's fossil fuel just like coal, you know, and it's like yeah, guys, you're only shifting a uh you're only shifting a um substance.

Environmental Disasters And Hard Lessons

SPEAKER_02 18:10

But you know, these these Ponzi schemes that that are running around um green energy is just it's massive. I mean, it's multi-billion and multi-trillion dollars uh of this money coming through, and the government is behind a lot of it. You know, the government and I'm not talking just our government, I'm talking governments all over the world because you know, Canada, Canada, Canada, whoever those people are up north, the Canucks up north, um, you know, they have been pushing to be full electronic vehicles by 2060. And so, yeah, it is a big government push. It's a government push in the UK for it to have renewable resources or green energy and electric vehicles and to have all households have that by a certain year. And we keep being told that this can be done, this can be done. Well, but at what cost? I mean, what are we looking at? We're looking at wiping out parts of our civilization, we're looking at destroying the earth, you know, as kind it's kind of a a burnt earth type of system where they go in and they take all of these minerals and everything, and they basically just say, okay, well, good luck with that dirt pile now, you know, there's nothing left.

A Call For Smarter, Sustainable Plans

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and listen, we're not, we're not, or I'm not anyway, saying that I'm against uh, you know, having a plan. Um, but you know, come on. I mean, and we know that there's been some major environmental disasters, right? Um, we think back at the deep water uh horizon oil spill. Well, that was in 2010. And they were releasing over 130 gallons of oil into, you know, pristine waters around it. And 11 workers died that day uh because of an incident that occurred. There's a big one in 1986. Do you know what that one was, Bobby? Was that Three Mile Island? Chernobyl, Chernobyl explosion. Chernobyl. Yeah. And um, you know, so that there's uh and that area is still radioactive. And uh, you know, in 2020 there was a cyanide spill that was Bomar, and they had a hundred thousand cubic meters of cyanide can uh contaminate the water in Romania. And uh so we we definitely recognize that it's an issue, but you know, it's uh like I've said before, you know, you don't go after the little guys, you go after the big guys, and unfortunately the big guys are funded by the government or they're funded by people who have money. And um, you know, some of the ongoing disasters that we still have. I mean, the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone that created, you know, a systemic dumping of nitrogen nutrients and phosphorus into the sea, and that's ongoing and um caused 88 percent of the uh province's children to have lead poisoning. I mean, come on, you know, we I I get it. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do something, I'm saying let's let's be careful what we get behind.

SPEAKER_02 21:33

Yeah, and I mean I I'm kind of with you on the let's have a plan, but I'm more of let's have a sustainable plan, let's have a good plan, because I mean Jeffrey Dahmer had a plan. Okay, obviously that was a good one.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

He had freezers and he had recipes.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

I mean, anybody can have a plan to do anything, but let's let's start looking at a plan that doesn't turn around and screw us in the end, that that doesn't kill off our grandchildren, that doesn't, you know, take beautiful rainforests and you know, small villages and turn them into bloody massacre scenes.

Thanks, Feedback, And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Let's let's stop that. Yeah, I agree with you. Well, Bobby, I think that's probably all that we have for today, don't you? I do. Okay, so I just want to tell our listeners we appreciate you joining us here at the Rabbit Run Studio since we are on the run. Be sure to follow us. Uh, we do look forward to spending time with you each week. Hey, listen, if y'all have any comments, we want the feedback. If you have positive feedback for us, or if you've got a topic out there, drop us a short email at boomerandgenxer at gmail.com. Um, you know, if you have hate mail, hey, we don't all disagree, or we don't all agree on things. You don't have to hate on it because of that. We all have opinions, we all have ideas. Some are better than others. We don't really want your hate mail. We're not going to read it anyway because we have a hard time reading as it is. So anyway, I'm Jane Burt. And I'm Bobby Joy. And you're stuck with us. Peace out. Later.