Shocking Image: How Wind Turbines Ruin Landscapes

May 20, 2014

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week

19 Comments »

19 Responses to “Shocking Image: How Wind Turbines Ruin Landscapes”

Gingerbaker Says:

May 20, 2014 at 10:00 am
Hideous! I can almost make out the cascade of bloody bird carcasses arcing down red against the sky, but the smog is a tad too thick to say for sure.

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- dumboldguy Says:
  
  May 20, 2014 at 11:24 am
  Hideous indeed! If you look closely, you can also see herds of animals and indigenous humans fleeing the area, perhaps to escape the brain-damaging noise made by the turbines?
  
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- Alec Sevins Says:
  
  June 21, 2015 at 3:58 am
  You’ve had your laugh with that ridiculously biased camera angle. Now, let’s look at an honest photo of wind turbines in the true context that makes people call them eyesores. I could post hundreds of such photos, so what’s the point of claiming that a random mine in the foreground negates all the “turbinated” scenery around the world? Remember, wind turbines add to existing landscape blight, and that’s why they’re hypocritically green. There are no magic trades where longstanding industrial scars vanish in the presence of wind turbines. The access roads for wind turbines are usually wider than logging roads due to the truck turning radius for blades and tower sections. Additionally, land is cleared around the towers to prevent forest fires, etc. if the nacelle burns. Honest environmentalists don’t look the other way at so much blight. Carbon emissions aren’t the only moral hazard on this complex planet.
  
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  - dumboldguy Says:
    
    June 21, 2015 at 8:18 am
    Alex, you are such a hypocrite! Are you really going to maintain that your “landscrape” is not shot from a “ridiculously biased” camera angle and isn’t dishonest? I’d want to see a collection of 8 or 10 photos of that particular wind farm taken from a variety of angles and distances before I accept such a bold claim.
    
    “People” call them eyesores? Which “people”? Fools like you? I wouldn’t want one in my backyard, but the many thousands that I saw covering the dead hills in Texas actually improved the view, IMO.
    
    You are a “straw grasper” of the highest order, Alex. Who do you whore for? A manufacturer of solar power who wants to steal market from wind? The fossil fuel interests, who want to hold down renewables of any kind?
    
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    - Alec Sevins Says:
      
      November 13, 2015 at 4:09 pm
      You got my name wrong and you’re being ludicrous if you think wind turbines only look large from special camera angles. Do I need to explain the laws of perspective and how the eye works? The mine photo at the top of this article is absurd because it barely shows wind turbines at all, implying that everyone is always going to be that far away from them! Public outcries over setback distances debunk that idiocy, and wide angle lenses in random still shots distort the true size of wind turbines from many locations.
      
      Do you understand that there are over 250,000 of the blamed things spiking the planet already? America has about 45,000 now. Do you realize that they are the physically tallest construction projects in rural areas this century? Do you comprehend that man-made impacts on the landscape are cumulative? Scars add up, they don’t cancel each other out.
      
      Coal mines (which always get brought up to deflect wind power criticisms) are usually located in areas where they’ve been digging for many decades, whereas wind turbines are visible from thousands of NEW locations that have no dependence on underground geology. Even the spread of fracking (which I’m no fan of) isn’t nearly as visible from such a wide range of areas, being as those towers are much smaller. The main drilling rigs get removed and trees can easily obscure machinery that remains on site. Wind turbines are deliberately tall and conspicuous. You know this is true, so why deny it?
      
      There’s a whole group of neo-environmentalists who are obsessed with “clean” energy and blind to its dirty visual presence, yet they claim moral superiority over climate deniers whose tactics they closely mimic.
      
      http://postimg.org/image/xxq3sinpr/
      
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    - Alec Sevins Says:
      
      November 13, 2015 at 4:23 pm
      Your claim that wind towers “improve” certain views is entirely subjective and shows you don’t have much respect for natural landscapes, which is my whole point about wind zombies. The link below shows wind turbines on the Bald Hills in Texas, which is likely the type of landscape you claim needed improving. To me, they are just more eyesores, tainting the shrinking open space on this finite planet. Your ilk would probably be happy if half of America look like an industrial pincushion. Do you spend most of your time indoors?
      
      Can’t you begin to comprehend why people are offended when giant towers are built on scenery that never would have been developed w/o wind? It shows a serious lack of aesthetic values to write them off as NIMBY complainers. People who give a damn about the total planet (not just intermittent wind-generated electricity) don’t act that way. They are willing to admit that “clean” power is only clean in a narrow context.
      
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    - Alec Sevins Says:
      
      November 13, 2015 at 5:08 pm
      dumboldguy (aptly named) wrote: “You are a “straw grasper” of the highest order, Alex. Who do you whore for? A manufacturer of solar power who wants to steal market from wind? The fossil fuel interests, who want to hold down renewables of any kind?”
      
      Due to its minimal impact, I think rooftop solar is far more green than wind but I don’t need to work in that industry to see it. With your blind defense of landscape ruination and odd critique of solar, chances are much higher that you’ve got a money stake in wind power. Even if you don’t, people who host turbines are often asked to sign codes of silence. The Australian Wind Alliance has some YouTube propaganda videos featuring people hosting turbines. It’s laughable hearing them saying nothing but good things about gargantuan structures that took over their landscape.
      
      I have no ulterior motives. I just respect the world’s vanishing LANDSCAPES and what nature used to be before Man mucked it up, with wind power as the newest big assault. You, who keep ignoring that point, have weak aesthetic values. Wind-pushers have decided to write off lost scenery as collateral damage, which to me is evil. Some of us have a conscience about the whole of nature, not just subsidized high-tech braggadocio. Enercon boasts of its E-126 wind turbines, which stand 650 feet tall, not caring that they stick out like an obscene daggers on the landscape. Such people have sold their souls to the other type of green.
      
      The main problem with wind turbines is that they are just too BIG and NUMEROUS. I’m tired of the hypocrisy surrounding massive construction projects with pseudo-green credentials and limited practical output. It’s not clear that much CO2 is being reduced, since backup plants run 24/7 to support fickle wind. Climate deniers are another breed and I wish they’d stay out of this debate.
      
      Reply
Shocking Image: How Wind Ruins Landscapes | Climate Denial ... | DANA TOURSDANA TOURS Says:

May 20, 2014 at 2:27 pm
[…] Link: Shocking Image: How Wind Ruins Landscapes | Climate Denial … […]

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uknowispeaksense Says:

May 20, 2014 at 3:57 pm
This may have been part of a Twitter meme that started here in Australia when our federal treasurer Joe Hockey complained about the appearance of wind turbines in the Australian Capital Territory. He described them as “utterly offensive”. Naturally tweeps had alot of fun with pictures of coal mines.

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- dumboldguy Says:
  
  May 20, 2014 at 4:51 pm
  Don’t know if you play hockey down under, but up here he would immediately have had “puck” added to his name to become Joe Hockey Puck. A fitting addition, since a hockey puck is a mindless piece of hard rubber whose only reason for being is to get whacked around by hockey sticks, and that’s what your boy Joe sounds like—–an “utterly offensive” entity.
  
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- Alec Sevins Says:
  
  November 13, 2015 at 5:20 pm
  Yes, coal mines that have existed for many decades in the same general areas, are the only real form of man-made blight.
  
  It doesn’t matter how many rural areas get invaded by gigantic wind towers (250,000 at last count, globally). They are somehow invisible to the terminally winded. When they do admit to noticing a few, they must be “beautiful” because…..they just are. All complaints must be from climate deniers or NIMBY whiners.
  
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Andy Lee Robinson Says:

May 20, 2014 at 6:58 pm
Genius! Pure genius!

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Alec Sevins Says:

June 21, 2015 at 3:31 am
That image is just a puerile abuse of context, putting the mine in the foreground, as if those giant turbines are insignificant. The photographer could just as well have snapped it right behind the turbines, making the mine seem small, with much less vertical impact than the turbines. Indeed, many mines are not visible until you’re right on top of them. Wind turbines are deliberately “visible” to high level winds and the eye by default. Few, if any man-made structures outside urban cores loom as large as wind “farms” at great distances. Even tall antennas tend to be relatively skinny with less reflectivity and fade into the horizon faster.

Crude photo perspective tactics are no less devious than skewing climate graphs to make the Medieval Warm Period look more significant than the past century. No context = no science. Everyone knows that wind turbines are industrial eyesores in the context of scenic mountain ridges and bucolic landscapes. Some pretend they are “beautiful” while ignoring nature’s original, lost aesthetic qualities.

Below is an especially lame example of someone exaggerating the foreground to hide the size of wind turbines. You don’t see 400 foot spinning McDonald’s signs and overhead wires! A number of similar photos & cartoons are scattered around the web and they all minimize the obvious blight factor, or pretend existing blight is all that matters (see the word cumulative). If you have to resort to feeble-minded camera tricks you don’t have an honest case.

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- dumboldguy Says:
  
  June 21, 2015 at 8:34 am
  Here’s Alex with yet another rant. He talks about how erecting wind turbines means we are “ignoring nature’s original, lost aesthetic qualities”.
  
  Lord love a duck, but he suffers from a number of “visual” maladies—-tunnel vision, myopia, blinders. and looking through the wrong end of the telescope among them, and all wrapped in cognitive dissonance. The mines and other extractive industries and their down line processing plants and end uses are far more damaging to the biosphere than wind farms, and the only living thing on this planet that cares about “aesthetics” is man.
  
  The “aesthetic quality” of nature that I hope we emphasize is the presence on the planet of living things in abundance and variety, which is being seriously threatened by AGW due to GHG buildup. I think a dead planet would be far uglier than wind farms, although if there is no one alive to look at the “view”, it hardly matters what it looks like.
  
  I’ll ask again, Alex. Who do you whore for that you argue against wind power, one of the measures we can implement quickly in the fight against AGW? What do you think we should employ in place of wind turbines?
  
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- greenman3610 Says:
  
  June 21, 2015 at 9:36 am
  you prefer the strip mining. We get it.
  
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Alec Sevins Says:

July 8, 2016 at 8:04 pm
I revisited this old post after finding another stark example of wind industry propaganda. They routinely exaggerate foreground objects to misrepresent the size of industrial wind turbines. Those old fashioned windmills are typically 1/5th to 1/10th the height of modern generator towers. Some wind turbines now exceed 700 feet and the bulk of new ones are over 400 feet tall. It ought to be common knowledge by now and it’s the whole problem with these obscene structures. Many wind-pushers are fully aware of their proportions but use other rationalizations, like “coal mines are ugly” (so nothing else can be, somehow).

This photo is of the Westereems wind “park” (another propaganda word) in the Netherlands. The real context of that project on the landscape is much different. The Dutch apparently have little concern for aesthetics, or at least their government doesn’t. Maybe they find flat farmland dull to look at, but it’s still an affront to balanced scenery.

https://s32.postimg.org/n3rf6quxh/dishonest_photo_perspective_windpark_Westereem.jpg (vidcap from youtu.be/DsvM4TMyUqk)

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Alec Sevins Says:

July 8, 2016 at 8:31 pm
Continued…. Be sure to click the link under the “large” windmill propaganda photo, or see it here with an inset comparison. It shows that windmill in honest scale with the behemoths surrounding it. The difference is not subtle, and you people know it, yet you persist in trying to minimize it. The mine photo at the top of this page isn’t dissimilar, even though the mine is large in its own right. But it lacks vertical prominence, which is critical in terms of horizons. More people see wind blight than almost anything else as it expands across the countryside in nice areas. Most mine damage is old and established. Fracking sites are a new phenomenon but again, they lack vertical prominence and that land can be repaired (water is a separate issue).

If wind power was an honest business, grade-school photo tricks wouldn’t be needed to promote it. Environmental damage comes in many forms and denial surrounding “green” energy isn’t sacrosanct.

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Respect Silence Says:

October 2, 2016 at 2:37 am
Sure, mines are eyesores but they also tend to be lower-profile features.* In nature, you find many cases of erosion and bare rock but you never find things like wind turbines. Yet you purposely chose a photo that barely includes them. If I was doing a study of billboard blight on nice routes, I wouldn’t show photos of sinkholes and claim that billboards were barely visible. Lying by omission is still lying.

Many people don’t realize that Wyoming is now the biggest U.S. coal producer, yet you can drive close to many of those mines and they don’t stand out much from the surrounding low hills. Do a virtual drive near Gillette, WY on routes 14 and 59. That’s the type of land that can be reclaimed, but it’s also congruous with the surroundings a lot more than white towers. Wind turbines in Wyoming and elsewhere are hard to miss, even at night. They just don’t blend in well. This is about visual prominence, not trying excuse mines as saintly.

If a beautiful woman’s face represented the world’s landscapes, wind turbines would be like ugly white hairs sprouting from her skin, while mines and drilling sites would be pockmarks, often subtle at a distance. Seen from ground level, wind turbines are significantly more prominent, except when mines gut mountains.* But wind turbines also gouge mountaintops and add big machines to the skyline. It’s no coincidence that you rarely see those photos on blogs like this.

I could also bring up toxic rare earth mining for wind turbine magnets, but my focus is on the ugliness of the final product.

http://cutt.us/blightfornaught (F3 “cherry-picked locations”)

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Respect Silence Says:

July 8, 2017 at 4:53 pm
A puerile wind power zealot in another thread referred me to this post again, which reminded me that it should be re-titled altogether.

Here’s the original, absurdly disingenuous title:

“Shocking Image: How Wind Turbines Ruin Landscapes”

Here’s an accurate title for what that photo actually shows:

“Shocking Image: How MINING Ruins Landscapes”

To drop the cherry-picking and see what wind turbines actually do to landscapes, click here:

http://cutt.us/beautifulwindpowerscenery (image search for: wind turbines mountains scenery)

Random example among many:
https://www.altagas.ca/sites/default/files/styles/asset_images/public/2016-02/3.3-AGW008-Feature-Bear_Mountain_Wind_Park3.jpg?itok=808JeVGO

http://cutt.us/blightfornaught

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