They’re not from climate change or modern farming – but from climate and organic policies
Paul Driessen
Many activists, politicians and regulators believe our Earth and its wild kingdoms are threatened by fossil fuels, conventional farming, modern living standards, and catastrophic climate change resulting from the aforementioned human activities. Many promote these fears to gain ever-greater control over energy and economic systems, circumscribe personal freedoms, and silence questions and dissent.
Few of them could likely hunt, gather or grow sufficient food for their families, or be a lucky protagonist in an episode of the Weather Channel’s Could You Survive? series – much less endure Mary Draper Ingles’ harrowing 800-mile walk through the 1755 wilderness to escape captivity by Shawnee Indians.
Yet they are strident in their opposition to synthetic conventional herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers, and unbending in their mistaken belief that organic farmers don’t use pesticides – or at least none that aren’t safe for people and wildlife. They ignore the widespread use of “natural, organic” chemicals like copper sulfate, which is toxic to humans, deadly to fish, harmful to avian and mammalian reproductive systems, poisonous to sheep and chickens, and highly persistent and bio-accumulative in soil and water.
Their obsession with “dangerous manmade climate change” likewise ignores reality. Their computer models run hot, consistently predicting planetary temperatures significantly warmer than are actually measured. The warning they fuss over may have begun around the industrial age, but it also coincides with Earth’s emergence from the 500-year-long Little Ice Age – a convenient overlap for polemics.
The extreme weather events they blame on fossil fuels and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are not increasing in frequency or intensity. Above all, no credible science supports their claims that today’s weather and climate are entirely human-driven … and unrelated to the natural processes and fluctuations that caused glacial epochs, warm periods, and extreme weather events and cycles throughout history.
Their biggest error by far, however, is their insistence that wildlife and their habitats would be saved by eliminating fossil fuel for electricity generation, transportation, heating and cooking. In reality, the gravest threats plants, animals and habitats face are not from climate change. They are from “green” energy policies and programs implemented in the name of stabilizing Earth’s never-stable climate.
The current rush to employ executive orders, Green New Deals and infrastructure bills to shut down fossil fuel production and use – and derive all of America’s energy from wind, solar and biofuel power – will result in tens of millions of acres of croplands, scenic areas and wildlife habitats blanketed by huge industrial facilities, to provide the energy that makes America’s jobs, health and living standards possible.
As habitats are damaged and destroyed, more species are harmed, threatened and driven to extinction.
Coal, oil and natural gas now generate over 2.7 billion megawatt-hours of electricity per year. Vehicles consume the equivalent of another 2 billion MWh annually, while natural gas provides an additional 2.7 billion MWh for home, business and factory heating, water heating, cooking and industrial processes.
That’s 7.5 billion MWh, just for the United States. It’s an enormous amount of power – and it doesn’t include oil and gas feed stocks for plastics, pharmaceuticals and countless other petrochemical products (which is where corn, soybeans and other biofuel crops enter the replace-fossil-fuels picture). It also doesn’t include power to charge backup batteries for sunless, windless hours, days and weeks.
“Renewable” energy advocates and lobbyists want us to believe we can do this with very few wind turbines and/or solar panels – on relatively small swaths of the USA. One calculated it would require just 1,939 square miles (1,240,000 acres; Delaware) of solar panels to meet existing US electricity needs; another said 10,000 square miles (Maryland); a third estimated 40,223 square miles (Ohio).
Another figured we could replace current electricity generation with just 1,260,000 wind turbines on only 470 square miles of land, assuming a quarter-acre per turbine and all generating power 40% of the year.
I’m not sure what pixie dust these folks were sprinkling, but these are not real-world numbers. You need space between panels for access and maintenance; you can’t jam them into one enormous array. Bear in mind, too, Dominion Energy alone is planning 490 square miles of panels (8 times Washington, DC) just for Virginia, just for a portion of its electricity market share of the state.)
72,000 high-tech sun-tracking solar panels at sunny Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base cover 140 acres and generate only 32,000 MWh per year: 33% of rated capacity. Low-tech stationary panels generate far less than that. The 355 turbines at Indiana’s Fowler Ridge industrial wind facility cover 50,000 acres (120 acres/turbine – nowhere near an absurd 1/4 acre) and generate electricity only 25% of the time.
I estimate it would take over 17 billion Nellis-style solar panels – on 53,000 square miles (34,000,000 acres or half of Nevada) to replace all 7.5 billion MWh of US fossil fuel energy and charge batteries for a week of sunless days, under the Team Biden Green New Deal. Using standard, stationary panels would double or triple the land area and number of panels.
Using Fowler Ridge as a guide, and assuming just 50 acres per turbine, it would take some 2 million 1.8-MW wind turbines, sprawling across 155,000 square miles of scenic, crop and habitat land. That’s all of California. And it assumes every turbine generates electricity 25% of the year. Go offshore, and we’d need over 300,000 monstrous 10-MW turbines along our Great Lakes and seacoasts.
We’d also need thousands of miles of new transmission lines to connect all these facilities and cities.
But the more wind turbines we install, the more we have to put them in sub-optimal areas, where they might work 15% of the year; and the more we install, the more they affect wind flow for the others. Land, habitat and wildlife impacts could easily double; millions of raptors, other birds and bats would be killed.
The more solar panels we install, the more they must go in low-quality areas, and the more we need.
Energy analyst Willis Eschenbach has calculated what would be required to get the world to zero-emission electricity generation by 2050 – and ensure sufficient peak power for the hottest summer and coldest winter days. He used solar or wind, in conjunction with (feared and despised) nuclear power plants as backup/actual generating capacity, for sunless and windless days, and assumes 35% efficiency. Adjusting his numbers to account for only US needs, America would require:
* 350,000 square miles of solar panels (Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico combined) plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. Adding space for access and maintenance would at least double this. Or
* 10.5 million 2-MW wind turbines, on 820,000 square miles of crop, scenic and wildlife habitat land: over one-fourth of the Continental USA, plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. (Using 1.8-MW instead of 2.0-MW turbines, we’d need 11.6 million turbines on 30% of the Lower 48 states.)
Biofuel production to replace all those petrochemicals would require millions more acres of ex-habitat.
All these turbines, panels, backup batteries, electric vehicles, biofuel processing plants, nuclear power plants and transmission lines would require millions of tons of metals, minerals, plastics and concrete – from billions of tons of overburden and ores. That will result in astronomical land, air, water, wildlife and human impacts from mining, processing and manufacturing. Most of this will be overseas, out of sight and out of mind, because Team Biden won’t allow these activities in the United States. So a lot of people won’t care and will happily focus on these new energy sources being “zero-emission” … here in the USA.
These are just best estimates. But they underscore why we need full-blown, robust energy production and environmental analyses and impact statements on every GND concept, proposal and project – before we head down the primrose path to ecological and economic hell, paved with (presumably) good intentions.
There must be no expedited reviews, no shortcuts, no claiming the ecological impacts can be glossed over because they are “inadvertent” or less important than “saving the planet” from climate chaos.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.
The social cost of environmental blight.
Blight solution isn’t as simple as impeaching plastic shopping bags for a 2nd time.
I get the impression that most greens expect wind turbines and solar panels to last forever.
Greens don’t have a very good grasp on the meaning of “ever” when it is preceded by worst or for.
Part of the problem originates with their canary like attention spans.
If it wasn’t for the endless choruses croaking away in their favorite echo chambers, they’d have no memory at all.
According to some, since everyone expects these problems from wind and solar, they don’t count as social costs.
“In reality, the gravest threats plants, animals and habitats face are not from climate change. They are from “green” energy policies and programs implemented in the name of stabilizing Earth’s never-stable climate.”
Indeed, the gravest threat to humanity and the environment is 7+ billion people put in energy poverty by ignorant “green” climate policies. Even if that number is “only” 1-3 billion people, the inevitable destruction to the environment they live in would be catastrophic as they seek out affordable fuels and food sources.
One only has to look at US West Coast cities and the endless,and growing homeless-tent city crises there to see how the Liberal’s well-intentioned public policies play out in the real world. Liberal policies on climate, environment, energy, and economics in all facets of western life are the gravest of threats to us all of this century.
Climate Change Policies pushed by the Left-Socialists-Marxists are by far the biggest threat to global ecosystems and humanity. A regional nuclear war in the mid-East or South-east, or Central Asia isn’t even a close second to the global environmental damage that global energy poverty will bring if the Western liberal-retards (like John Kerry and the UNFCCC) have their way in shutting-down affordable access to fossil fuel energy sources.
A young white-tailed eagle that hatched in the Netherlands was last week found slashed in two by a German wind turbine.
The white-tailed eagle is an endagered species in the Netherlands.
Viertes Reichsopfer. Für das Klima.
According to American Bird Conservancy between 500,000 and 700,000 birds are killed each year in the States.
Here in France we have for the first time ever a decision to take down seven wind turbines causing havoc for wildlife.
You don’t see it on main stream news but people are getting really peed off with these things.
According to American Bird Conservancy between 500,000 and 700,000 birds are killed each year in the States.
Here in France we have for the first time ever a decision to take down seven wind turbines causing havoc for wildlife.
You don’t see it on main stream news but people are getting really peed off with these things.
Wind turbines are very effective at killing predatory birds such as falcons, hawks, and eagles.
These birds habitually build nests on ledges of cliffs, where their young are safe when they cannot yet fly, but they have a commanding view of prey below.
The boxes containing the generators of wind turbines provide what appears to the bird as an attractive nesting site–a bird’s eye view and no threat from other wildlife.
The problem comes when the bird needs to hunt. Wind turbines have tail-vanes that force the rotating part of the turbine to face into the wind. Birds (like planes) tend to take off against the wind, in order to maximize air speed and lift, and from a wind turbine power box, this path is straight through the plane of the rotating blades. In a strong wind, when the turbine is turning rapidly, there may be only a few tenths of a second between the passage of turbine blades across the takeoff path. One mis-timed leap through the plane of the blades and it’s bye, bye, birdie. If the bird killed happens to be a mother bird hunting to feed young chicks, the chicks also starve to death.
Like all the various and vicious sects of the religion of Marxism, Climastrology is deadly to living things like humans, trees and my beloved eagles! The insanity of worrying about a wholly beneficial molecule and some minor, and probably cyclical, warming while there are so many REAL problems still to deal with in the world is breathtaking!
The environmental movement morphed into a fanatic religious cult sometime in the 1970s or 1980s! Since then it has increasingly been taught as the State Religion of choice in almost all our schools and universities! Until we realize that we are in a religious war and not a polite discussion of the relative policies, we will continue to lose ground! The public by and large agrees with US! They have little concern about global warming or climate change, but they leave the decisions to their leaders who are eager to drink the Kool-aid and win the approval of their fellow travelers as well as the ducats of the wealthy owners awarded contracts and pork!
The only problem that matters to Marxists is that they are not in power.
Here we go again: nobody proposes we ‘just’ use wind turbines or ‘just’ use solar panels…
solar panels can and will be installed on rooftops, warehouse roofs, factory roofs, over parking lots. When they are put on agricultural land they can be put on poor quality agricultural land, which can still be used for grazing etc (that’s how it works in the UK).
you can put wind turbines way out at sea, well away from bird feeding and migration areas.
There are several countries in Europe with a third or half their electricity from renewables: none are ‘blanketed’ by wind or solar.
This article makes no reference to the actual real world experience where renewables have been rolled out on a large scale for 20 years…
Small nations with extensive Hydro do NOT count for a global solution. Texas has 25 percent wind, and wind always fails. Besides hydroelectricity, what besides useless and harmful to the grid wind and solar do you count as renewable?
( Certainly not bio and wood right?)
Besides the few hydroelectric wealthy nations, name one nation with large renewables where Wind and Solar don’t depend on regular conventional rescue from their inevitable daily failures?
And explain how those nations will eliminate all the necessary conventional back up. ( Back up in name only, as they are in truth primary base load generators, made far more costly by politics.)
griff’s IGNORANCE comes to the fore YET AGAIN
Seems the little LIFE-HATING cretin has never heard of sea birds
Not to mention the damage to other sea creatures.
Would YOU like a huge wind turbine factory where you live, griff?
Yet you would INFLICT that on ocean creatures…..
What a despicable piece of human waste you really are !!
Renewable have destroyed the RELIABILITY of grid systems around the world, we are well aware of that, even if you are in deep DENIAL.
SOLAR is basically meaningless without 100% back-up from RELIABLE SUPPLIES.
That makes then BASICALLY MEANINGLESS, and just a total WASTE OF MONEY and raw materials.
And no, many solar “factories” are made by destroying VIABLE AGRICULTURAL LAND..
… just like MANY wind industrial estate have been in areas where FOREST HAS BEEN DESTROYED.
Given the number of times griff has been corrected on all of these lies of his, ignorance can no longer be an excuse for him/her/it.
Well, he’s also ignored the simple fact that some birds migrate over water bodies like the Mediterranean, and in large numbers, too, when they do the flight south and the return flight north.
Birds also migrate from Canada to Mexico so the entirety of the US is unavailable
actually solar does have a couple of excellent uses, it heats a swimming pool fairly well AND you can use it to recharge a Powerwall on the days you aren’t using the Powerwall to recharge your Golf Cart
In Massachusetts, solar “farms” are being built on prime forest and agricultural land. None have any agricultural use under them.
As for putting wind “farms” “way out at sea”- you mean where the water is much deeper? That will drastically raise the cost.
For those European nations which you claim have a significant amount of their electric power from renewables- just wait until ALL energy must come from renewables- that is, add transportation and heat and industrial. How much land will that need for renewables?
Europe also likes wood energy- at least that doesn’t destroy the landscape because most comes from managed forests- which have been managed for centuries.
It is actually the same in the UK regards solar factories in the countryside. It is only Griff who would consider putting solar panels on north-facing hillsides. All the ones I have seen are on flat to south facing slopes on prime agricultural land, with no secondary use of the land.
Imported wood from America for burning in the DRAX powerstation certainly has little impact on the British landscape.
Unfortunately for us, we do have quite a lot of shallow seas such as Dogger Bank which means the bird mincers are being placed beyond scrutiny. I guess that will recycle the fish eating birds – smashed up to feed the fish.
“It is only Griff who would consider putting solar panels on north-facing hillsides.”
Here in Mass. I notice many homes now have solar on the roof. In my modest working class ‘hood consisting of mostly small “ranch” houses- many of the roof top systems are on west and east facing roofs. I presume south is best- but west and east might be OK- if it wasn’t for the fact that many of the homes here have large trees shading many of the panels. The installation firms should have told the owners to cut or heavily trim those trees. I wouldn’t mind if the cost was fully paid by the home owners- but no, much of the cost is covered with tax breaks and grants.
It’s fellow travelers like “griff” that keep the public confused. Industrial wind farms blanket Germany. The Germans closed nuclear plants and are burning lignite. In Virginia the first “mountain topping” is at Rocky Forge. Anyone who has seen what happened at Laurel Mountain WV or Lowell in Vermont knows destruction of the environment is coming.
That is enlightening. Worse than I had thought it would be. Thanks for that link.
You are nuts. Sunshine captured by solar panels is NOT AVAILABLE to provide energy for photosynthesis. If you want to leave space for grass to obtain SOME sunshine, then double, triple, or more the space for solar panels. Most solar arrays have their panels all crammed together to minimize superstructure and high current capable wiring. Those costs will go up also if you spread them out.
You obviously have never used your hands or brain to design any large structures have you?
Can you imagine the hassle of trying to harvest crops that are grown in the gaps between solar panels? I guess it would be back to hand harvesting for everything.
Also the crops can’t be allowed to grow high enough to shade any of the panels.
Remember, the higher up the panels have to be mounted, the more the mountings are going to cost.
Poor, delusional Griffool. He deludes himself that “renewables” make economic sense, and that they are “reliable”. Wrong on both counts. He deludes himself that “renewables” both don’t harm the grid as well as ratepayers. Wrong, and wrong again. He deludes himself that wind and solar don’t take up huge tracts of land, do great harm to ecosystems, destroying wildlife habitat, and destroying birds and bats. His biggest delusion though, is that “renewables” will somehow, magically, “save” the planet, when in fact the only ones threatening the planet are fools such as himself, and his fellow travelers.
To go with this weeks quote.
For every problem there is one solution that is simple, neat and wrong.
You can always count on griff to find this solution.
Putting a couple of solar panels here, and a couple there increases the cost of installation and maintenance by several orders of magnitude. You also introduce the problem of shading from nearby buildings and trees.
But what the heck, it’s only Other People’s Money.
As to putting wind mills far out to sea, floating windmills have been tried, and failed.
Fist the cost goes up tremendously.
Second, you lose much of the power generated transmitting the power back to land.
Third, having the windmill rock while the blades are turning destroys the bearings very quickly.
PS: I see that griff is still pushing the lie that if a country generates 30% of it’s power from renewables, for 5 minutes, once a year. Then they are generating 30% of their power from renewables.
Ummm, no CO2 emissions? How else do we get there other than all solar and wind? Dams? Nuclear?
It also doesn’t mention the FACT that these countries are paying out HUGE subsidies for their ‘free’ renewables! So is Texas, by the way!
“There are several countries in Europe with a third or half their electricity from renewables: none are ‘blanketed’ by wind or solar”
And Pray-Tell WHAT is the remaining 1/2-2/3 of their power supplied by? …and where is their reliable backup sourced? … and what supplies the all too important Balancing Load? … Fossil Fuel
To summarise then: “Green renewable energy” involves astronomical levels of mining with all the environmental destruction and pollution that entails; Requires fossil fuels in the mining and manufacture; must cover vast areas of natural habitat, destroying the ecosystem; the process – mine, manufacture, install – must be repeated for ever because they have a limited lifespan; the cost to human society will be equivalent to that in fighting the last world war; worn out “renewable” wind and solar must be thrown away – somewhere.
The level of intelligence of society is evidently much lower than that of an individual person when presented with the facts. Probably on the level of a very young child.
They just keep indoctrinating the kids and keep the pressure up until they’re out of school. If you watch TV, the message is almost always there through small climate references or with renewable energy in the background. It’s the Big Lie right in front of you.
“Greens” are even keen to destroy the ecology of lakes by covering them in solar panels, the BBC got very excited by this prospect a few years ago, and here is Scientific American promoting the idea for the USA:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/putting-solar-panels-on-water-is-a-great-idea-mdash-but-will-it-float/
One thing has puzzled me with solar panels is the cost of keeping them clean so as to avoid a reduction in efficiency.
Apart from the water needed, 1 gallon per panel?, there is the cost of the operator, in a well-paid unionised green job, $40,000 per year?, as well as the cost of equipment, transport for personnel and water. The logistics must be horrendous.
Has anyone done the math, as I have never seen any figures as to how many panels one person can clean in a day? Also there is the problem of water availability in the sunnier areas where the solar panels are sited, and the amount of copper cabling needed to connect to the grid.
On the windmill front we will have to start saving immediately for their replacements in 16 to 25 years time, in the same way as we need an oversupply of generating capacity if we are to use battery storage to ensure a reliable electricity supply.
It strikes me that all politicians involved in setting the green agenda need to go on a 6 month course in mathematics, engineering and resource management!
Perhaps but in the end they will still be self-loathing Leftists with all of their misanthropy intact.
The idea of going to two electric grid production methods that require massive increase in land and materials, require one hundred percent back up power sources, and have a far shorter life span then the conventional generation plants they replace, is so mind boggling stupid that only the Government could come up with it.
The amazing part is that you need to explain this fact to almost everyone. Two systems that can do the same output are more expensive than one. Additionally, your “back-up” system needs to be running at some level all the time, which is basically wear/tear and accumulated waste.
The one day special course of standing against the wall is a faster method.
The waste disposal will still be an issue
After about 10 to 15 years, a part of each years production of wind mills and solar panels has to be diverted from new installations, to replacing existing installations that have worn out. After about 15 to 20 years, 100% of each years production will have to go towards replacing worn out units.
To those who think warmth is bad for biodiversity, here is a small excerpt from my book Denierland:
“My old ecology textbook (Begon, Harper & Townsend (1987 corrected reprint of 1986 ed.)) has quite a bit to say about biodiversity and climate. One fact that is indisputable is that the tropics are more biodiverse than the poles. In fact on p. 801 BHT show three figures (a fourth only covers 30-48 °N), each of which displays a striking biodiversity gradient from pole to equator: marine bivalves (a thousand species at the equator and <100 approaching the poles; ants (200 species at the equator rapidly declining to zero at the poles); birds in north and central America (>1000 species at the equator, declining linearly to reach none at about 80N).”
The fact is that as far as I know no extinction has been due to global warming. Quite a few have been blamed on it though – it’s just that on a closer look, far more local factors are to blame (one of the most serious being introduced rats). I hope we will not cause local extinctions by the forests of wind turbines we are erecting – but if we do, you can bet the wind turbines won’t get the blame.
Well p. At 9.00 am Monday 1March I can confirm that all of the windmills in the UK are whirring around and producing a massive 3% of uk power generation this morning. This is the third day..
GB Fuel type power generation production
That’s exactly what the greens are doing. They don’t plan to build so many facilities. By reducing access to energy and food, they get rid of people. The “goals” of the club of Rome are an earth population of 500 mio to 1 billion. With the current population of 8.5 billion, that means 7.5 to 8 bio. humans will either have to “bite the dust”, or be made infertile. Be aware that there is no long term fertility (Syncytin) data available yet with the mRNA vaccines. Long term data wrt. ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) is also missing. If things go wrong, the endangered species could well be … us!
I have just stumbled over a real gem. Planet of the Humans hasn’t been totally disappeared as I thought it would be. It has a website and on that website is a fact checking page giving sources for all the facts stated in the film. link
Here’s an example:
Science Direct
It should be undeniable that renewables are a fraud. People need to know that. Once that is obvious to the masses, we can start having a sane conversation about policies that would actually protect the environment. I have no idea how people can be brought to realize the peril in which the Green Goddess places us. The facts are out there but that clearly isn’t enough.
The insanity of all this is that politicians are taking advice from the likes of Michael Mann.
As inconceivable as the the vast land requirements are for renewable energy, it needs to be duplicated before the end of life of the infrastructure to enable continuous power supply.
We have a politicians in Australia who are hell bent on rolling out renewables at breakneck speed. They don’t have a clue.
The belief stated above that ‘going green’ for energy will cause more damage to the environment is untrue.
The argument goes that green energy used much more land to provide the same energy as fossil fuels. But who ever said that we will be provided with the same amount of energy? The greens told us that green energy would be cheap – they lied. They are also lying when they tell us that green energy will provide for us as well as fossil fuels have done.
Green Visions of future society are not coherent. They envisage a ‘small’ human footprint, and will say whatever it takes to achieve that, no matter how illogical that is. When inadequate energy is provided, we will simply be told to live more frugally. We will end up living a tribal hunter-gatherer existence.. .
Good report, Paul. I have commented several times here at WATTS on my experience with wind mills chopping up our flying friends, based on the line of these giants northeast of Casper, Wyoming. I also saw seagulls flash into smoking death spirals when they got too close to the sodium canister at the reflector solar plant near the Barstow, California airport. No other industry is allowed to continue with this level of carnage against our flying friends. So the Green crowd justifies this how?
Don’t they just deny that any birds or bats are harmed?
I live next to a modern coal power station. Lots of wild life. Birds, animals, reptiles, marine life. Forests, lots of forest. After 30+ years, it appears nature loves coal power.
Our State and Federal Governments are going. Green. Wind and Solar. We are losing farm, forests, native habitat but its just starting. We will lose sea eagles, flying fox colonies, giant rosella flocks, kangaroo pasture and much much more. All to save the planet.
I will miss the wild life, and the natural environment. In Queensland Australia the debate is over.
Down in Florida, the manatees congregate near power plants. The cooling towers end up heating the nearby water by a couple of degrees.
Climate Change has basically hijacked the traditional environmental movement, which waits in suspended abeyance for quarterly government updates against the unobservable invisible enemy (CO2). It it is almost religious in a way, as the government could well be giving updates about the battle for the Heavens between the forces of lightness and darkness. (the theme is zero accountability)
Meanwhile, almost any industrial project can now be green-lighted if its ultimate purpose is to fight climate change (even pipelines, which deliver NG, a transition fuel, Nord Stream II).
Thirty years ago the arctic was considered inviolable, but now, thanks to LNG, the Russians will be opening it up with a fleet of 15 nuclear powered ice breakers. Even fracking is banned with a wink and a nod (so long as it is not in the public eye):
How Hillary Clinton’s State Department sold fracking to the world
h**ps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/10/how-hillary-clintons-state-department-sold-fracking-to-the-world
And then you have ruinous bio-fuel policies:
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html
And next up will be protection for mining companies going after rare-earth metals and lithium necessary to construct our collective “green” future.
Don’t be distracted by the headlines from Myanmar, about the need to “protect democracy”, as under the surface of that is another issue: about the supply and prices of rare earth elements:
Myanmar crisis poses risks to global rare earth supply chain
https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/myanmar-crisis-poses-risks-to-global-rare-earth-supply-chain
Europe’s Rare Earth Dependency Dilemma
In 2020, China mined 140,000 tons of rare earths. The United States was a distant second with an output of 38,000 tons, and Burma (Myanmar) was third with 30,000 tons. Europe doesn’t even figure in the list of rare earth producers globally.
h**ps://www.zerohedge.com/energy/europes-rare-earth-dependency-dilemma
It is all an amazing “sleight of hand” which isn’t left to just the environment. Practically everything has been turned upside down. The government protecting us from autocracy (the Trump bogeyman) becomes autocratic. Elections now need to be “fortified” against malign actors by another set of malign actors. Free speech needs to be protected by purging divergent opinions… and on and on it goes.
When you look at the totality of it all, it is truly jaw-dropping.
For carbon emission guilty jet flyers- Massachusetts Audubon offers carbon credits.
https://www.massaudubon.org/get-involved/ways-to-give/other-ways-to-give/jet-set-offset
Nice way way for Audubon to make some money! Just sell these “indulgences”! The following image is on that site.
Too late. We’ve got turbines springing up all over in the mid-West. Blades and towers wandering the interstates, with the red blinking lights of assembled monstrosities littering the night skies.
So Willis has been demoted to “energy analyst”? I think giving him that title is providing fuel for the trolls, while at the same time ignoring his enormous talents. You don’t need a specific degree to be able to do calculations, and as shown by Mikey Mann, the degree may make you overconfident in your abilities.
To say nothing of the minor fact that our electrical grid would need massive upgrading to accommodate more than one or two electric cars charging on most residential streets.
Green energy is very cool and promising. I love to drive along the highways past heaps of tall windmills. They are just breathtaking. You immediately forget about everything small next to them: about problems, about a lawyer, about everything.
Would you like one in your garden or local park?
From the article: “* 350,000 square miles of solar panels (Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico combined) plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. Adding space for access and maintenance would at least double this. Or
* 10.5 million 2-MW wind turbines, on 820,000 square miles of crop, scenic and wildlife habitat land: over one-fourth of the Continental USA, plus 1,760 new 3000-MW nuclear power plants. (Using 1.8-MW instead of 2.0-MW turbines, we’d need 11.6 million turbines on 30% of the Lower 48 states.)”
And then we would need to rebuild all this every 20 years.
Let’s just scrap the plans for windmills and solar and go with the 1,760 nuclear power plants, instead. That’s what sensible people would do.
Those numbers for solar also assume brand new panels.
In the real world, output from solar panels starts dropping from day one.
You have dust and bird poop.
Then there is scratching of the panels both from blowing sand and from the action of cleaning dust and bird poop off of them.
Finally the cell itself degrades with age. The hotter the panel gets, the faster they degrade.
I’ve always referred to electric cars as being Zero Emissions Here Vehicles.
One side effect of the proliferation of grid scale solar and wind is that a prohibitive price of grid provided electricity will make self contained roof top solar much more economically attractive. Especially true where sunshine is reasonably reliable year round and incentives are available. It would still be nice to have reasonably priced NG to run back up generators.
To whatever extent rooftop solar is made “economically attractive”, rest assured, someone else is paying for that. In particular, other ratepayers as well as taxpayers are paying for that, and are getting a much less reliable grid in the process.
“… will make self contained roof top solar …”
I have a hunch he’s thinking of an ‘off-grid’ installation.
“Off grid” – Check out http://www.thedesertbar.com/
The comment on that page about the “cooling towers” is somewhat misleading – “… a nice cool airflow.”
No, it’s just plain cold! (Personal experience.)
Stationary solar panels only need spacing between them in the east west direction. Since the panels need to be tilted towards the equator. This prevents the panels from shading each other. The further north you go, the larger this spacing needs to be.
Once you start tracking the sun on a daily basis, you have to add in spacing in the north/south direction, otherwise the panels start shading each other in the morning and evening.
PS: Unless you add the ability to tilt the panels in the north/south direction, you will only get maximum output from them on the two equinoxes. The rest of the year, the sun is either too high, or too low in the sky for maximum output.
The long term plan is not to substitute ‘renewables’ for all energy needs. It is to live ‘simpler’ lives, ‘closer to nature, with fewer people.
Yes, and all the people who support that idea should take the opportunity to begin the project immediately by removing themselves from this beautiful world.
I can point Mr Driessen to absolute top quality ‘organic’ growers in the uk who simply use ZERO chemicals, ‘fertilisers’ AT ALL. Their productivity is astonishing.
I can also tell him that I use ZERO chemicals or fertilisers on my own growing areas and achieved over 30lb produce/sqm in 2020 in specific test trials.
Shall I tell him what I DO use?
I use NOTHING ELSE.
I do use the odd fleece or mesh which might not be termed ‘organic’. I do use the odd bit of petrol in a lawnmower to create grass inputs to compost heaps.
There is a bit of glass in the windows of the garden shed I use to store tools and vegetables in winter.
I have a few module trays, pots and barrels which probably used some petrochemical products. The polystyrene ones were bought second hand on e-bay and lasted seven years.
I have a small lean-to which has a few metallic elements and an insulating cover probably made of petrochemical products.
Mr Driessen needs to start doing some homework on the best organic producers.
They can feed the world if their methods can be rolled out globally.
Thing is, that would empower lots of smaller producers and disintermediate giant corporations and supermarkets.
Like in India…..
I saw this: The 355 turbines at Indiana’s Fowler Ridge industrial wind facility cover 50,000 acres (120 acres/turbine – nowhere near an absurd 1/4 acre) and generate electricity only 25% of the time.
That does explain why ComEd has a habitual power outage on a recurring basis, e.g., always when the weather requires A/C or heat. ComEd buys some of its power from sources other than those within state boundaries.
Well, in view of the estimates in the article itself, which appear to be relatively realistic rather than somewhat weird, it is plain that to have zero emissions, all Hoomans will have no place to live, grow food, procure clean water for drinking (never mind the other things we do), and that means No Hoomans will be available to pay for this twaddle or get any benefit out of it… so WHAT is the point of it in the first place? (Answer: There is NO point.)
It would be really nice if we could sock some of these know-it-alls into the Doctor’s Tardis and take them back to the start of the Industrial Age, when burning coal and wood for cooking and heat was universal and the bathroom (water closet) and plumbing were just being invented for use.
I do recall a few days in the 1960s when a smog layer from New York City floated south and planted itself over Washington, DC. There was a distinct change in the color of the air. That smog layer finally went away, but it was impressive. That was REAL pollution, and these know-it-all know-nothing nimrods need to learn the lessons we learned a long time ago, before they were a twinkle in someone’s eye.
I’m completely in favor of building a network of small nuke reactors to provide electricity to communities. It’s far less dangerous and OCEANS less polluting than the ecohippies can possibly imagine.
Anti-human Malthusian zealots have dominated the environmental movement for the last 60 years. Irrational delusion disables them from experiencing empirical reality.
The NABU is a German environment protecting NGO and have now a big internal problem.
Closing ranks with the Greens divides NABU
NABU head Jörg-Andreas Krüger is single-handedly writing a pro-wind energy strategy paper with the Greens. In doing so, he plunges his association into a crucial test. A report from a troubled association.
Without backing from the grassroots and the committees, NABU President Jörg-Andreas Krüger has published a strategy paper together with leading politicians from the Green Party in favor of a faster expansion of wind energy. The paper contains numerous proposals that would significantly strengthen the wind industry in the conflict with species protection and could result in a massive construction of new wind turbines, even in regions that are already heavily polluted. Krüger thus wants to make the further expansion of wind energy, which is taking place anyway, more nature-friendly than it has been up to now.
In the opinion of many NABU activists, however, the paper marks a drastic change of course in the policy of the association, which up to now has been one of the last major nature conservation organizations to fly the flag for the protection of birds and species. Experts are also critical of the paper.
The NABU chairman’s unilateral action triggers strong protests among many members and plunges the association into a test of strength. Our research shows a deeply divided association. Over the course of several weeks, we spoke with numerous people within Germany’s largest nature conservation organization – from grassroots activists, to district and state chairmen, to members of the association’s close management in Berlin. We also spoke at length with NABU President Jörg-Andreas Krüger himself.
At NABU’s federal headquarters in Berlin-Mitte, there was palpable pride in the new president’s coup. For months, a small circle around NABU head Jörg-Andreas Krüger had worked on a coordinated position between NABU and the narrow party and faction leadership of the Greens on the expansion of wind energy.
Now the paper should be “played in the media” shortly, as the head of the bird protection section at the headquarters of Germany’s largest nature conservation association, Lars Lachmann, put it in an e-mail. Engaged Vogelschützerïnnen, which plead hand in hand with the most decided wind power fans in the parliament for a nature-compatible development of the wind energy – that would be a message beneficial for both sides.
The Greens received the seal of approval “recommended by conservationists” and NABU proved that it can not only complain against wind turbines, but also compromise on equal terms with the possible next chancellor. A real win-win situation. In addition to NABU Chairman Krüger, who has been in office for just over a year, the paper was negotiated and signed by Green Party leader Robert Habeck and the deputy leader of the Green Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Oliver Krischer.
At the beginning of December, NABU bird conservation expert Lachmann reported completion in another mail to a select group of members. The “joint strategic working paper” had been “launched via the Süddeutsche Zeitung,” he wrote the day after it appeared. And so it happened that the vast majority of NABU members learned from the newspaper of the closing of ranks of their association with the Greens in what is probably currently the most important and most controversial issue of nature conservation policy.
Even some state chairmen were, according to their own information, completely surprised. “Greens and Nabu conclude bird peace”, they could read in the business section of the SZ: “Environmental associations have been diligently complaining against wind turbines for years – to protect the birds. Now the Nabu is giving in for the sake of climate protection,” the paper pointedly summarized the four-page paper in the lead.
Source (German)
The rest is paywalled.
“Wind turbines are for the birds!”
“Wind turbines are NOT for the birds!”
Both statements are true.
So let’s just give wind turbines the bird!