Presidential candidates and giant mega corporations have been dumping gallons of green paint on themselves in an effort to feed their greener-than-thou facade. The promise of green collar jobs to replace the long gone blue, and now dwindling white collar markets in the United States appears attractive. But those jobs come at a global cost.
From The Washington Post:
[I]n China, the push to get into the solar energy market is having unexpected consequences.
With the prices of oil and coal soaring, policymakers around the world are looking at massive solar farms to heat water and generate electricity. For the past four years, however, the world has been suffering from a shortage of polysilicon — the key component of sunlight-capturing wafers — driving up prices of solar energy technology and creating a barrier to its adoption.
With the price of polysilicon soaring from $20 per kilogram to $300 per kilogram in the past five years, Chinese companies are eager to fill the gap.
In China, polysilicon plants are the new dot-coms. Flush with venture capital and with generous grants and low-interest loans from a central government touting its efforts to seek clean energy alternatives, more than 20 Chinese companies are starting polysilicon manufacturing plants. The combined capacity of these new factories is estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 tons — more than double the 40,000 tons produced in the entire world today.
But Chinese companies’ methods for dealing with waste haven’t been perfected.
For example:
The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn’t believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It’s a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production — silicon tetrachloride — is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.
“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University.
Technology in the 21st century is not going to fix the energy demand frenzy of the 20th century.
I know that 20 years from now people are going to say to me, with perfectly straight faces, how could we have possibly known that a global environmental crisis was going to happen?
And I know that I will have a very difficult time to not slap them and let them know that if they’d hadn’t had their head so far up their ass they would have seen the plain writing on the wall.
Where’s your head?
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
Back in the late ’70s when I visited Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand during my service in the 
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In the longest running comment thread on Have Coffee Will Write, the discussion of 
