The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines.
Speaking at a wind power industry conference in Boston, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that her agency will begin to identify, demarcate and hope to eventually lease federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine and off the coasts of the Mid-Atlantic States, North Carolina and South Carolina, California and Oregon, to wind power developers by 2025.
The announcement came months after the Biden administration approved the nation’s first major commercial offshore wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and began reviewing a dozen other potential offshore wind projects along the East Coast. On the West Coast, the administration has approved opening up two areas off the shores of Central and Northern California for commercial wind power development.
Taken together, the actions represent the most forceful push ever by federal government to promote offshore wind development.
“The Interior Department is laying out an ambitious road map as we advance the administration’s plans to confront climate change, create good-paying jobs, and accelerate the nation’s transition to a cleaner energy future,” said Ms. Haaland. “This timetable provides two crucial ingredients for success: increased certainty and transparency. Together, we will meet our clean energy goals while addressing the needs of other ocean users and potentially impacted communities.”
Mr. Biden has pledged to cut the nation’s fossil fuel emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 by designing policies to promote the use of electric vehicles and clean energy such as wind and solar power. In particular, the administration has pledged to build 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030.
In Congress, Mr. Biden is pushing for passage of a major spending bill that includes a $150 billion program that would pay electric utilities to increase the amount of electricity they purchase from zero-carbon sources such as wind and solar, and penalize those that don’t.
Mr. Biden has also sought to unite his Cabinet in finding ways to promote renewable energy and cut the carbon dioxide that is warming the planet under what he has called an “all-of-government” approach to tackling climate. Experts in renewable energy policy said that the Interior Department’s move represents a major such step.
What an unmitigated tragedy, if this comes to be. Have we no soul? No heart? Coastal ecosystems are the most prolific and fundamental to the oceans, and the most fragile. A few nuclear power plants with with vanishingly tiny amounts of nuclear waste – molten salt thorium breeders – could save our coasts. And it’s stupid, ignorant “China Syndrome” paranoids who run our politics in this regard. Wisdom? Evidence? Science? Throw it all out the window when it comes to voting. You can be the most psychologically damaged, ignoramus and your vote counts the same as the wisest, most far-thinking and benevolent-to-life person on the planet. And we proudly wave our flag for this??
The oceans are crossed by hundreds of thousands of ships flushing out fuel and contaminated sewage, burning dirty bunker fuel so the particulates fall on the oceans—or worse, on ice so it speeds warming and then ends up in the water. Runoff from GHG-spewing chemical industrial agriculture, with meat by far the largest part of it, is causing dozens of massive dead zones with fertilizer, deadly poisons, and eroded soil; plastics, also off-gassing CO2, cause uncountable wildlife deaths. Oil gushes from tankers, drilling platforms, and pipelines. Acidification threatens every fish, shellfish, cetacean, marine plant, and ecosystem.
Building thousands more reactors all over the world, scores at a time, as fast as possible trying to compete with onshore and offshore wind and solar PV, offshore PV, CSP, Clothesline Paradox Solar (and geothermal and hydro and tidal and efficiency and wiser lives and all the hybrid systems) increases by some phenomenal but unknown amount, the risk of shoddy work will likely lead to—dozens? scores?—of worst-case scenario nuclear disasters. Fukushima is dismissed by nook boosters as inconsequential (just like Chernobyl and every other disaster is) but released large and almost certainly lied-about amounts of radiation into the Pacific.
99 reportable-level accidents up to 2009 (killed people or caused $50k+ damage) and more since; Browns Ferry, TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, Sodium Reactor Experiment, Enrico Fermi Unit 1, SL-1, Windscale, the Goiania accident, radiation accidents in Mexico City, Zaragoza, Morocco, Thailand, Mayapuri, Costa Rica, India, Tokaimura… and thousands of other “minor” ones.
It takes an average of >14 years to build nukes, except it’s gotten longer recently, means millions of people and uncountable others die of air pollution from fossil fuels. Oceans absorb megatons of pollution and keep getting more acid from fossil fuel pollution. Between the time clean safe renewable energy generation or efficiency savings could have been built and reactors are, pollution kills millions. Nuclear electricity is more expensive than that from wind and solar plus batteries, so less can and will be built in the same time, leaving more fossil fuels to kill longer. Those longer construction times than Lazard, etc. assume, is just one of many ways they underestimate the cost of nuclear, so it’s even worse than it seems.
Hinkley is years overdue and billions over budget, but it has a contract to sell electricity, if and when it’s finished, at 50-100% more than wind and solar have already reached. So there’s enough motivation for the Chinese and Areva, not to mention the Royal Navy to finish it, take the profit and the submarine fuel, and give a big middle finger to climate hopes, and sense, right? What a disgusting, corrupt, and pathological industry.
You believe in evidence? The idea that wind turbines cause damage remotely close to either climate catastrophe or nuclear power multiplied by is absurd, but show us the evidence that wind turbines do net harm to ocean ecosystems.
China is building 17 nukes in as little as 3 1/2 years each. Median build time 4 1/2 years. UAE will have 4 finished in 2022, after about 10 years.
I’ve often droned that only fiat governments can crank out nuclear power plants. Established democracies which entail involvement of the public, the private sector, in addition to government (including bribed politicians) make building nuclear power plants untenably expensive and/or late.
The key is to site them where they’d be displacing coal (and eventually gas) plants.
Go, China, go.
More meterless power
Apparently you don’t believe in evidence.
“is building” and “will have” means they haven’t yet, are only promising to. “as little as” means almost all of it’s more than.
Couldn’t fit any more weasel words in there?
The facts I spelled out remain the same. The average construction time is 14+ years, and it’s certainly not getting better, especially in western European countries with the bad taste to keep building them. The places they are getting built is the places with, believe it or not, even less democracy than we have, where the people in charge are the least trustworthy ones you could imagine, yet full of passionate intensity. But often when people know what they’re doing is wrong, they self-sabotage.
Like incompetent dictators. I suppose if you’re going to have dangerous technologies, slow ones that get cancelled a lot are the best.
Does not really answering only 1 point mean stipulating to all the others? Or to all of them?
Nukes take longer, kill directly and collaborate with fossils to kill millions. [Thus both are tools of the malignantly narcissistic white oligarchic system of domination. Among other meanings, they’re delaying tactics for the nihilistic right–like carbon prices–a trap for conservatives while all real action is stalled, and nook boosters are recruited to the ARF cause by the constructed dichotomy.]
The avg is global so for every shorter time there’s an equal weight of longer ones, and as I said, times have been getting longer and outcomes worser in the US and western Europe. The faster times are mostly where we trust the govt even less than ours, as impossible as that seems in our proto-fascist corporate oligarchy.
____________________________________
The 2 biggest fast low-carbon energy increases were hydro; as were 3 of the biggest 6. Seven of the biggest 15 were renewable and 23 of the biggest 43. Every one that started after 2000 has been renewable energy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear_memes/comments/dr64cn/largest_10year_deployments_of_lowcarbon/
Wind turbines cause HUGE physical blight on land and sea, which people like you simply wish away. Blight is a problem, not a clean solution. Environmentalism has become the latest sellout movement, catering to economic growth (the real climate culprit). Greens won’t talk about degrowth or humility because smug people mustn’t lose any comforts.
They constantly sidestep the growing mortality of birds, bats & insects with techno fixes that can’t work. For example, this study debunks turbine sizes improving wildlife mortality: https://www.usgs.gov/news/new-usgs-analysis-wind-turbine-upgrades-shows-no-impact-wildlife-mortality (and you can’t really shut them down when a critter gets near)
The panacea of electrification, built with fossil fuels, is also a conceptual failure. Nature is not being saved by any of it. Only Man needs all this chattel strewn over the land and sea. It’s a failure to admit that human nature is the problem, not the solution.
Notice how electric car hype is often about 0-60 times, with conservation as a benefit, not the enticing goal. Nasty mining operations for batteries & magnets are noted, then ignored. Lining formerly scenic drives with wind turbines is said to justify it all, so we end up with more technology taking over nature.
The only way to pretend otherwise is to lie, which sites like ClimateCrocks and CleanTechnica are pros at. Avoiding an honest conversation about SCALE is how neo-environmentalists dodge the whole topic.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2020/11/12/hey-joe-biden-where-you-gonna-put-60000-more-wind-turbines/
Stop using aerial photographs to depict blight, or else include everything else (tank farms, frack fields, junkyards, landfills, etc., refineries, mountaintop removal, abandoned buildings, massive clear-cuts, power lines, trackyards, etc.) that can be seen by drones and planes. It’s a dishonest way to frame the problem, especially since many of these other things displace wild habitat in ways that wind turbines don’t.
If you want to avoid seeing most wind turbines, do what the timber companies do and screen the view from the road, which is the only time most people see them. The wildlife and vegetation and crops and livestock go right up to them.
Things that upset False Progress: The sight of wind turbines.
Things that don’t upset False Progress: Massive scale coal mining, oil spills, contaminated aquifers, NOx, SOx, leaking CH4, oil refineries, coal trains, pipelines, tarballs on the beach, shorebirds covered with spilled oil, people in remote villages having their waterways turned into tar pits and lots of other nasty things that wind turbine energy is replacing.
“Things that don’t upset False Progress: Massive scale coal mining, oil spills, contaminated aquifers, NOx, SOx, leaking CH4, oil refineries, coal trains, pipelines, tarballs on the beach, shorebirds covered with spilled oil, people in remote villages having their waterways turned into tar pits and lots of other nasty things that wind turbine energy is replacing.”
More childish lies, and once again revealing a very narrow interpretation of environmental damage. I oppose most forms of industrial blight, but you have a selective techno-fetish for the latest “green” ones. It can’t be that hard to see that wind turbines (and solar panels) are a major invasion of nature. Something is absent in your ability to connect broader concepts.
https://falseprogresshome.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/wind-and-solar-energy-sprawl-collage-1.jpg
OK, but everything you said there is false. (I counted 27 false statements in your little thing there.) The fact that an energy system that does a tiny fraction of a percent of the harm our current one does disturbs you so much is a serious emotional problem for you. Whatever financial or ideological reasons you also have for doing this, you’re obviously divorced from reality and in serious need of psychotherapy. Please get it.
“The fact that an energy system that does a tiny fraction of a percent of the harm our current one does disturbs you so much is a serious emotional problem for you.”
Once again, you’re assuming the word “harm” can only apply to specific types of damage to nature, which you narrowly define as chemical pollution. You claim that large physical intrusions on nature are just a NIMBY issue, which makes you a soulless technophile to broad-thinking environmentalists. People unreachable with aesthetic arguments have also fought the national park system, or put billboards in prime scenic spots. I assume you like some types of scenery, or do you want it to become a rare, zoo-like phenomenon?
Here’s another analogy:
You have an oily 10-foot wide puddle in your 1/2 acre yard, caused by seepage from a nearby gas station that’s taking years to clean up. But also in your yard is a 100 foot-wide pile of broken wind turbine blades, which you must stare at from the living room.
People like you are choosing to claim that ONLY the oily puddle can be a true environmental problem. The clincher to that analogy is that wind turbines look even uglier over much greater distances when fully intact!
No, false, we understand completely. You’ve decided you’re the world’s only authoritative arbiter of taste and are trying to impose the equivalent of your psycho-ideological psychosomatic sensitivities on everyone. We’re just still trying to come up with words to express how thoroughly revolted we are at the flabbergasting psychopathic narcissistic arrogance it takes to do that. You see, we have our own standards of taste.
No, you have the aesthetic values of a miner or logger, with elaborate rationalizations to claim otherwise. We wouldn’t be having this argument if you thought like John Muir, Aldo Leopold et al. Muir was fighting the original “clean energy” in the form of dams like Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite. Leopold outlined the importance of a land ethic, which industrial wind power has trampled all over.
There are roughly four main forms of man-made environmental damage, and you only care about one as urgent, along with the reckless assumption that wind power can cure the others. Man has a long history of replacing old ills with new ones, like whale oil with fossil fuels, and now them with “clean energy” sprawl on a vast scale, built with the very things it aims to replace (see Hew Crane’s Cubic Mile of Oil for why wind power is futile).
It’s hard to rank these in order of importance since they combine in various ways.
A) Physical intrusions on nature and removal of plants & animals. This includes logging, mining, drilling, roads, oil & gas infrastructure, wind turbines (including bird & bat fatalities), power lines, etc.
B) Visual pollution aka aesthetic blight. Wind turbines are the king of this; more numerous and visible at greater distances that other man-made structures, with flashing red lights all night.
C) Chemical pollution related to fossil fuel combustion and thousands of synthetic compounds that foul air, water & land. This category also includes the food supply, of course.
D) Noise pollution from traffic, construction projects, airplanes, trains, electronic entertainment, wind turbine blades & gears, factories, mining, fracking, etc.
Folks like you are willing to forgive wind power’s growing contributions to A, B & D in the blind hope that C can be cured by it. That’s not environmental thinking, it’s the same growthist ideology that caused AGW in the first place. The build-big technophiles who’ve infiltrated environmental groups refuse to acknowledge this.
“The oceans are crossed by hundreds of thousands of ships flushing out fuel and contaminated sewage, burning dirty bunker fuel so the particulates fall on the oceans—or worse, on ice so it speeds warming and then ends up in the water.”
You keep assuming that nobody but you understands the concept of pre-existing environmental damage, but it’s you who have the problem of not comprehend ADDITIONAL damage on a very large scale. The visual blight of renewables is already staggering. https://eerscmap.usgs.gov/uswtdb/ (America recently passed the 70,000 mark, mostly on land)
Why don’t you care about much aside from chemical pollution? Visual pollution is a huge psychological component of environmental destruction, and bird, bat & insect kills by spinning blades can’t be forever wished-away.
It would take just a few steps from your angle to reach the same conclusions as this excellent speaker: https://youtu.be/Q_s8Vo00Xug
Yeah, like I said, you’ve decided you have the right to dictate the world’s esthetic values—while you stereotype & insult people for theirs! That would be wrong even if you weren’t basing it on false, ridiculous, & malevolent assumptions, & talking points from Koch, Exxon, ALEC, Republicans, etc. In the end you put your stupidly wrong beliefs (or at least assertions) above reality.
A story I heard in an environmental ethics class is about walking in a forest and seeing a beautiful red flower you can’t identify, appreciating it as you approach, & then being crushed when it turns out to be a piece of trash. The point was supposed to be that what we assume about things colors our perception & keeps us from enjoying things just for the sensual experience, but what I’ve always taken from it is that symbols are only real in relation to the real. I think exactly like Muir, & Leopold, & Dave Foreman, & David Brower, & Julia Butterfly Hill—& the way Kingsnorth would if he hadn’t let his personal psychological history make him despair prematurely & selfishly give up on the biosphere out of his elitism and privilege. Because they’ve always been my heroes, I love the sight of wind turbines, to me the graceful soaring structures symbolize…
what they are:
a tremendous step forward because even though you refuse to admit it, they drastically reduce every kind of harm we do to nature & will allow most of the horrendous damage we’ve done with fuels to heal. As the technology improves, the harm will continue to shrink even more. Counting climate catastrophe, far fewer than 1/30th the birds fossil fuels kill per KWh, fewer than half those killed by nukes, & the full set of hocketed clean safe renewable energy saves even more. But that doesn’t begin to count it, because fossil fuels & the nuclear fuel cycle kill uncountable insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, cetaceans, trees, flowering plants, and members of every other class and order of life besides. Climate catastrophe will cause millions of extinctions, and if we were insane enough to allow nuclear reactors to multiply, disasters that makes absolutely inevitable would threaten the tiny holdouts of nature left, as well as millions of people.
You make it clear with every comment your ideas about what kind of folk I am are as grossly fallacious as your ideas about energy; it’s your stereotyped projections that are making you assume such things & act on them as if they bear some relation to reality. Fossil & fissile fuels cause all the problems you list & more; clean safe renewable energy far, far less, & the fact that that’s not obvious to you is a clear sign of something seriously wrong with your emotional & cognitive processes.
You continually disparage clean safe renewable energy based on nonsensical lies from both the fossil-fueled Wetiko-infected right wing & some bizarre misplaced nature delusion, & never offer any solutions to anything except your need to express (very badly) your unmet childhood needs. You definitely should find a better place to do that; if you tell me where you live I may be able to recommend someone, but meanwhile, tell us what your solution to climate and the larger eco-psychological crisis is.
Post a list of the places you’d NOT want covered with wind turbines, or have them visible from. Where would you stop with this holy faux green smugness? The Grand Canyon rim? The top of Half Dome? How about lining the profile of the Tetons with their majestic beauty?
Even a little known place like Mars Hill, Maine was a tragic aesthetic blunder. And people blocked the road in an attempt to save Lowell Mountain in that same state. Yes, some tree-huggers actually despise wind turbines! Lots of trees get permanently logged.
There are a number of homes for sale in your wind energy paradises. Have a talk with the sellers and live among the white giants with a clause that you can never complain about noise, shadow flicker and all the rest.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/03/05/rural-people-who-hate-wind-power
Correction: “…Lowell Mountain in that same state” (meant Vermont, not Maine)
Just once wouldn’t it be nice to hear an honest argument from the reactionaries pushing fuels? Of course then it would be completely obvious that they lost the argument decades ago, and only hold on through lies and manipulation, inviting the end of civilization and most life on Earth. The world is not just in dire need of wind turbines, solar panels, but psychotherapists.
“Post a list of the places you’d NOT want covered with wind turbines, or have them visible from.”
Places where there is not a lot of wind to harvest. That would be pointless.
Actually, I’d consider putting up “fake” turbines in some places if it kept people from building in the area. That would keep developers from consuming more wildlife habitat.
Are you aware of the reef-like marine life and the “great fishing” people have long reported around oil rigs. The critical difference between an oil rig and an offshore wind support structure is that active oil rigs produce active organic waste (food scraps and worker poop) that nonresidential wind turbines do not.
I would like to see a study where selected offshore wind turbines are regularly dosed with some amount of organic waste (like municiple compost) to see what kind of ecosystems they can support and maintain. (Have some for control, and other study groups classed by the volume and frequency of the “feeding”.)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francesco-Petrini-3/publication/234071589/figure/fig2/AS:340487375474703@1458189924966/Main-parts-of-an-offshore-wind-turbine-structure-with-reference-to-three-typologies.png
(Of course, if you were only whining about this because American politicians aren’t supporting nuclear power, then go ahead and ignore this potential upside of offshore wind.)
That old angle that species are being helped by man-made structures is based on a hollow kernel of truth. The real solution is to stop destroying places where they used to nest and feed in the first place, but that angers growth-addicts.
I’m saying that wind turbines represent a strange mix of growthism and quasi-environmentalism that’s just as easy to see through as turbines are impossible to un-see.
“Do people pretend to be Saving The Planet while simply rebranding business as usual? People DO.” (Chevron ad satire)
Glad to see another aesthetic environmentalist commenting on this blog. Nuclear will always carry some risks but its energy-density footprint is ultra green.
I’ve come to see the “renewables” agenda (namely Big Wind pushers) as a greenwoke ideology. Offer any criticism of their aesthetic blindness and you’re branded a “climate change denier,” analogous to the woke knee-jerk-word, “racist.”
The wind mob has extreme tunnel-vision, which may explain why they can’t see the growing blight all around them. Show it directly to them and they’ll twist it into “majestic” or “beautiful” scenery, as if nature’s millions of years of greening can’t match Man’s spiky intrusions.
They literally enjoy seeing nature covered by new machines as long as said machines fit their narrative of rebelling against fossil fuels while being embedded in them, like all large construction projects. It’s like praising a tangle of steel while lamenting the mound of coal that forged the steel.
Connect the dots, people! Do some of them simply lack education on energy physics? Hew Crane’s Cubic Mile of Oil (CMO) should be taught to every wind-happy college kid.
The term “vast expansion” correlated with environmental progress is a ludicrous excuse for growthism. It makes people like E.F. Schumacher (smaller is better) spin in their graves.
For whom or what is this planet really being saved? Who decided that carbon is the only environmental impact worth caring about now? Big Wind is sold as “saving more future species by lowering carbon” but it’s mostly speculation. The only known thing is that the planet has become much uglier since Big Wind starting growing like mold spores. The growing acceptance of white, spiky horizons has elements of that frog in a pot of water. Oceans always represented earthbound infinity, not industrial sprawl.
Support for industrial wind power reveals the extent of shallow environmentalism. If you’re willing to obliterate the remainder of what actually resembles nature, and kill more flying animals “to fix this carbon problem,” you’ll stop at nothing to give people what they want. Greedy humans in ever-greater numbers are the basic problem, but you frame it as a lack of technology, revealing your actual ideology.
It’s no different than the urgent quest to drill, mine and dredge every yielding acre. The big ruse is that you’re different because your machines are newer and don’t smoke as much. Wasted words here, I know, but one can try.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2018/06/24/why-saving-the-planet-is-a-lost-cause/
You’re conveniently leaving out all of the other negative consequences of the fossil fuel industries.
US foreign policy (including wars, making nice to oppressive petro-states, pressuring countries to let our corporations drill for oil) is heavily driven by our addiction to oil. We don’t expect anybody to invade countries for their wind farms.
Coal plants have giant dammed ponds of coal ash slurry waste. A few of them have broken (and more are vulnerable to rain bombs) trashing watersheds and towns downhill. The coal is extracted from hazardous shaft mines or via mountaintop removal. A wind turbine might fall over: Big deal.
Fracking consumes water and damages aquifers. Leaked methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Wind turbines have no emissions and send electricity down a cable.
Oil spills—including a lot that the public never learns about—damage habitat, poison waterways and kill wildilfe. If a wind turbine fell in a remote forest, the plants would just grow right over it and critters would use it as a highway. If it fell at sea, it wouldn’t leave a spewing hole like an oil rig.
Global warming and the climate change it produces affects more than just certain people’s delicate sensibilities. It kills coral reefs, it melts permafrost, it enlarges wildfires, it produces Cat4 Atlantic hurricanes in November, it expands crop-killing droughts and it breaks rainfall records, and it drives important species extinct. Wind turbines can kill some flying animals (but less and less as the avoidance technology improves).
So, no, it isn’t just an abstract “carbon” problem, you thoughtless, whiny obsessive.
Absolutely right, but you didn’t mention the 9 million people killed every year by air pollution. That’s more than all of these combined: suicide, influenza (in a normal year), pneumonia, kidney diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, chronic respiratory disease, accidents, malaria, cancer, heart disease, AIDS, cars, TB, and alcohol. It kills more than tobacco. Almost all of the people it kills would be saved by 100% clean safe renewable energy.
We’re more aware all the time of the serious health and ecological harm fracking does.
Then there’s the resource curse, the almost irresistible force of fossil fuels in creating poverty, inequality (a main cause of climate catastrophe), and conflict. Or the psychotropic effects of burning fossil fuels that are a huge part of what makes them so addictive to the rich and the right—aggression, lower IQ, disturbed thought and language processes…
And of course we also need to ditch chemical industrial ag because of its climate destruction, but it also threatens all the waters of the world with huge and growing dead zones and other atrocities, and threatens thousands of bee species and uncountable other beings. The solutions to climate catastrophe are an integral set both in regards to climate and all our other problems; we have to pursue all of them all the way or civilization and nature won’t survive. Fortunately all the solutions to the climate crisis also solve these and other major problems.
http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2012/07/tar_sands.jpg
Bizarrely, the thing that seems to set off False’s rage more than anything else is the visual aspect of clean safe beautiful renewable energy, but s/he never mentions open pit coal mines, removed mountain tops, vast plains of oil and gas rigs, houses, power lines, roads, cars, or any of the other devastations wrought by civilization.
https://climatecrock.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/shockingimage.jpg
My apologies, I mixed global air pollution deaths with CDC figures for the others just for the US. I’ve seen figures showing global air pollution kills more people than AIDS, malaria and TB; am checking on comparisons for both US and world, as CDC and WHO split things differently in what I’ve seen—cause of death vs. cause of cause of death.
The first photograph above, btw, is a tar sands pit of hell in Alberta, Canada. Mordor come to life.
I’ve seen that absurdly dishonest image before, and others like it, showcased in the page below.* You can’t possibly think that represents the scale of wind energy blight, and I know damned well that mining scars are ugly. I was always staunchly against mountaintop removal coal mining, and am equally opposed to wind projects in the Appalachians. But you people just look the other way at the latter, making you phony.
The concept of CUMULATIVE damage is amazingly lost on you people. You seem to think there are two planet Earths, with one that has mostly fossil fuel damage, and a new planet withd infinite places to build your new “green” damage. You can’t be that dumb so I peg you as liars, or disingenuous at best.
The core problem with “clean energy” is the scale of weak, intermittent sources trying to replace dense, reliable sources (oil, gas and coal) which inconveniently build the weaker infrastructure.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2016/08/29/wind-turbines-desecrate-nature/ (*the McDonald’s image is a blatant abuse of lens perspective)
“Absolutely right, but you didn’t mention the 9 million people killed every year by air pollution. ”
I don’t NEED to mention it because every real environmentalist already knows it! Wind pushers create straw men by thinking they need to explain this stuff. You constantly fail to understand the concept of cumulative damage, and lack the aesthetic values to care about REMAINING natural places being obliterated.
Wind turbines are being built for a single species called Man. Other animals didn’t create the mess of economic growthism, which Man is now trying to fix with more of the same growth, rebranded.
Again, there’s no proof that Big Wind will solve AGW. The world is pushing 400k wind turbines and temperatures keep rising. Adding another 400k or a million (all built with fossil fuels) is unlikely to change the CO2 balance. Even if is could, it’s too damned ugly to be green, and that matters.
Let me try this analogy: Someone with 12 oil wells on their Texas ranch is not making their ranch more “natural” by adding 120 wind turbines to its landscape. All they’re doing is building more machines via fossil fuels that happen to soak up part of the ERoI by generating electricity. But they greatly increase the visual and aesthetic decline of nature. Environmentalist used to protect nature, not just economies. That’s my big point.
I wasn’t talking to any of the malignorant morons here.
But here’s some homework, your falseness, since you consistently refuse to accept science and fact and arrogantly deny the Koch-Exxon-ALEC et al right wing constructions are as false as you:
Calculate the amount of land taken up and utterly ruined by fossil fuels and nukes in the last 50 years, and calculate the amount of land that will be taken up by clean safe renewable energy in the next 50, however, assuming equal population and energy use.
Remember to include mines, refining and other facilities, post-disaster exclusion zones, and leaks into other lands and waters (at least doubling the effective space taken up—aka ruined for geologic time-scales—by fuels). Don’t forget the roughly 250 million graves.
Include all the renewables that take up no land at all: rooftop and parking lot etc. solar, clothesline paradox solar (like passive and active space and water heating and cooling, and geothermalish Annual Cycle Energy Systems), offshore wind that could all alone power the world), solar over batteries (necessary even without any RE, since we have to stop using fossil fuels and nukes can’t follow load) combined solar/geothermal, floating solar on pumped hydro storage, bays, etc, tidal, and soon other ocean energies.
Also remember to calculate the reduction in land taken up by solar and wind as they improve in power, efficiency, and capacity factor. Keep in mind the recent replacement of 1500 wind turbines in Altamont Pass by 82 that produce the same amount of electricity, and the fact that 98% of the land around land-based wind turbines—if we even need any by 2071—can be used for other things.
I’d say get back to us when you’ve finished this assignment, but there’s absolutely no chance you would ever do this honestly or admit the results. Too obsessed with the fact that you don’t like to look at wind turbines to understand the horrific actual effects of fossil and fissile fuels. So since you can’t ever be honest, revealing the bankruptcy of your OBI-—your One Big Idea—why not just go away and work on your blog where you can attract mostly people who don’t despise you?
You continue with the straw man that I’m only “for” fossil fuels, which makes your type impossible to debate logically. Wind power advocates have an odd zealotry that spurred me to view this as a human nature problem. https://tinyurl.com/fpwindblight
You’re at least a step above “dumboldguy” who mostly posts insults, with “racist!” being the latest. That same canard got me kicked off the otherwise excellent un-denial.com when I noted the sham of BLM, a police-scapegoating movement that ignores the black crime problem and incites costly riots. When people yell “climate denier!” at wind power opponents, it sounds a lot like “racist!” leveled at CRT opponents. Slogans drown out reason.
Back to Big Wind: I’m against most industrial growth, but you’re for it when it’s branded to fit Bright Green ideology. This all comes down to broad-thinking about human impacts vs. a technology-obsessed, pro-growth mentality.
Wind & solar are Manifest Destiny v2.0 whereas early growthism (fueled by wood, whale blubber, coal & petroleum) was v1.0. But fossil fuels are now building v2.0, not being supplanted by it. The two phases are a continuum. They only look different because “green” marketing has swayed some people.
I don’t post “insults” here. When I call you a racist and white supremacist, it’s because it’s TRUE, as anyone can see if they read some of the things on your website and your comments on Crock
You demonstrate your prejudice and racism by what you have said in this comment also—
“…the sham of BLM, a police-scapegoating movement that ignores the black crime problem and incites costly riots. When people yell “climate denier!” at wind power opponents, it sounds a lot like “racist!” leveled at CRT opponents…”
But I guess you’re too dumb (or OCD) to realize there are 5 or 6 racist “whistles” in those two short sentences.
PS Forgot to mention that CRT opponents ARE racists and white supremacists by any measure of rational thinking. This country will never get it together until it deals with the 400 year history of discrimination and prejudice towards blacks, indigenous, and other people of color. That’s a FACT, and anyone who rejects it has got their head up their behind.