| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"boson boss" |
| Date: |
21 Apr 2006 07:29:20 PM |
| Object: |
Tilting at Windmills |
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, April 19, 2006; Page A17
"Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants
rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with
whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes."
-- from "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
Wind turbines on farmland near Wasco, Ore.
Wind turbines on farmland near Wasco, Ore. (By Don Ryan -- Associated
Press)
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To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green
grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially
to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.
But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than
ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a
murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is
"an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a
few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of
lies." Far from being clean and green, "corporate wind is yet another
extraction industry relying on false promises," a "poster child for
irresponsible development."
Such attacks -- those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web
site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone -- are not atypical.
Similar language turns up on http://www.windwatch.org/ , on
http://www.windstop.org/ , and on a dozen other anti-wind sites, most
started by local groups opposed to a particular project. Their recent,
rapid proliferation is not an accident: After languishing for years on
the eco-fringe, wind energy has suddenly become mainstream. High oil
prices, natural gas shortages, better technology, fear of global
warming, state renewable-energy mandates and, yes, tax breaks have
finally made wind farms commercially viable as well as clean.
Traditional utility companies want to build them -- and thus the
traditional environmental movement (which supports wind energy) has
produced a handful of untraditional splinter groups that are trying to
stop them.
They may succeed. Already, activists and real estate developers have
stalled projects across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. In
Western Maryland, a proposal to build wind turbines alongside a coal
mine, on a heavily logged mountaintop next to a transmission line, has
just been nixed by state officials who called it too environmentally
damaging. Along the coast of Nantucket, Mass. -- the only sufficiently
shallow spot on the New England coast -- a coalition of anti-wind
groups and summer homeowners, among them the Kennedy family, also seems
set to block Cape Wind, a planned offshore wind farm. Their well-funded
lobbying last month won them the attentions of Rep. Don Young
(R-Alaska), who, though normally an advocate of a state's right to its
own resources, has made an exception for Massachusetts and helped pass
an amendment designed to kill the project altogether.
The groups do have some arguments, ranging from the aesthetic -- if you
are bothered by the sight of wind turbines on a mountaintop, which I am
not (or, anyway, not when compared with the sight of a strip mine) --
to the economic. They are right to note that wind will not soon replace
coal or gas, that wind isn't always as effective as supporters claim,
and that some people are going to make a lot of money out of it (though
some people make a lot of money out of coal, and indeed Nantucket
summer homes as well).
But they also reflect a deeper American malady. The problem plaguing
new energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the
"Not-In-My-Back-Yard" movement. The problem now, as one wind-power
executive puts it, is BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere
Near Anything." The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales
beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade
entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power
plant. Indeed, the founders of Cape Wind say they embarked on the
project in part because public antipathy prevents most other utility
investments in New England.
Still, energy projects don't even have to be viable to spark
opposition: Already, there are activists gearing up to fight the
nascent biofuel industry, on the grounds that fields of switch grass or
cornstalks needed to produce ethanol will replace rainforests and
bucolic country landscapes. Soon the nonexistent "hydrogen economy"
will doubtless be under attack as well. There's a lot of earnest, even
bipartisan talk nowadays about the need for clean, emissions-free
energy. But are we really ready, politically, to build any new energy
sources at all?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR200604180=
1188.html
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| User: "Toshi ikutsu?" |
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| Title: Re: Tilting at Windmills |
21 Apr 2006 09:24:56 PM |
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<snip crap>
But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than
ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a
murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is
"an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a
few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of
lies." Far from being clean and green, "corporate wind is yet another
extraction industry relying on false promises," a "poster child for
irresponsible development."
Such attacks --
miss the real problem,
the wind turbine only lasts for 10 years at best before it has to be
replaced, due to corrosion and vibration.
checkout the mess at South Point, Hawaii
learn first, before spewing liberal hippy political crap.
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