There’s a lot in there! Here’s how I’d respond, briefly..
Producing both involves greenhouse gas emissions. Like with a lot of things, there are ways of reducing the emissions, but they cost money. Fundamentally though, you have to compare like with like. What are the GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels to produce electricity and how does that compare with wind and solar? Which is lower? Even nuclear power involves some emissions from building the power plants, mining and refining the uranium, decommisioning them when they’re old and disposing of the waste.
China is the country with the biggest reserves and almost all the production is there, but actually they have less than 50% of the world’s reserves overall. The reason we’re getting it all from China is that they have poor environmental controls so they can mine them and refine them more cheaply. If we were willing to pay more and piss off the Chinese, we could stop using their products. It would come at a huge cost - like stopping oil imports from Saudi Arabia - but we could do it. It’s a political problem, not a technical one.
The reason the 75% comes from Congo (DRC) where children work in deplorable conditions is that they have the biggest reserves of any country and the miners work for almost nothing. Buying Cobalt from Congo is not inevitable though, like with rare earths metals in China, there are reserves in many other countries including Aus. Accepting the use of slave labour to keep costs down, like in China, is a political decision and governments could stop it if they wanted to. There’s a company that makes mobile phones without using Cobalt from DRC - fairphone.com If they can do it, wind turbine manufacturers can too. Australia has the world’s second biggest cobalt reserves bu only 3% of production. Australian goverment could mandate that wind turbines be built in Australia using Australian cobalt if we were willing to pay for it.
See point 2. We could stop imports from Xinjiang. China would respond by putting sanctions on us, like they did when we critised them for covering up Wuhan. It would hurt the economy, but in the end it’s a political decision.
Just like any kind of wood, you can grow it sustainably, it’ll just cost more in the short term. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but just because companies produce things the cheapest way possible and bugger the consequences doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
It’s an endocrine disrupting chemical but it’s in plastics everywhere, not just wind turbines. Despite the problems with it, it hasn’t been banned anywhere, contrary to what Plimer says. Plastic drink bottles often advertise that they’re made without it, but then they use other similar compounds that may be as bad or worse, we don’t know. There was a great book published about endocrine disrupting chemicals in the 90s, “Our stolen future”. The point is, why pick on wind turbines, specifically? Pretty much any manufacturing or industrial process you could name involves polluting the environment in some way. The point is to reduce the damage where we can. How do wind turbines compare to burning fossil fuels or nuclear power plants? E.g. Burning coal emits mercury. That’s not good for the environment either.
Well, it’s not a perfect world. I imagine that blades could be made from other materials that could be recycled, at some cost. If we were really concerned about recycling wind turbine blades, the government could mandate that they be made from carbon fibre or aluminium. As with everything, you need to compare it to damage caused by other methods of generating electricity and decide which causes the least damage. Fossil fuels and nuclear also damage the environment.