Month: June 2021

In my 32 years of military service, I spent a lot of time in joint assignments but for this piece, let me limit my comments to the US Army, the service I know best. 

The Army always has been and always will be a product of America.  Those entering come from every background, every community and even some with questionable alliances with radical groups such as white supremacists; but they all have one thing in common, they volunteered and, like it or not, they are going to be brain-washed and indoctrinated.

Day one: At the end of that first day in the Army they all have the same hair style, that is, no hair, and they all are dressed alike.  There is a reason what soldiers wear is called a “uniform.”

Many will arrive with a chip on their shoulder based on their upbringing, education, talent, physical prowess etc.  But that “chip” gets knocked off very quickly by a drill instructor who has been especially selected and trained based on his or her abilities to “read” people and indoctrinate/train them.  It’s not a complex formula, just “tear them down and build them all over again.”

Day two: they begin to understand that their life in the Army will revolve around two concepts.  One is the mission and secondly, above all else, you are responsible for the person on you right and left.  Soon it begins to sink in that if I am responsible for those on my right and left, that means that they are also responsible for me.  One day it’s a white guy, perhaps the next day it’s a black gal.  Hmmm, “interesting concept”, they say to themselves, “someone always has my back, I’m not alone, this is my team.”

The mission.  Early on it is a training mission and later on it may be a combat mission.  Either way, mission is mission, it is the focus of the day and every soldier has a leader who will take me through it.  Trust, Respect. 

Background: there are 190 military occupational specialties (MOS) in your Army; infantry, artillery, aviation mechanic, medic, intel specialist, you get the picture.  Within your MOS, you will be faced with a task list.  It is a long list.  This is what you must learn, this is what you will do. Additionally, for every task there is a standard that must, without fail, be achieved.  The third factor is condition; day/night, wet/dry, rested/sleep deprived, fully-manned/short staffed, etc.  Task/Condition/Standard, the basis of all US Army training and execution. 

Do all soldiers end up with the same proficiency in their MOS task list? Yes and no. They will all be proficient but some to a greater degree because from day one it is emphasized that this is an organization where you are given the opportunity to be-all-you-can-be.  While be-all-you-can-be is individualized, you also understand you are first and foremost part of a team with primary responsibility for the guy or gal on you right and left.  Accountability.   

There is no organization in the world that is better at equal opportunity than the US Army. Period.  Be-all-you-can-be every day.  On day-one you were a private E1.  The cream raises to the top and you get promoted, Private First Class and eventually to Sergeant, E5.  Now you are a team leader. 

As a leader, in name and rank, your professional life takes a big turn.  You are now faced with a new, longer and move complex list of tasks.  It is called the collective task list and is less MOS-specific.  That is, the leader tasks for an infantry Sergeant are about like the leader tasks for a medic team leader. 

Becoming a leader in the Army is not a do-it-yourself operation.  You get training and mentoring.  The cream continues to rise, you get promoted to squad leader E6, then Sergeant First Class E7, the senior non-commissioned leader of a 30-person platoon.   E8 is a Master Sergeant/First Sergeant of a 100-person company. 

The cream of the be-all-you-can-be, equal opportunity crop will become a Sergeant Major E9 of a battalion, then perhaps a brigade, a division (10-15 thousand soldiers), a corps, an Army and there is always one super star, currently Michael Grinston, who is Command Sergeant Major of the whole US Army, 1,005,500 men and women active, National Guard and Army Reserve. Be-all-you-can-be. 

Along the way, whether serving 2 years or 32 years, all of these soldiers, through the above-described process, became imprinted deep in their souls with a culture of accountability, respect and trust.  In all situations, day-in-and-day-out, soldiers know they will be held accountable for their own actions as well as those of the unit they lead.  From day one they learned to respect and trust the soldiers on their right and left as well as their leaders. 

Culture is a powerful and pervasive force in every organization, be it just a team or a cast of thousands or a million-person Army.  When every person understands the culture and lives it every day, that is a winning organization.

With that tutorial, let’s get to the issue at hand, extremists in the ranks of the US Army, more specifically racists and white supremacists.  This did not seem to be a public issue until the events at the Capitol on 6 January of this year. 

Then some idiot politicians got behind a microphone and descided the Army National Guard protecting the Capitol and the politicians inside needed to be “vetted.”

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee: “You’ve got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominantly more conservative… there are probably not more than 25 percent of the people that are there protecting us who voted for Biden,” Cohen said. “The other 75 percent are in the class, the large class of folks, who might want to do something.” Translation, you voted for Trump, you are likely a racist and/or white supremacist and must be weeded out.  Brilliant.

Not to be outdone the D.C. Mayor, Muriel Bowser, felt the need to inform us that, “When you have Guardsmen and women coming from all over the nation at this time, I do think that it is prudent to make sure that they are being vetted and that anybody who cannot pledge allegiance to their missions, and may be pulled by other views, needs not only to be removed from this duty, they need to be removed from the Guard.”

Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal wanted us to know that as much as ten percent of the U.S. military is compromised of racists or extremists.  

Then in early February retired General Lloyd Austin, the quintessential product of a be-all-you-can-be, equal opportunity, merit-based organization, is President Biden’s pick to be Secretary of Defense.   He put on a suit, went to his confirmation hearing and testified that he would, “work to rid racists and extremists from the ranks of the U.S. military.”

Later he informed us that, “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies, but we can’t do it if some of the enemies lie within our own ranks,”

Sec Def Austin announced a 60-day “stand down” and ordered military leaders to have, “needed discussions with the men and women of the force in an effort to weed out extremism in the ranks.”  Sec Def Austin later went on to say, “We shall adhere to our core beliefs and values and reaffirm the oaths we each took to uphold and support the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. My Point of Contact for these efforts is Mr. Bishop Garrison.”

Mr. Garrison, with a title of Senior Advisor to the Sec Def for Diversity and Inclusion is armed with a mandate from President Biden and a $40 million budget.  It is well documented that Garrison’s point-of-departure thinking is that if you are a Trump supporter that makes you a racist, misogynist and extremist.  You couldn’t make this stuff up. 

The Democrats in Washington are doing a great job of denigrating your great soldiers, of questioning their integrity, their competence and patriotism. But I don’t believe for a minute that the American public is buying into their nonsensical insults and misguided delusional thinking.  

Perhaps there is a little light at the end of the woke tunnel; to their credit, two four-star commanders, Admiral Charles Richard, head of the US Strategic Command and General James Dickinson, head of US Space Command testified before the House Armed Services Committee this week, stating that the risk of extremism in the ranks is virtually nonexistent and that their units are among the best, most professional in the world. How would you like to be a fly on the wall when Special Assistant Bishop Garrison shows up for an “office call” with those two brave souls?  Don’t bet the farm on the longevity of those two Generals. 

So, who are the extremists in the ranks?  Extremist defined: “A person who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm.”  Beyond the norm; I contend that there is nothing “normal” about your soldiers.  They are extremely well trained, extremely dedicated, extremely patriotic and extremely deadly when called on to execute what they have been trained to do; blow things up and kill bad guys.                      

Imagine this scenario: A squad is in contact with the enemy and you stop the action for a moment, put blinders on one of the soldiers and ask him this question:  Can you tell me the color of the skin of your fellow soldiers on your right and left?  The soldier would look at you like you were born on the back side of the moon and say (you fill in the blanks), “What the _ _ _ _ are you talking about?  Not only do I not know, I don’t give a _ _ _ _.  Only thing I know is they have my back; now get the _ _ _ _ out of my face, I’ve got to shoot some terrorists to protect your sorry ass.”

One of the great pleasures when being lucky enough to command soldiers is to meet most mornings for a few minutes with your Command Sergeant Major.  Here is an example of the conversations I envision going on throughout the chain of command.  Sgt Major: “The Sec Def told us to do what?  You can’t be serious.  What does he want me to do if I find an extremist, take him out and shoot him? What the hell is he thinking?”  Perhaps all that with some spicier words. 

The Sec Def will send down some radical left-wing flunky who, as the saying goes, “wouldn’t recognize a soldier if he had one standing on his chest”, he/she will give the canned speech to the soldiers.  But I’m convinced your soldiers are too good, too competent, too well trained, too patriotic and too encased in a culture of accountability, respect and trust to buy into all the divisive woke BS; especially after their Sergeant has a chat with them. 

EXTREMISTS IN THE MILITARY? GOD I HOPE SO.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com

LONG-RANGE STRATEGIC PLANNING AND THE GREEN MOVEMENT

The ability to conduct long-range strategic planning is a critical component for the success of any large organization.  The US government is a large, very large, organization with almost zero demonstrated ability to build and execute a long-range strategic plan, (hereafter, LRSP).  What does that have to do with the Biden administrations Green movement?  Everything.

Aside from the Defense Department, politicians and government bureaucrats generally have little or no training or experience in strategic planning.  Here is how government “planning” too often works: a politician gets the ball rolling with an idea which morphs into a political movement and may take on a life of its own.  Then, it may become a House/Senate bill consisting of a several hundred-page to-do list.  After becoming law, it is passed on to government bureaucrats who implement with perhaps thousands of pages of instructions, regulations and new organizations.  All of this without a clue as to whether the original idea is doable because they missed the first step in LRSP which consists of executing a very deliberate up-front process to determine the viability of the idea, the art of the possible. 

Let’s begin with a short tutorial to describe what LRSP is all about.  In its simplest form it is just the answers to the following questions: who, what, when, where, why and how.

Strategic planning must always begin at the end with a coherent vision of the end-state; one that can be clearly articulated in a sentence or two.  This first step is a must-do because of the truth in the old saying, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

The very next step is to conduct an exhaustive review of limiting factors.  For example, does the science exist to make it happen?  Can we find and hire the necessary expertise?  Do the raw materials exist in the quantities we will need now and for decades ahead?  Will the price of our product be reasonable enough for success?  What will the competition do?  What is the viability of the market for our product? And on and on and on until leaders get to the point where they can determine if the idea is a viable vision or hallucination. It is all about the art of the possible. 

To illustrate the above brief comments on the subject of LRSP, let’s look at President Biden’s declaration that we will, “Achieve 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035″, “Net-zero emissions by 2050” and “Cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030”.  Along with those goals, Democrats are pushing to have a majority of US-manufactured cars be electric by 2030 and every car on the road to be electric by 2040.  In total that says to we-the-people, shut down the coal/oil/gas-fired electric producing plants and drive electric cars.  Are we to believe those statements/directives in any way represent the results of an all-inclusive LRSP?  No; not only no but hell no, not even close.

Let’s say that instead of making the above announcement to everyone, President Biden said to his Secretary of Energy, Granholm, “ put together a LRSP for those issues”.  If the president had set in motion a comprehensive LRSP on energy, what follows is some of what the planners would be considering with their questions, discussions, research and findings. 

 In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Mark Mills brought to light the fact that the International Energy Agency (IEA), generally regarded as the world’s most important source for energy information, recently released a 287-page report entitled, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.   

Here are some highlights and lowlights from that IEA report. 

• Transitioning from today’s energy production (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) to clean energy (wind, solar, batteries) requires minerals, lots of minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and what are called, “rare-earth metals”.  Demand will explode by an estimated 4,200% (lithium), 2,500% (graphite), 1,900% (nickel) and 700% (rare-earth metals).  Supply and demand drive pricing. When these dramatic increases occur and with greater competition for the metals, what will happen to the price of these minerals, and hence the price of a battery-powered car? Raw material costs already account for some 50-70% of total battery costs. 

• All of this mining requires a mining industry, massive transportation, refinement facilities and infrastructure to support them that does not exist and there are no plans to build them.  And to do so will cost a least hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.

• Production of an electric car requires six times more minerals than a conventional car.  An on-shore wind plant requires nine times more minerals than a natural gas fired plant and a wind turban will need to be replaced in an estimated 20 years.  In just the past ten years, as the transition to wind and solar has begun, the minerals needed to produce a unit of energy has increased by 50%.  And that effort only increased the wind and solar share of energy production by 10%.

• With greater demand for minerals there is another long-range consideration, declining resource quality.  Already we are experiencing mineral quality falling across a range of commodities. For example, the average copper ore grade in Chile declined by 30% in just the past 15 years. 

• The IEA reported that on average it takes over sixteen years to move a mining operation from discovery to production. 

• Environmental consequences:  The new demand for minerals creates a global mining boom that will produce an enormous environmental footprint.  First, it demands huge quantities of water and, coincidently, about half the known global lithium and copper sources are in water-shortage areas.  Additionally, there will be extensive contamination from acid mining, contaminated drainage and wastewater.

• The IEA points out that the mining of “energy transition minerals” will occur mainly in countries with “low governance scores”.  That is, where corruption and bribery pose high-risk operations.

• Viability of access to “energy-transition-minerals”, ETM:  While the top three global oil and gas producers account for less than 50% of oil and gas supply, the top three producers of key ETMs control more that 80% of global supply.  But, most importantly, China controls most of that 80% and today the US isn’t even in the game.

• To contrast our position today with China, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of our needs are imported thereby creating tremendous vulnerability.

• The IEA report also poses a critical question on future net carbon savings. Mining, transporting, chemical processing and refining of billions of tons of earth materials will create a new and massive carbon footprint which could conceivably create new carbon emissions in greater volume than that which is saved by driving electric cars.

• What do we do when we run out of one or more of the essential minerals to support battery energy?

• What if the cost of producing batteries for vehicles increases the cost of a vehicle out of the range of lower- and middle-class families?

• The planners would look at the Paris Global Climate Accords and conclude that the accords do nothing to address the IEA revealed shortcomings.  Nations set their own goals, nothing is enforceable and there are no penalties for noncompliance. The accords also state that the 139 “developing countries” (which, according to The World Bank, includes China and India) would need assistance from “developed” countries. Wherein India promptly estimated that it would need “at least US $2.5 trillion” in aid by 2030 to achieve its emissions reduction targets.” And then there is China’s “pledge”; they will build hundreds of new coal-fired plants and continue to increase emissions of carbon dioxide at least until 2030.

• Vehicles currently account for about 30% of US carbon emissions.  A single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials creating a huge carbon footprint.  Averaged over a battery’s 7–10-year life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth and, Americans alone, drive some 3 trillion road-miles a year. 

• Replacing the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house (producing enough electricity for 75,000 homes), requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land, requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of nonrecyclable plastics for the huge blades. With solar hardware, the tonnage in cement, steel, and glass is 150% greater than for wind, for the same energy output.  

• Could we learn some long-range strategic planning lessons from China?  In two generations, China has built 500 entire cities from scratch; moved the majority of their1.4 billion population from poverty to the middle class; initiated a global Silk Road infrastructure initiative in underdeveloped countries.  By comparison China has 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, the US has none; it took ten years for a bus line in San Francisco to pass its environmental review; and it took us 16 years to build the Big Dig tunnel in Boston. China’s emergence as a world leader in commerce and military preparedness is all about long-range strategic planning on a global scale.

Long-range strategic planning begins by answering a long list of questions.  This International Energy Agency study goes a long way towards surfacing the critical issues that must be considered to determine a way ahead for any Green movement without just borrowing trillions of dollars to throw at the problem.

This LRSP will demand that we take a close look at the electric vehicle issue. 

• One electric car battery, weighs in at about 1000 pounds.  To produce one battery requires digging up and processing about 500,000 pounds of raw materials such as cadmium, cobalt, lead, lithium, and nickel. For example, for some of these type materials, the end product is about one half of one percent of the weight of the material dug out of the ground.

• Numbers of vehicles:  US has about 290 million, there are over 1 billion world-wide.

• There is some mind-numbing math associated with electric vehicles: Vehicles in the US travel about 3 trillion miles per year.  Divide that by 290 million vehicles and we have 10,344 miles per vehicle per year.  The average elective vehicle can travel about 200-300 miles and then must be recharged.  That means each vehicle battery must be charged about 40 times per year. Forty charges per year for 290 million US vehicles equals 11.6 billion charging actions.

• CO2 emissions from vehicles is not just a U.S. problem.  To achieve success all nations need to be involved. To that point, there are about one billion vehicles in the world today. It would take 250 billion tons of materials to build a battery for every car, once. Currently, electric car battery life is seven to ten years and then we need to dig another 250 billion tons, and again and again.  Is that feasible? By the way, replacing one vehicle battery-pack currently costs anywhere from $1000 to $6000.  In years ahead when the demand for raw materials increases exponentially, will battery costs be prohibitive for lower and middle-class income families?

Where does the electricity come from to achieve the total annual charging requirements as well as all the other electrical needs?  in the Green movement world, it comes from solar and wind production which leads us to more mind-numbing numbers about the tons of minerals to build wind and solar produced electricity.

• The American Wind Energy Association says it takes somewhere in the range of 200 to 230 tons of steel to make a single wind turbine. The steel tower is anchored in a platform of more than a thousand tons of concrete and steel rebar, 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep. Add to that 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic blades and 2 tons of rare-earth elements. Then after a life-cycle of around 20 years, start over.

• If we want wind to produce half the world’s electricity, we will need to build about 3 million more turbines. Three million turbines at 230 tons of steel each equals about 690 million tons of steel.  To produce steel for one turbine requires about 150 tons of coking coal and about 300 tons of iron ore, all mined, transported thereby producing hydrocarbons.  Will battery-powered vehicles actually give us net zero carbon emissions? Probably not.

• More bad news.  Cement is the second most-consumed resource in the world, with more than 4 billion tons produced globally every year which generates about 8% of global carbon emissions. Then there are the emissions from all the trucks, trains, ships, bulldozers, cranes, and other equipment involved in turbine construction. Again, what will be the net carbon reduction?

• Another downside to wind is that the turbines are so preposterously expensive that no one would dream of building one unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy, also known as tax dollars.   

• Another disturbing question; what do we do for power when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?  The most obvious answer is that we must maintain, at all times, a fully operational backup power source. Or do we just heat half the houses, run half the manufacturing plants, recharge half the vehicles and cell phones?  Because of the requirement for near 100% backup, some experts predict a wind farm’s power will actually cost around $25,000 for every home it powers.

• The discussion of cement/steel requirement for energy from wind are sobering.  I’m sorry to report that energy from solar power requires even more cement and steel than wind turbines to produce the same amount of electricity.  Additionally, production of solar panels requires large amounts of silver and indium.  Mining of these metals is expected to increase by 250% and 1200% respectively over the next twenty years and some day we will likely run out of both. 

• Solar panels require other “rare-earth” elements which are not currently mined in the US.  Demand for these elements is expected to rise 250-1000% by 2050.  Access to these metals is questionable.  For example, the Republic of the Congo produces 70% of the world’s raw cobalt and China controls 90% of cobalt refining. 

And then there are the geopolitical issues associated with global mining of essential minerals to support the gas emission goals issued by the Paris Accords and the Biden administration. What leverage do we have over China to cause them to give us access to the rare metals they control in Africa?  Probably none. Will future wars be fought over control of essential mineral deposits?  Could be.

The carbon gas issue is a global problem; If the US goes to zero carbon it will not solve the problem unless the other 194 countries become major contributors.  So, what if the answer to the math problem tells us there is only enough required minerals on earth to provide a battery to the world’s vehicle fleet only once or twice or ten times.  If that is true, and it could be, by the end of this century hundreds of millions of electric vehicles will be in the scrap heap and we will be desperately trying to rebuild the gas and oil industry and cars to again run on gas. 

The point being, we must have those answers and empty political sound bites will not provide them. 

What will our electric bill look like in a carbon free society?  For example, last year about 400,000 natural gas workers produced about 35% of U.S. electric power.  The same size labor force, 400,000, accounted for solar’s miniscule 0.9% share. When it comes to solar energy, the outrageous production-to-labor-force ratio is a glaring and expensive.

There are nations that are actively studying the electric vehicle issue; according to a British Professor Kelly, if all of the UK vehicle fleet is replaced with electronic vehicles, they would need the following materials: about twice the annual global production of cobalt; three quarters of the world’s production of lithium carbonate; nearly the entire world’s production of neodymium; and more than half the world’s production of copper.  And this is just for the UK’s 32 million vehicles.

OK, you get the picture, there is a tremendous amount of research that must go into the up-front part of LRSP before the leader begins making promises he/she cannot possibly deliver. 

The above questions, discussions and discovery is just a small fraction of what the planners would look at for weeks or months just to determine the answer to one question, is this a viable vision or is it hallucination?

All of this data leads us back to the question, can we spend trillions of dollars in support of a political-motivated soundbite that may or may not produce a net loss of carbon emissions and/or may not be feasible given the known quantities of minerals needed?

Recall up front I described the LRSP process as simply answering the questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.  Vision is WHERE the leader is taking the organization. If the vision statement is viable, here is a quick look at how the remainder of the LRSP process will unfold. The next step is mission.  

Mission answers WHAT.  Mission is a declaration to everyone in the organization, in this case that would be we-the-people, of WHAT it is we are all collectively going to do. Mission is not a paragraph, it is a single, clear, understandable statement.

One of the most memorable and important mission statements in our history was delivered on 25 May,1961 by President Kennedy before a joint session of congress; “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon.” Brief, clear, concise, memorable, repeatable, inspirational and, most importantly, believed to be within the art of the possible. 

Next is the leader’s statement of intent.  Intent is the most powerful tool available to a leader.  A leader who uses intent in strategic planning is letting everyone in the organization inside his or her head.  Intent answers WHO, WHEN and WHY.  Intent is a few short paragraphs, preferably less than one page.  Brevity and clarity are paramount.  Who is going to be in charge?  What is the timeline from vision to execution?  Why are we doing this?  During World War II, General Eisenhower famously said, “American soldiers will do anything you ask of them as long as you tell them why.” 

The hardest part of any LRST is the strategy piece, determining HOW we are going to proceed from vision to execution; how, in general terms, we are going to get to the end state.  Strategy is the long pole in the tent. Without a solid strategy, all we have is empty rhetoric.  Unfortunately, many times (particularly in Washington) the strategy is left out of the planning process and without the “how” the process just flounders and ultimately fails, having wasted billions or in this case perhaps trillions of dollars in a failed project.

A LRSP will be a phased operation.  It’s a little bit like getting on an airliner; you can’t get a boarding pass until you make a reservation.  You can’t go through security until you get a boarding pass. You can’t get on the airplane until you go through security.  Phases are absolutely essential and they will be based on objectives achieved, or time-phased or both. 

A second reason for phasing is that on day-one of plan execution there is a lot you may not yet know, but more importantly, especially early in the game, you may not know what you don’t know.  

In every phase there will be a deliberate process orchestrated by the leader to determine centers of gravity for each new approaching phase.  Centers of gravity are persons, places, things or circumstances that are central to success.  That is, they can significantly assist in success or can cause failure.  Once determined, the centers of gravity become must-watched issues. 

LRSP is not rocket science but it can be the key to success for any long-range significant undertaking.  In organizations where LRSP is not routinely used (the federal government), that organization will flounder and waste unimaginable amounts of time, energy and money.   

THREE FINAL THOUGHTS:

It is a certainty that the scope of increased mining to satisfy mineral requirements will create an enormous, new carbon footprint.  The question is, from the totality of the Green movement, will there be a net overall reduction in carbon gases? This must be determined by scientists and engineers, not politicians.  We-the-people need to know the answer.  And we need to know now.

Secondly, generally speaking the Green movement is based on a false premise and false promises.  A principle underpinning of the pro-green argument is that the energy source is “renewable.”  Technically, yes wind and sun are renewable.  But, in the larger sense, in order to harness that renewable wind and sun it will be necessary to mine, transport and refine literally billions of tons of minerals, many of which are already classified as “rare.”  For example, the world needs about 3 million more wind turbines in order to produce 50% of the world’s electric needs.  To build 3 million turbines will require mining of about 1 billion tons of iron ore and not one ounce of that iron ore is “renewable.”  Then, in about 20 years we replace all 3 million worn out wind turbines with another billion tons of iron ore. 

Finally, the vast majority of the 195 countries cannot afford any of the Green movement.  Do we print a few extra trillion dollars to bankroll them into Green compliance?

We-the-people need an in-progress-review briefing from our leaders on the status of the long-range strategic plan for the Green movement.  Don’t hold your breath. 

P.S. For anyone looking for a detailed discussion of how to lead an organization and conduct long-range strategic planning, try reading Vision to Execution, a book for leader.  Available on Amazon books. 

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of Vision to Execution a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com