An analysis by a nonprofit research group claims that the United Nations organization on climate change has been drastically underestimating the carbon intensity of Chinese-made photovoltaic cells.
Environmental Progress, a nonprofit organization co-founded by investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, in collaboration with The Blind Spot and Italian analyst Enrico Mariutti, argue in a recently released report that Chinese-made solar panels are about three times as dirty—in terms of carbon emissions during their production—as what has been claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body for assessing climate change science.
“People say solar panels don’t produce carbon emissions, but they do. And now, a major new investigation by Environmental Progress, drawing on the research of @enricomariutti, finds that solar panels made in China produce at least 3x more carbon emissions than IPCC claims,” Mr. Shellenberger wrote in a tweet on July 24.
Specifically, the IPCC claims that the carbon footprint of solar panels—most of which are made in China—is about 48 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilowatt-hour (kWh). But Environmental Progress said in a bombshell report that research carried out by Mr. Mariutti suggests the true carbon emissions are closer to 170 grams to 250 grams of CO2 per kWh—between three to five times higher than reported by the U.N.
“For 10 years, the @IPCC-CH has been presenting misleading evidence on the carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy,” Mr. Mariutti said in a Twitter post on July 24.
The IPCC didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report based on independent calculations.
‘Dirty Secret’
In April, Mr. Mariutti, an analyst specializing in economics as well as climate and energy policy, published a report titled “The Dirty Secret of the Solar Industry.” In the report, he argued that the IPCC was vastly underestimating the amount of carbon generated by Chinese-made photovoltaic cells because it was basing its calculations on a Europe-based, low-carbon supply chain rather than the coal-reliant production processes in China.
“We are investing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in technologies that are low-carbon only because someone wrote it down somewhere,” Mr. Mariutti said in the executive summary of his report. “There aren’t any national or international authorities who have bothered to understand on what basis and how this ‘paper knowledge’ was assembled.”
The problem is that most of the carbon intensity data that the IPCC—and governments—rely on for solar panels are based on modeling that’s likely to have vastly underestimated the carbon emissions of solar power because of a lack of transparency, or simply inaccurate or “made-up” data from Chinese manufacturers, according to the Environmental Progress report.
Over the years, China has become a dominant force in the production of solar panels. For example, about 97 percent of the global supply of solar wafers—a key component of photovoltaic cells—are made in China.
However, China’s growing share of the solar panel market hasn’t come about because of innovation.
“The majority of experts consulted by Environmental Progress agree that China’s competitive advantage did not lie in an innovative new technological process, but rather in the very same factors the country has always used to outcompete the West: cheap coal-fired energy, mass government subsidies for strategic industries, and human labor operating in poor working conditions,” according to the group’s report.
When he first released his independent report in April, Mr. Mariutti said in a post on Twitter that he was motivated to publish his findings “in light of the acceleration of European climate policy, which threatens to condemn Italy to irreversible decline.”
He said he felt it was his duty to make his research public in order to inform public policy decisions.
“In the last 10 years, the IPCC has systematically underestimated the carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy by pretending that photovoltaic modules are produced in Europe rather than in China,” he said at the time.
“By recalculating the carbon footprint of a photovoltaic system on the basis of a predominately coal-based energy mix, it is possible to estimate that the global average carbon intensity of photovoltaic energy is at least 200 [grams of CO2 per kWh].”
Mr. Shellenberger, for his part, has long warned about the holistic environmental impacts of the solar panel industry.
Solar Panel Waste Tsunami
In 2021, Mr. Shellenberger told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” that the economics of solar panel production, deployment, and recycling shows that the technology has a “toxic” and “dangerous” dimension, while its advocacy is driven by ideological leanings rather than by sound science.
“We’ve been in a sort of hypnotic trance,” Mr. Shellenberger said at the time, referring to what he characterized as the misguided belief that solar power is an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional forms of power generation such as nuclear.
“It’s a spiritual pursuit,” he said. “There’s the idea that … we’ll protect the natural environment by being dependent on natural energy flows like sunlight. It’s not a scientific view. It actually is worse for the environment.”
A Harvard Business Review study concluded that solar panels are being replaced faster than expected because of various economic incentives, and warned of a rising mountain of solar panel trash “of existentially damaging proportions” unless incentives are adopted to drive down the high costs of recycling.
The Harvard study cited estimates by Garvin Heath, senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who told PV Magazine that it costs $20 to $30 to recycle a panel, versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill. Harvard Business Review concluded that the bright promise of more widespread adoption of solar energy as an environmentally friendly alternative “would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash.”
Asked about the study, Mr. Shellenberger confirmed the high recycling costs but said that they’re just one part of the end-of-life burden of solar energy. The panels contain heavy metals such as lead, which can be released as a toxic cloud if the panels shatter during disposal.
“It’s hazardous waste,” he said at the time.
With the proliferation of renewable energy sources, especially solar power, in the United States, the issue of tackling waste has become a growing concern.
The United States currently has an estimated 149.5 gigawatts of solar capacity installed nationwide.
Research firm Wood Mackenzie expects the country’s total installed solar capacity to hit 378 gigawatts by 2028.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
