Race Reed April 17, 2026 Is Clean Energy Really Clean? (Outside Reading)

 I went down a rabbit hole after class reading about whether clean energy is actually as clean as we think and it was a lot to sit with. The short answer is that it's complicated. Solar panels require rare earth minerals that are often mined using child labor in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wind turbines take up massive amounts of land, sometimes cutting into farmland. And AI data centers, which run on electricity, use enormous amounts of water for cooling and are being built at a rate that is genuinely alarming.

The phrase that keeps coming back to me is "out of sight, out of mind." Clean energy feels clean because the mess happens somewhere else, in a mine far away or in a data center most people will never see. It connects to what we've been discussing about the hidden costs of infrastructure decisions. Nothing is really free and I think we need to be more honest about the tradeoffs involved in the green energy transition.


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