The U.S. Senate, like many state legislatures, is considering a "renewable portfolio standard", or RPS, as part of new energy law.
What is the goal of the RPS?
Is it to encourage the development of renewable energy sources (at least for electricity)? It does that, of course.
Is it meant to lower carbon and other emissions from fossil fuels? That is what its proponents say.
Yet there is no requirement for such a result.
Although the purported goal is reduced emissions, an RPS dictates only new building. Some of the mandated new sources may indeed effect reduced emissions from other sources, but that is not at all guaranteed. For example, wind energy on the grid has never been shown to cause a significant reduction in fossil fuel use.
And since wind energy is the only current renewable source that can be built to substantial capacity, an RPS is essentially a directive for huge amounts of new wind energy, with an implied free pass from proper environmental and community review.
If a utility builds giant wind energy facilities whose output equals, say, 15% of its average load, but it still maintains and builds "conventional" facilities as much as otherwise -- and in fact burns as much fossil fuels as before -- then what has the RPS achieved?
It has only ensured a greater movement of the people's money into the accounts of big energy developers. They, and the politicians they support, can claim to be "green" as they laugh all the way to the bank.
But the RPS has not reduced carbon or other emissions.
If that public good is in fact the goal, then that should be what the law requires: a carbon reduction standard.
Let the realities of energy production and conservation determine how that standard is achieved, not the spiels of industry lobbyists.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont
June 10, 2007
"The Greenwashing Of America"
From an essay by Philip Mattera, published June 6 at Tompaine.com (click the title of this post):
Today the term “greenwash” is rarely uttered, and differences in positions between corporate giants and mainstream environmental groups are increasingly difficult to discern. Everywhere one looks, enviros and executives have locked arms and are marching together to save the planet. Is this a cause for celebration or dismay?
Answering this question begins with the recognition that companies do not all enter the environmental fold in the same way. Here are some of their different paths:
• Defeat. Some companies did not embrace green principles on their own—they were forced to do so after being successfully targeted by aggressive environmental campaigns. Home Depot abandoned the sale of lumber harvested in old-growth forests several years ago after being pummeled by groups such as Rainforest Action Network. Responding to similar campaign pressure, Boise Cascade also agreed to stop sourcing from endangered forests and J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to take environmental impacts into account in its international lending activities. Dell started taking computer recycling seriously only after it was pressed to do so by groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
• Diversion. It is apparent that Wal-Mart is using its newfound green consciousness as a means of diverting public attention away from its dismal record in other areas, especially the treatment of workers. In doing so, it hopes to peel environmentalists away from the broad anti-Wal-Mart movement. BP’s emphasis on the environment was no doubt made more urgent by the need to repair an image damaged by allegations that a 2005 refinery fire in Texas that killed 15 people was the fault of management. To varying degrees, many other companies that have jumped on the green bandwagon have sins they want to public to forget.
• Opportunism. There is so much hype these days about protecting the environment that many companies are going green simply to earn more green. There are some market moves, such as Toyota’s push on hybrids, that also appear to have some environmental legitimacy. Yet there are also instances of sheer opportunism, such as the effort by Nuclear Energy Institute to depict nukes as an environmentally desirable alternative to fossil fuels. Not to mention surreal cases such as the decision by Britain’s BAE Systems to develop environmentally friendly munitions, including low-toxin rockets and lead-free bullets.
environment, environmentalism
Today the term “greenwash” is rarely uttered, and differences in positions between corporate giants and mainstream environmental groups are increasingly difficult to discern. Everywhere one looks, enviros and executives have locked arms and are marching together to save the planet. Is this a cause for celebration or dismay?
Answering this question begins with the recognition that companies do not all enter the environmental fold in the same way. Here are some of their different paths:
• Defeat. Some companies did not embrace green principles on their own—they were forced to do so after being successfully targeted by aggressive environmental campaigns. Home Depot abandoned the sale of lumber harvested in old-growth forests several years ago after being pummeled by groups such as Rainforest Action Network. Responding to similar campaign pressure, Boise Cascade also agreed to stop sourcing from endangered forests and J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to take environmental impacts into account in its international lending activities. Dell started taking computer recycling seriously only after it was pressed to do so by groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.
• Diversion. It is apparent that Wal-Mart is using its newfound green consciousness as a means of diverting public attention away from its dismal record in other areas, especially the treatment of workers. In doing so, it hopes to peel environmentalists away from the broad anti-Wal-Mart movement. BP’s emphasis on the environment was no doubt made more urgent by the need to repair an image damaged by allegations that a 2005 refinery fire in Texas that killed 15 people was the fault of management. To varying degrees, many other companies that have jumped on the green bandwagon have sins they want to public to forget.
• Opportunism. There is so much hype these days about protecting the environment that many companies are going green simply to earn more green. There are some market moves, such as Toyota’s push on hybrids, that also appear to have some environmental legitimacy. Yet there are also instances of sheer opportunism, such as the effort by Nuclear Energy Institute to depict nukes as an environmentally desirable alternative to fossil fuels. Not to mention surreal cases such as the decision by Britain’s BAE Systems to develop environmentally friendly munitions, including low-toxin rockets and lead-free bullets.
environment, environmentalism
June 8, 2007
In love with wind energy money
To the editor, On Earth, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council:
According to Joseph D'Agnese's Summer 2007 cover story and the accompanying box, people are in love with large-scale wind energy only because they are getting money. But what does such taxpayer largesse do for the rest of us? Does wind energy on the grid provide energy that actually reduces the burning of fossil fuels or splitting of atoms to a meaningful degree? An answer to that question was notably missing from D'Agnese's love note. Even in the showcase example of Denmark, one is unable to find a significant effect on the use of other fuels from saturating the countryside with wind turbines.
It is no wonder that "lucrative subsidies are drying up in Europe". European governments want renewable energy, but with wind they have learned that they still have to build and rely on conventional plants as much as ever. Wind is fickle. Either the grid operates as if it isn't there, absorbing its fluctuations in a large enough system (as Denmark apparently does with its large international connections), or it must provide costly back-up to balance it.
Since the U.S. is comparatively late to the game, we ought to learn from Europe's example, not blindly follow it, however much such unquestioning enthusiasm might delight the developers now seeking holdings here.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism
According to Joseph D'Agnese's Summer 2007 cover story and the accompanying box, people are in love with large-scale wind energy only because they are getting money. But what does such taxpayer largesse do for the rest of us? Does wind energy on the grid provide energy that actually reduces the burning of fossil fuels or splitting of atoms to a meaningful degree? An answer to that question was notably missing from D'Agnese's love note. Even in the showcase example of Denmark, one is unable to find a significant effect on the use of other fuels from saturating the countryside with wind turbines.
It is no wonder that "lucrative subsidies are drying up in Europe". European governments want renewable energy, but with wind they have learned that they still have to build and rely on conventional plants as much as ever. Wind is fickle. Either the grid operates as if it isn't there, absorbing its fluctuations in a large enough system (as Denmark apparently does with its large international connections), or it must provide costly back-up to balance it.
Since the U.S. is comparatively late to the game, we ought to learn from Europe's example, not blindly follow it, however much such unquestioning enthusiasm might delight the developers now seeking holdings here.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism
June 7, 2007
Excuse me while I kiss the sky goodbye
Bob Lucas of Ohio has written a rousing song about wind energy development. Click on the title of this post for the page at National Wind Watch from which it can be downloaded.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism
June 4, 2007
Current events
From Ironic Times:
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June 1, 2007
In the company of wind turbines
A correspondent wrote to us recently:
A neighbor of mine visited Fenner [N.Y.] and stopped to talk to a couple of people
as he was driving around.
One was a farmer who was standing at the side of the road talking with
someone. The farmer has a working farm with several [wind turbines on it]. He said
his only complaint was that for the last three years he has been paid only
half of what he was owed by the company. Our neighbor wanted to ask more
questions, but the person the farmer was talking to was becoming agitated.
And yesterday's news contained this related item from Scotland (brought to our attention by National Wind Watch):
Anger over wind farm cash delay
Hundreds of thousands of pounds promised to communities as a recompense for living in the shadow of Sutherland's only operational wind farm have yet to be paid, it emerged this week.
The £25 million Beinn Tharsuinn wind farm, straddling the Sutherland/Easter Ross border, came on stream two years ago, but local people have yet to see a penny of the community benefit pledged. ...
wind power, wind energy
A neighbor of mine visited Fenner [N.Y.] and stopped to talk to a couple of people
as he was driving around.
One was a farmer who was standing at the side of the road talking with
someone. The farmer has a working farm with several [wind turbines on it]. He said
his only complaint was that for the last three years he has been paid only
half of what he was owed by the company. Our neighbor wanted to ask more
questions, but the person the farmer was talking to was becoming agitated.
And yesterday's news contained this related item from Scotland (brought to our attention by National Wind Watch):
Anger over wind farm cash delay
Hundreds of thousands of pounds promised to communities as a recompense for living in the shadow of Sutherland's only operational wind farm have yet to be paid, it emerged this week.
The £25 million Beinn Tharsuinn wind farm, straddling the Sutherland/Easter Ross border, came on stream two years ago, but local people have yet to see a penny of the community benefit pledged. ...
wind power, wind energy
May 30, 2007
The Green Masquerade
[excerpts -- click on title for complete interview at Counterpunch]
Alan Maass: Among a number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power.
Jeffrey St. Clair: That comes out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Gore's political biography will know that he's his father's son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector as a congressman and as a senator.
If you go back to Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes of that book is a cooling tower. That's Gore's solution to the global warming crisis -- a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president, that was their message, too.
Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power industry's fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it didn't. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research funding and renewing all the protections.
So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes. And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into believing that we're going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then you're going to be confronted with the argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way to do that.
Alan Maass: Can you talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this corporate greenwashing?
Jeffrey St. Clair: The environmental movement made its deal with the devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal lobby shops. The idea was that if we can't defeat capitalism, if we can't change capitalism, then let's just give in and see if we can use some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage done to the environment.
These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but really reached an apogee in Clinton Times.
I don't even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s, and '80s -- Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But they don't have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset.
You can't distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world's great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is in a joint venture with Ikea -- so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to me to be very passé.
Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations -- they control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones -- their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.
I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda.
Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then the money dries up.
What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around global warming.
environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism
Alan Maass: Among a number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power.
Jeffrey St. Clair: That comes out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Gore's political biography will know that he's his father's son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector as a congressman and as a senator.
If you go back to Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes of that book is a cooling tower. That's Gore's solution to the global warming crisis -- a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president, that was their message, too.
Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power industry's fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it didn't. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research funding and renewing all the protections.
So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes. And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into believing that we're going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then you're going to be confronted with the argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way to do that.
Alan Maass: Can you talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this corporate greenwashing?
Jeffrey St. Clair: The environmental movement made its deal with the devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal lobby shops. The idea was that if we can't defeat capitalism, if we can't change capitalism, then let's just give in and see if we can use some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage done to the environment.
These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but really reached an apogee in Clinton Times.
I don't even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s, and '80s -- Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But they don't have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset.
You can't distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world's great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is in a joint venture with Ikea -- so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to me to be very passé.
Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations -- they control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones -- their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.
I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda.
Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then the money dries up.
What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around global warming.
environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism
Go vegan to help climate, says [U.K.] Government
By Charles Clover, Environment Editor, Telegraph:
It would help tackle the problem of climate change if people ate less meat, according to a Government agency.
A leaked email to a vegetarian campaign group from an Environment Agency official expresses sympathy with the environmental benefits of a vegan diet, which bans dairy products and fish.
The agency also says the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is considering recommending eating less meat as one of the "key environmental behaviour changes" needed to save the planet. ...
The agency's official was responding to an email from the vegan group Viva, which argues that it is more efficient to use land to grow crops for direct consumption by humans rather than feeding them to dairy cows or livestock raised for meat.
The campaign group entered a comment on the Environment Agency's website saying: "Adopting a vegan diet reduces one person's impact on the environment even more than giving up their car or forgoing several plane trips a year! Why aren't you promoting this message as part of your [World Environment Day] campaign?"
An agency official replied: "Whilst potential benefit of a vegan diet in terms of climate impact could be very significant, encouraging the public to take a lifestyle decision as substantial as becoming vegan would be a request few are likely to take up.
"You will be interested to hear that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working on a set of key environmental behaviour changes to mitigate climate change. Consumption of animal protein has been highlighted within that work. As a result the issue may start to figure in climate change communications in the future. It will be a case of introducing this gently as there is a risk of alienating the public majority.
"Future Environment Agency communications are unlikely to ever suggest adopting a fully vegan lifestyle, but certainly encouraging people to examine their consumption of animal protein could be a key message."
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism
It would help tackle the problem of climate change if people ate less meat, according to a Government agency.
A leaked email to a vegetarian campaign group from an Environment Agency official expresses sympathy with the environmental benefits of a vegan diet, which bans dairy products and fish.
The agency also says the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is considering recommending eating less meat as one of the "key environmental behaviour changes" needed to save the planet. ...
The agency's official was responding to an email from the vegan group Viva, which argues that it is more efficient to use land to grow crops for direct consumption by humans rather than feeding them to dairy cows or livestock raised for meat.
The campaign group entered a comment on the Environment Agency's website saying: "Adopting a vegan diet reduces one person's impact on the environment even more than giving up their car or forgoing several plane trips a year! Why aren't you promoting this message as part of your [World Environment Day] campaign?"
An agency official replied: "Whilst potential benefit of a vegan diet in terms of climate impact could be very significant, encouraging the public to take a lifestyle decision as substantial as becoming vegan would be a request few are likely to take up.
"You will be interested to hear that the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working on a set of key environmental behaviour changes to mitigate climate change. Consumption of animal protein has been highlighted within that work. As a result the issue may start to figure in climate change communications in the future. It will be a case of introducing this gently as there is a risk of alienating the public majority.
"Future Environment Agency communications are unlikely to ever suggest adopting a fully vegan lifestyle, but certainly encouraging people to examine their consumption of animal protein could be a key message."
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism
May 28, 2007
Wind: corporate "environmentalism" at its worst
To Don Fitz, editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought and writer of "Consume Like There's No Tomorrow":
The corporate enviro embrace of industrial-scale wind energy is not an exception but fits perfectly in your critique.
As the first section of the essay "A Problem With Wind" concludes, 'wind farms constitute an increase in energy supply, not a replacement. They do not reduce the costs -- environmental, economic, and political -- of other means of energy production. If wind towers do not reduce conventional power use, then their manufacture, transport, and construction only increases the use of dirty energy. The presence of "free and green" wind power may even give people license to use more energy.'
Wind is an intermittent, highly variable, and unpredictable source, so it either requires the building of new quick-response conventionally powered plants for back-up (such as the natural gas plant that would be built to support Delaware's planned off-shore wind facility and the diesel plant that Cape Wind's parent company would build to support that facility) or elaborate and manufacturing-intense storage systems, whose added inefficiencies would seriously cut into wind's already low output.
Since Enron set up the modern wind industry in the 1990s, its only success has been a massive transfer of public funds into private bank accounts.
Wind energy also requires huge amounts of space (60 acres per megawatt, according to the American Wind Energy Association) or clearing and road building on forested mountaintops.
With very rare exceptions, it also represents NIMBY predatory capitalism at its worst. In the U.S. and similar countries, the usual targets for sprawling industrial wind facilities are poor rural communities. Wind has become part of the current strife in Oaxaca, as the governor and president assist the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola in taking the lands of ejidatarios without consent and with very poor compensation. Their interest in erecting hundreds of giant wind turbines in the western hemisphere's most important migratory bird flyway is not to provide energy (which will be all but lost by the time it gets to where it might be needed) but to generate carbon "credits" for Spain.
Not only should big wind not be a focus at the expense of conservation, it should be rejected as a destructive boondoggle.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
The corporate enviro embrace of industrial-scale wind energy is not an exception but fits perfectly in your critique.
As the first section of the essay "A Problem With Wind" concludes, 'wind farms constitute an increase in energy supply, not a replacement. They do not reduce the costs -- environmental, economic, and political -- of other means of energy production. If wind towers do not reduce conventional power use, then their manufacture, transport, and construction only increases the use of dirty energy. The presence of "free and green" wind power may even give people license to use more energy.'
Wind is an intermittent, highly variable, and unpredictable source, so it either requires the building of new quick-response conventionally powered plants for back-up (such as the natural gas plant that would be built to support Delaware's planned off-shore wind facility and the diesel plant that Cape Wind's parent company would build to support that facility) or elaborate and manufacturing-intense storage systems, whose added inefficiencies would seriously cut into wind's already low output.
Since Enron set up the modern wind industry in the 1990s, its only success has been a massive transfer of public funds into private bank accounts.
Wind energy also requires huge amounts of space (60 acres per megawatt, according to the American Wind Energy Association) or clearing and road building on forested mountaintops.
With very rare exceptions, it also represents NIMBY predatory capitalism at its worst. In the U.S. and similar countries, the usual targets for sprawling industrial wind facilities are poor rural communities. Wind has become part of the current strife in Oaxaca, as the governor and president assist the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola in taking the lands of ejidatarios without consent and with very poor compensation. Their interest in erecting hundreds of giant wind turbines in the western hemisphere's most important migratory bird flyway is not to provide energy (which will be all but lost by the time it gets to where it might be needed) but to generate carbon "credits" for Spain.
Not only should big wind not be a focus at the expense of conservation, it should be rejected as a destructive boondoggle.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
Consume Like There's No Tomorrow
by Don Fitz
April 22, 2007
Would someone please tell the Sierra Club Exec Board that the idea of an "environmentally friendly car" makes as much sense as a "non-violent death penalty?" While the vast majority of those concerned with global warming consider reduction of unneeded production to be at the core of a sane policy, the Sierra Club has endorsed a plan that includes virtually no role for conservation.
In January 2007, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) released the 180-page document Tackling Climate Change in the U.S. Typical of big enviro analyses, it assumes a corporate-dominated growth economy. Its novelty is its highly technical studies which claim to compute how much CO2 emissions can be offset by energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy.
Teaming up with ASES to present the study to Congress, the Sierra Club enthusiastically wrote that "energy efficiency and renewables alone can achieve a 60-80% reduction in global warming emissions by 2050." Adding the key word "alone" in the first paragraph of its release indicated that the Sierra Club wanted to be sure that politicians and corporate donors understood that it has no intention of criticizing the large quantity of unnecessary junk created by corporate America.
What ain't there
Solar power, wind power and EE play vital roles in reducing CO2. The rub is the role of conservation, or reduction of total production. For "deep greens," the most basic goal is social change that would foster the reduction of energy. For "shallow greens," conservation is, at best, something to give lip service to while tunnel visioning on eco-gadgets.
More blatant than the typical corporate enviromental analysis, the ASES/Sierra report trivializes conservation as "doing without" or "deprivation." It presents a vast array of technological playthings, some of which are quite good and some of which are less than environmental. What is most revealing is what it does not include. It discusses transportation without using the word "bicycle" or "walking."
It looks at efficient building design with no discussion of using empty buildings or designing buildings to last longer than 50 years. The report that Carl Pope boasts is "now the official Sierra Club global warming strategy" has an extended discussion of home heating and cooling without mentioning the word "tree." George Monbiot's recently published Heat concludes that manufacturing a ton of cement creates a ton of CO2, a fact not emphasized by proponents of EE buildings.
In the analysis of EE, the phrase "organic agriculture" never appears and there is no mention of the massive use of petrochemicals or factory farms and there is zero concern with the fact that the average American food item travels 1300 miles from farm to plate. The strange approach to EE does not question the cancerous growth of household appliances, planned obsolescence, or corporate creation of artificial desires for unneeded products.
The authors have no comment on enormous waste in medical care or huge insurance buildings which drain energy while creating nothing of value. The chapters on transportation, such as plug-in hybrid electric cars, ignore the fact that air traffic in the United Kingdom will double by 2030, at which time it will have more effect on global warming than automobiles. The call for a 10-fold increase in biomass says nothing about effects of monocultures, deforestation, genetic engineering or pesticide usage.
Those approaches left out of the big enviro plan for EE share something: they are common sense low tech or no tech solutions which involve reducing the quantity of production and energy use with no decrease in the quality of life. They have something else in common: they do not involve the swelling of corporate profits via increased manufacture.
When is energy efficiency not efficient?
Almost as much as solar and wind power, EE is becoming the unquestioned mantra of solutions to global warming. Refrigerators that use 75% less energy are a plus. Even better would be the German-designed Passivhaus, which is so well insulated that it has zero heating and cooling systems.
Energy efficiency is good. But projections about what it can offer sometimes border on hallucinations. This is the case with the ASES/Sierra claim that EE can offset global warming by 57%.
The first limitation on EE is the old maxim that the more parts there are to a system, the more parts there are to break. The ASES/Sierra report reads like an encyclopedia of techno-fix gadgets for buildings, cars and holes in the earth. Each item involves increased industrial interdependence. As resources come to be in short supply from exhaustion or wars or hoarding, the future is likely to see a decline in the ability to patch up interconnected systems. Becoming more dependent on them more begs for industrial breakdown.
Another factor that works against EE is the law of diminishing returns. Joseph Tainter explained that societies begin to collapse when resources are drained to meet the needs of increasing complexity. Similarly, the biggest impact of discoveries come when they are first introduced. That's when there is the greatest energy returned on energy invested. Additional refinements tend to cost more and yield less. Oil was cheap and easy to obtain when it oozed to the surface. As time goes on, oil becomes more expensive to pump, the available quantity decreases and the quality worsens. The biggest impact of drugs came with antibiotics. Now we are bombarded with ads for new drugs that cost more to research but have fewer advantages over the previous generation of drugs.
Technocrats tend to have faith in unlimited potential for EE. The truth is that we have probably seen most of the largest efficiency impacts and future changes will mainly be refinements that offer less and less improvement.
The most important difficulty for EE is the market economy, which corporate environmentalists love so much and understand so little. Corporations do not compete to make less money. They compete to increase their profits. Market forces compel each corporation to expand production as rapidly as possible. When more efficient heating is available, corporations selling it will encourage customers to turn up their thermostats and run around in their underwear in the middle of winter.
People live commuting distances from work. The automobile has lengthened that distance. Fuel-efficient cars will do nothing to affect that distance or the expanding miles of road, the loss of habitat that accompanies road construction, space for parking or energy used in manufacturing cars.
It is not hard to visualize yuppies feeling so smug about their EE apartment in New York that they buy an EE home in Phoenix, an EE condo in Chicago, a hybrid car for each city, and a helicopter modified to run on biofuels for shuttling between cities. Energy efficiency is not efficient when some individual items are more efficient but the overall quantity of items increases so much that the total mass of energy used goes up instead of down. Like it or not, that is the irredeemable compulsion of market economics.
This is not to say that EE plays no role in preventing the planet from frying. It is to say that EE must be accompanied with an intense program of conservation, economic redesign and governmental regulation. Without these, EE in a market economy is not merely worthless, but will likely result in expanded production and increased global warming.
Invasion of the techno-babblers
Anyone who has ever fought an incinerator, cement kiln or coal plant knows that you've lost the struggle if you ever let industry suck you into an argument about which pollution control device should be tacked on after toxins have been created. The only genuine solution is the easy one -- to prevent the creation of the poisons in the first place.
If someone tries to sell an incinerator or an EE system that's too complicated to understand, that could indicate it's a bad idea. Making things simple is typically the route of greatest efficiency.
A narrow focus on technology seeks to replace a gee-gaw with a doo-dad, and when that doesn't work come up with a gizmo. Techno-babble sputters forth from the belief that social problems can be solved in a quest for the ultimate gadget. Oblivious to social reasons for global warming, the ASES/Sierra report claims that whatever greenhouse gas problems remain after EE can be solved with six renewable technologies: "concentrating solar power, photovoltaics, wind power, biomass, biofuels and geothermal power." The last three [or four -- Ed.] of these are techno-babble.
"Biomass" is largely an effort to turn whatever wildlands remain on this planet to energy crop monocultures. Not surprisingly, the word "ecology" does not appear in the biomass chapter. What is surprising is the subsection on "Urban residues" which discusses the use of municipal solid waste as feedstock for heat conversion to electricity. This is a polite way of saying that environmentalists should endorse spewing incinerator poisons into city air and abandon the notion of not generating waste.
"Geothermal power" does not have such offensive associations. But less than 0.1% of geothermal energy is within three kilometers of the surface, which makes it currently recoverable. Suggesting that yet-to-be-perfected techniques of recovery might allow geothermal to provide 20% of US energy is pure speculation. It cannot be part of a serious energy strategy.
One of the more shameful chapters of the report concerns "Biofuels." It has nothing against corn ethanol. It only rejects using corn grain to produce ethanol on the basis that the 10 million gallons of ethanol which could be manufactured from U.S. corn would represent only 5% of this country's gasoline demand. It pays no attention to issues brought up the same month in a Scientific American article that (1) refining ethanol uses more energy than it produces and (2) ethanol requires "robbing food crops to make fuel." The lack of concern with either ethanol efficiency or world hunger renders the Sierra Club-endorsed report as less ecologically minded than Scientific American, the prototype of techno-hype publications.
The chapter clings to the hope that ethanol could be produced if, instead of using corn grain, "residues from corn and wheat crops" made up the feedstock. There are several problems with this "cellulose" strategy. First, as with geothermal, making ethanol from cornstalks is so highly speculative that it has no place in long-term projections. If it could be done, it would be from genetically engineering corn to make it more amenable to separating sugars from lignin. There has already been plenty of genetic contamination of foodstocks. Additional genetic engineering is exactly what agriculture does not need.
The biggest problem with cellulosic ethanol is that it assumes that soil should be nothing more than a sterile medium for growing crops and that "residue" has no part in replenishing soil. Just as the Forest Service under Bill Clinton brought us "salvage logging" based on the belief that decaying wood has no significance for forest ecosystems, Hillary Clinton might usher in the concept that decaying cornstalks have no contribution to soil ecosystems.
Those who fixate on biofuels don't seem to grasp that keeping natural fertilizers out of the soil means relying more on petrochemical fertilizers. With a straight face they are proposing to reduce oil use in cars by increasing use of oil-based fertilizers.
Hard questions/tough reality
Perpetual motion machines, biomass and biofuels will not halt species extinction caused by climate change. Again, efficiency and solar and wind power [? -- Ed.] are critical components of a sustainable society. But focusing on them diverts attention from the real issues that need to be addressed -- how to dramatically reduce energy production while improving the quality of life. This is the basis for the hard questions that corporate environmentalists avoid.
For example, the U.S. needs to reduce the number of cars on the road by at least 95% and make sure the few that are manufactured are hybrids. How can the U.S. economy be reorganized so that auto workers and refinery workers have jobs comparable to jobs that they now have?
Many poor countries depend on destructive industries such as oil. How can the world economy be reorganized so they increase their standard of living while altering what they produce?
It is well known that greenhouse gas reduction requires population reduction, which can best be accomplished by reducing the gap between rich and poor and achieving equality for women. How do we reverse the right-wing pattern of increasing disparity?
The global economy is increasing production of high-energy goods such as roads, cars, airplanes, fast food, meat and endless mountains of consumer crap. How do we change this to production of low-energy goods that people actually need, such as locally grown organic food, preventive health care and clothes and homes that endure?
The creation of artificial wants for new objects is exploding like genetically engineered diseases in a bio-defense lab. How do we convince big enviro that it is not "sacrifice" or "deprivation" to focus on manufacturing items that people actually need and will last?
We all want to believe that our checks to the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy do some good in the long run and that they are just a little slow to do the right thing. The tough reality is that big enviro is doing bad things that lead in the wrong direction.
The most basic task for stopping global warming is having a moral, ethical and spiritual revolution based on the belief that excessive crap is bad. Reduction of unnecessary production is the antithesis of what corporations are all about. However destructive it is for the planet, corporations must seek to convince people to consume more and more.
Enter big enviro telling people that excessive consumption is not bad at all because it gives the consumer the ability to affect change with purchasing power. The erudite techno-magician waves his wand, uttering "Don't look at the mounds of discarded junk that go into landfills. Look over here at the fabulous eco-gadgets of our corporate friends."
Big enviro may be doing more to preserve the ethos of self-devouring consumerism than big corporations could ever do. What a surprise to learn that the Sierra Club has a history of obtaining funds from Chemical Bank, ARCO and British Petroleum. Big enviro just may deliver to big oil what it most needs -- faith that a market economy can protect the planet.
Karl Marx once said something to the effect that if there were only two capitalists left, they would compete to see which would sell the rope to hang the other one. A modern version might be that if the planet was so roasted that only two big enviro groups remained, they would compete to see which could get a grant from big oil to show that what was left of the world could be saved by consumer choices.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
April 22, 2007
Would someone please tell the Sierra Club Exec Board that the idea of an "environmentally friendly car" makes as much sense as a "non-violent death penalty?" While the vast majority of those concerned with global warming consider reduction of unneeded production to be at the core of a sane policy, the Sierra Club has endorsed a plan that includes virtually no role for conservation.
In January 2007, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) released the 180-page document Tackling Climate Change in the U.S. Typical of big enviro analyses, it assumes a corporate-dominated growth economy. Its novelty is its highly technical studies which claim to compute how much CO2 emissions can be offset by energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy.
Teaming up with ASES to present the study to Congress, the Sierra Club enthusiastically wrote that "energy efficiency and renewables alone can achieve a 60-80% reduction in global warming emissions by 2050." Adding the key word "alone" in the first paragraph of its release indicated that the Sierra Club wanted to be sure that politicians and corporate donors understood that it has no intention of criticizing the large quantity of unnecessary junk created by corporate America.
What ain't there
Solar power, wind power and EE play vital roles in reducing CO2. The rub is the role of conservation, or reduction of total production. For "deep greens," the most basic goal is social change that would foster the reduction of energy. For "shallow greens," conservation is, at best, something to give lip service to while tunnel visioning on eco-gadgets.
More blatant than the typical corporate enviromental analysis, the ASES/Sierra report trivializes conservation as "doing without" or "deprivation." It presents a vast array of technological playthings, some of which are quite good and some of which are less than environmental. What is most revealing is what it does not include. It discusses transportation without using the word "bicycle" or "walking."
It looks at efficient building design with no discussion of using empty buildings or designing buildings to last longer than 50 years. The report that Carl Pope boasts is "now the official Sierra Club global warming strategy" has an extended discussion of home heating and cooling without mentioning the word "tree." George Monbiot's recently published Heat concludes that manufacturing a ton of cement creates a ton of CO2, a fact not emphasized by proponents of EE buildings.
In the analysis of EE, the phrase "organic agriculture" never appears and there is no mention of the massive use of petrochemicals or factory farms and there is zero concern with the fact that the average American food item travels 1300 miles from farm to plate. The strange approach to EE does not question the cancerous growth of household appliances, planned obsolescence, or corporate creation of artificial desires for unneeded products.
The authors have no comment on enormous waste in medical care or huge insurance buildings which drain energy while creating nothing of value. The chapters on transportation, such as plug-in hybrid electric cars, ignore the fact that air traffic in the United Kingdom will double by 2030, at which time it will have more effect on global warming than automobiles. The call for a 10-fold increase in biomass says nothing about effects of monocultures, deforestation, genetic engineering or pesticide usage.
Those approaches left out of the big enviro plan for EE share something: they are common sense low tech or no tech solutions which involve reducing the quantity of production and energy use with no decrease in the quality of life. They have something else in common: they do not involve the swelling of corporate profits via increased manufacture.
When is energy efficiency not efficient?
Almost as much as solar and wind power, EE is becoming the unquestioned mantra of solutions to global warming. Refrigerators that use 75% less energy are a plus. Even better would be the German-designed Passivhaus, which is so well insulated that it has zero heating and cooling systems.
Energy efficiency is good. But projections about what it can offer sometimes border on hallucinations. This is the case with the ASES/Sierra claim that EE can offset global warming by 57%.
The first limitation on EE is the old maxim that the more parts there are to a system, the more parts there are to break. The ASES/Sierra report reads like an encyclopedia of techno-fix gadgets for buildings, cars and holes in the earth. Each item involves increased industrial interdependence. As resources come to be in short supply from exhaustion or wars or hoarding, the future is likely to see a decline in the ability to patch up interconnected systems. Becoming more dependent on them more begs for industrial breakdown.
Another factor that works against EE is the law of diminishing returns. Joseph Tainter explained that societies begin to collapse when resources are drained to meet the needs of increasing complexity. Similarly, the biggest impact of discoveries come when they are first introduced. That's when there is the greatest energy returned on energy invested. Additional refinements tend to cost more and yield less. Oil was cheap and easy to obtain when it oozed to the surface. As time goes on, oil becomes more expensive to pump, the available quantity decreases and the quality worsens. The biggest impact of drugs came with antibiotics. Now we are bombarded with ads for new drugs that cost more to research but have fewer advantages over the previous generation of drugs.
Technocrats tend to have faith in unlimited potential for EE. The truth is that we have probably seen most of the largest efficiency impacts and future changes will mainly be refinements that offer less and less improvement.
The most important difficulty for EE is the market economy, which corporate environmentalists love so much and understand so little. Corporations do not compete to make less money. They compete to increase their profits. Market forces compel each corporation to expand production as rapidly as possible. When more efficient heating is available, corporations selling it will encourage customers to turn up their thermostats and run around in their underwear in the middle of winter.
People live commuting distances from work. The automobile has lengthened that distance. Fuel-efficient cars will do nothing to affect that distance or the expanding miles of road, the loss of habitat that accompanies road construction, space for parking or energy used in manufacturing cars.
It is not hard to visualize yuppies feeling so smug about their EE apartment in New York that they buy an EE home in Phoenix, an EE condo in Chicago, a hybrid car for each city, and a helicopter modified to run on biofuels for shuttling between cities. Energy efficiency is not efficient when some individual items are more efficient but the overall quantity of items increases so much that the total mass of energy used goes up instead of down. Like it or not, that is the irredeemable compulsion of market economics.
This is not to say that EE plays no role in preventing the planet from frying. It is to say that EE must be accompanied with an intense program of conservation, economic redesign and governmental regulation. Without these, EE in a market economy is not merely worthless, but will likely result in expanded production and increased global warming.
Invasion of the techno-babblers
Anyone who has ever fought an incinerator, cement kiln or coal plant knows that you've lost the struggle if you ever let industry suck you into an argument about which pollution control device should be tacked on after toxins have been created. The only genuine solution is the easy one -- to prevent the creation of the poisons in the first place.
If someone tries to sell an incinerator or an EE system that's too complicated to understand, that could indicate it's a bad idea. Making things simple is typically the route of greatest efficiency.
A narrow focus on technology seeks to replace a gee-gaw with a doo-dad, and when that doesn't work come up with a gizmo. Techno-babble sputters forth from the belief that social problems can be solved in a quest for the ultimate gadget. Oblivious to social reasons for global warming, the ASES/Sierra report claims that whatever greenhouse gas problems remain after EE can be solved with six renewable technologies: "concentrating solar power, photovoltaics, wind power, biomass, biofuels and geothermal power." The last three [or four -- Ed.] of these are techno-babble.
"Biomass" is largely an effort to turn whatever wildlands remain on this planet to energy crop monocultures. Not surprisingly, the word "ecology" does not appear in the biomass chapter. What is surprising is the subsection on "Urban residues" which discusses the use of municipal solid waste as feedstock for heat conversion to electricity. This is a polite way of saying that environmentalists should endorse spewing incinerator poisons into city air and abandon the notion of not generating waste.
"Geothermal power" does not have such offensive associations. But less than 0.1% of geothermal energy is within three kilometers of the surface, which makes it currently recoverable. Suggesting that yet-to-be-perfected techniques of recovery might allow geothermal to provide 20% of US energy is pure speculation. It cannot be part of a serious energy strategy.
One of the more shameful chapters of the report concerns "Biofuels." It has nothing against corn ethanol. It only rejects using corn grain to produce ethanol on the basis that the 10 million gallons of ethanol which could be manufactured from U.S. corn would represent only 5% of this country's gasoline demand. It pays no attention to issues brought up the same month in a Scientific American article that (1) refining ethanol uses more energy than it produces and (2) ethanol requires "robbing food crops to make fuel." The lack of concern with either ethanol efficiency or world hunger renders the Sierra Club-endorsed report as less ecologically minded than Scientific American, the prototype of techno-hype publications.
The chapter clings to the hope that ethanol could be produced if, instead of using corn grain, "residues from corn and wheat crops" made up the feedstock. There are several problems with this "cellulose" strategy. First, as with geothermal, making ethanol from cornstalks is so highly speculative that it has no place in long-term projections. If it could be done, it would be from genetically engineering corn to make it more amenable to separating sugars from lignin. There has already been plenty of genetic contamination of foodstocks. Additional genetic engineering is exactly what agriculture does not need.
The biggest problem with cellulosic ethanol is that it assumes that soil should be nothing more than a sterile medium for growing crops and that "residue" has no part in replenishing soil. Just as the Forest Service under Bill Clinton brought us "salvage logging" based on the belief that decaying wood has no significance for forest ecosystems, Hillary Clinton might usher in the concept that decaying cornstalks have no contribution to soil ecosystems.
Those who fixate on biofuels don't seem to grasp that keeping natural fertilizers out of the soil means relying more on petrochemical fertilizers. With a straight face they are proposing to reduce oil use in cars by increasing use of oil-based fertilizers.
Hard questions/tough reality
Perpetual motion machines, biomass and biofuels will not halt species extinction caused by climate change. Again, efficiency and solar and wind power [? -- Ed.] are critical components of a sustainable society. But focusing on them diverts attention from the real issues that need to be addressed -- how to dramatically reduce energy production while improving the quality of life. This is the basis for the hard questions that corporate environmentalists avoid.
For example, the U.S. needs to reduce the number of cars on the road by at least 95% and make sure the few that are manufactured are hybrids. How can the U.S. economy be reorganized so that auto workers and refinery workers have jobs comparable to jobs that they now have?
Many poor countries depend on destructive industries such as oil. How can the world economy be reorganized so they increase their standard of living while altering what they produce?
It is well known that greenhouse gas reduction requires population reduction, which can best be accomplished by reducing the gap between rich and poor and achieving equality for women. How do we reverse the right-wing pattern of increasing disparity?
The global economy is increasing production of high-energy goods such as roads, cars, airplanes, fast food, meat and endless mountains of consumer crap. How do we change this to production of low-energy goods that people actually need, such as locally grown organic food, preventive health care and clothes and homes that endure?
The creation of artificial wants for new objects is exploding like genetically engineered diseases in a bio-defense lab. How do we convince big enviro that it is not "sacrifice" or "deprivation" to focus on manufacturing items that people actually need and will last?
We all want to believe that our checks to the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy do some good in the long run and that they are just a little slow to do the right thing. The tough reality is that big enviro is doing bad things that lead in the wrong direction.
The most basic task for stopping global warming is having a moral, ethical and spiritual revolution based on the belief that excessive crap is bad. Reduction of unnecessary production is the antithesis of what corporations are all about. However destructive it is for the planet, corporations must seek to convince people to consume more and more.
Enter big enviro telling people that excessive consumption is not bad at all because it gives the consumer the ability to affect change with purchasing power. The erudite techno-magician waves his wand, uttering "Don't look at the mounds of discarded junk that go into landfills. Look over here at the fabulous eco-gadgets of our corporate friends."
Big enviro may be doing more to preserve the ethos of self-devouring consumerism than big corporations could ever do. What a surprise to learn that the Sierra Club has a history of obtaining funds from Chemical Bank, ARCO and British Petroleum. Big enviro just may deliver to big oil what it most needs -- faith that a market economy can protect the planet.
Karl Marx once said something to the effect that if there were only two capitalists left, they would compete to see which would sell the rope to hang the other one. A modern version might be that if the planet was so roasted that only two big enviro groups remained, they would compete to see which could get a grant from big oil to show that what was left of the world could be saved by consumer choices.
Don Fitz is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is sent to members of The Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at fitzdon@aol.com.
Sources
Heinberg, R. The party's over. New Society Publishers, 2003.
Kutscher, C.F. (Ed.) Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential Carbon Emissions Reduction from Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030. American Solar Energy Society, 2007. www.ases.org/climatechange.
Monbiot, G. Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. South End Press, 2007.
Sierra Club, Renewable energy experts unveil report. Sierra club press release, January 31, 2007. Contact Josh Dorner, josh.dorner@sierraclub.org.
Tainter, J. The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Tokar, B., Earth for Sale. South End Press, 1997.
Wald, M.L. Is ethanol for the long haul? Scientific American. January 2007.
Sources
Heinberg, R. The party's over. New Society Publishers, 2003.
Kutscher, C.F. (Ed.) Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential Carbon Emissions Reduction from Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030. American Solar Energy Society, 2007. www.ases.org/climatechange.
Monbiot, G. Heat: How to stop the planet from burning. South End Press, 2007.
Sierra Club, Renewable energy experts unveil report. Sierra club press release, January 31, 2007. Contact Josh Dorner, josh.dorner@sierraclub.org.
Tainter, J. The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Tokar, B., Earth for Sale. South End Press, 1997.
Wald, M.L. Is ethanol for the long haul? Scientific American. January 2007.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
May 26, 2007
"Shadow flicker home 'G'"
This opinion piece (click on the title of this post) chillingly conveys the bureaucratic disregard of people's lives for political convenience and self-regard. It also reminds people that if they stand by as homes 'A' through 'G' are made unlivable, their neighborhood may well be next.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, human rights
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, human rights
May 25, 2007
Bernie and the snowmobilers
As Vermont Public Radio reported this morning, "Independent" Bernie Sanders and the U.S. Senate Environmental Committee is looking into the impact of global warming on skiing and snowmobiling in Vermont.
What they did not look into is the impact of skiing and snowmobiling on global warming.
One snowmobile, for example, spews as much greenhouse gases in a few hours as an average automobile does over 100,000 miles.
Sanders said (predictably) that "global warming is the challenge of the time" and that if it's not addressed quickly, future generations will not have the same outside beauty to enjoy [as if that's possible with snowmobiles around].
If that's the case, then the demise of recreational snowmobiling can only be helpful. Snowmobilers are not the victims of global warming. They are part of the cause.
environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism
What they did not look into is the impact of skiing and snowmobiling on global warming.
One snowmobile, for example, spews as much greenhouse gases in a few hours as an average automobile does over 100,000 miles.
Sanders said (predictably) that "global warming is the challenge of the time" and that if it's not addressed quickly, future generations will not have the same outside beauty to enjoy [as if that's possible with snowmobiles around].
If that's the case, then the demise of recreational snowmobiling can only be helpful. Snowmobilers are not the victims of global warming. They are part of the cause.
environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism
May 19, 2007
Climate, Class, and Claptrap
Garret Keizer has written a powerful "Notebook" piece for the June Harper's Magazine. Every sentence is gold. Buy the magazine and read it. Here is but one excerpt.
If I sound bitter it is partly because I have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new carbon-trading world order in the New England villages where I have lived, taught, and buried the dead for close to thirty years, and where any egress from one's house now risks collision with an eco-fluent carpetbagger. Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial "wind farm," ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance. So far only one of the towns affected has "volunteered" -- in much the same way and for most of the same reasons as our children volunteer for service in Iraq -- to be the site of what might be described as a vast environmentalist grotto of 400-foot-high spinning "crosses" before which the state's green progressives will be able to genuflect and receive absolution before zooming back to their prodigiously wired lives.
[Read more here.]
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont
If I sound bitter it is partly because I have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new carbon-trading world order in the New England villages where I have lived, taught, and buried the dead for close to thirty years, and where any egress from one's house now risks collision with an eco-fluent carpetbagger. Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial "wind farm," ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance. So far only one of the towns affected has "volunteered" -- in much the same way and for most of the same reasons as our children volunteer for service in Iraq -- to be the site of what might be described as a vast environmentalist grotto of 400-foot-high spinning "crosses" before which the state's green progressives will be able to genuflect and receive absolution before zooming back to their prodigiously wired lives.
[Read more here.]
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont
May 16, 2007
What Can Wind Do About Global Warming?
Tom Gray of the trade group American Wind Energy Association writes:
That's simply pathetic. Doubling the amount of wind turbines, as in the second example, only underscores the very small benefit that wind can provide even in theory.
Tom Gray pads the numbers by presenting them as the proportion of new emissions, and even for that lame figure he uses a very low estimate of emissions increase. But global warming is caused by existing emissions -- emissions not only from electricity generation and other energy consumption (e.g., for transport and heat and manufacturing), but also from animal farms and deforestation (responsible for 18% and 25%, respectively, of the human contribution to global warming worldwide). Wind's hope of saving 1.6% becomes even smaller.
Even that slim hope remains theoretical. There is no evidence that wind reduces the use of other fuels on the grid to any degree close to that corresponding to the electricity it generates. Wind is an add-on. The rest of the grid still has to provide power to people when they need it, with the extra burden of balancing the unpredictable and highly variable feed from the wind.
Industrial-scale wind has proved only to be a successful tax-avoidance division for big energy companies and a lucrative means of moving massive amounts of public monies into private bank accounts. Through the selling of fragments of its green mantle (i.e., "renewable energy credits"), it lets other companies and individuals join the self-serving charade. Not surprisingly, however, it has not been shown to reduce carbon emissions. In the fight against global warming, it is a boondoggle, distracting us from real solutions while destroying landscapes, communities, wildlife habitat, and people's lives -- for nothing.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
The following information is from a fact sheet we will be releasing soon.According to data compiled in the International Atomic Energy Association's Energy and Environment Data Reference Bank, The U.S. CO2 emissions from energy = c. 6,000 Mt = c. 6,600 million tons, of which 130 million tons is less than 2%. That's less than 2% of today's emissions, but emissions could be 20% higher by 2020 (according to projections by the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy). The "savings" from wind would then be close to only 1.6% -- accomplished with the sprawling and destructive construction of 71,000 megawatts of giant wind turbines, along with their supporting roads and clearance and transmission lines. And at a cost, three-quarters of which is paid by public subsidies, of 142 billion dollars.
How much can wind really do to fight global warming?
On average, every additional megawatt-hour produced by wind energy means 1,220 pounds of CO2 are not emitted into our environment.
# A recent study from the National Academies of Science (NAS) reports that adding another 60 gigawatts (GW) of wind energy by 2020, in addition to the 11 GW that we have today, could avoid approximately 130 million tons of CO2 in 2020. This is nearly 30% of expected emission increases by 2020 in the electric sector.
# A National Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) of 20% renewable generation by 2020 could avoid almost 100% of expected emission increases in the electric sector with 180 GW of renewable energy, including 130 GW of wind.
That's simply pathetic. Doubling the amount of wind turbines, as in the second example, only underscores the very small benefit that wind can provide even in theory.
Tom Gray pads the numbers by presenting them as the proportion of new emissions, and even for that lame figure he uses a very low estimate of emissions increase. But global warming is caused by existing emissions -- emissions not only from electricity generation and other energy consumption (e.g., for transport and heat and manufacturing), but also from animal farms and deforestation (responsible for 18% and 25%, respectively, of the human contribution to global warming worldwide). Wind's hope of saving 1.6% becomes even smaller.
Even that slim hope remains theoretical. There is no evidence that wind reduces the use of other fuels on the grid to any degree close to that corresponding to the electricity it generates. Wind is an add-on. The rest of the grid still has to provide power to people when they need it, with the extra burden of balancing the unpredictable and highly variable feed from the wind.
Industrial-scale wind has proved only to be a successful tax-avoidance division for big energy companies and a lucrative means of moving massive amounts of public monies into private bank accounts. Through the selling of fragments of its green mantle (i.e., "renewable energy credits"), it lets other companies and individuals join the self-serving charade. Not surprisingly, however, it has not been shown to reduce carbon emissions. In the fight against global warming, it is a boondoggle, distracting us from real solutions while destroying landscapes, communities, wildlife habitat, and people's lives -- for nothing.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
May 15, 2007
Debate about wind energy breaks into the main stream
World News Tonight (ABC), May 6, 2007: "Blow Back from Neighbors Over Wind Farms"
Living On Earth (NPR), week of May 11, 2007: "Wind vs. Wildlife": Wind energy is clean, but is it green if windmills chop up birds and bats? The country's top science panel says government agencies should take the environmental impacts of wind power more seriously.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights
Living On Earth (NPR), week of May 11, 2007: "Wind vs. Wildlife": Wind energy is clean, but is it green if windmills chop up birds and bats? The country's top science panel says government agencies should take the environmental impacts of wind power more seriously.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights
May 9, 2007
National Wind Watch comments on National Academies report on impacts of wind energy
Press release:
Rowe, Mass., May 9, 2007 -- On May 3, 2007, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies of Science released its report on the "Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects". The report states:
Because the use of wind energy has some adverse impacts, the conclusion that a wind-energy installation has net environmental benefits requires the conclusion that all of its adverse effects are less than the adverse effects of the generation that it displaces.
Such official analysis is exactly what has been missing in the careless push for wind energy, according to National Wind Watch (NWW), a coalition of individuals and action groups fighting inappropriate wind energy development in the U.S. and around the world.
Although commending the recognition of negative impacts, which neighbors and many observers have long been attesting to, NWW notes the report includes nine references from the main American industry trade group, three from the British, and three from the Danish. These are not cited as examples of how the industry self-protectively spins information but rather as reliable information about impacts. That not only calls into question some of the report's assessment of the extent of adverse impacts, it also illustrates the hurdles that people who defend wildlife, the landscape, and their homes still have to overcome.
The usual line from wind promoters is that the problems that wind energy solves are much worse than any that wind energy itself causes, e.g., more birds would die if wind turbines were not built (because of climate change caused by fossil fuels). But the argument is stacked. Neither part of it has been rigorously examined -- neither the premise that wind energy on the grid brings significant benefits, nor the assumption that its negative impacts on the environment, communities, and individual lives are anything but minimal. Only citizens' groups such as those associated with National Wind Watch have dared to demand accountability in the heedless industry and government push to develop wind.
It is welcome that the NRC report, although it glosses over the many adverse impacts of industrial wind development, nonetheless recognizes the need for studying them. NWW hopes that this quasi-official report will start to turn around the studious dismissal of increasingly obvious and significant problems.
Examination of wind's claims of benefit also need a hard look. With more than a decade of experience in Denmark and Germany, it is absurd to still cite carbon reductions according to industry theory instead of actual experience. We need to know the documented effect of wind (a highly variable and intermittent nondispatchable energy source) on emissions on the grid.
The report unquestioningly repeats the sales claim that the average annual output from wind is 30% of its capacity, even though the reality is quite different. According to figures from the 2007 Annual Energy Outlook of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Information Agency (IEA), the output in 2005 was only 21% of capacity.
As to effects on wildlife, although it acknowledges that impacts are poorly studied the report repeats the cant that the slaughter of raptors at Altamont Pass in California is an aberration and mostly due to older turbines -- an obviously dubious claim. Deaths are mounting with every new facility. The first-year study (by a company-picked firm) of the 120-turbine "Maple Ridge" facility in northern New York estimated that 3,000 to 6,000 birds and bats were killed there last year.
The report also determines that the toll on bats is only a problem in the mid-Atlantic, which is the only place where it's been well documented. But just two days before the NRC report was released, Michael Daulton of the National Audubon Society testified before the U.S. House Natural Resources Wildlife Subcommittee that bats in Missouri are attracted to wind turbines. Merlin Tuttle, president of Bat Conservation International, has stated, "We're finding kills even [by] the most remote turbines out in the middle of prairies, where bats don't feed."
Donald Fry, director of the Pesticides and Birds Program, American Bird Conservancy, testified also on May 1, 2007, to the U.S. House Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans Subcommittee:
The wind energy industry has been constructing and operating wind projects for almost 25 years with little state and federal oversight. They have rejected as either too costly or unproven techniques recommended by [the National Wind Coordinating Committee] to reduce bird deaths. The wind industry ignores the expertise of state energy staff and the knowledgeable advice of Fish and Wildlife Service employees on ways to reduce or avoid bird and wildlife impacts. ... The mortality at wind farms is significant, because many of the species most impacted are already in decline, and all sources of mortality contribute to the continuing decline.
Finally, concerning human impacts the report is regrettably vague in both its findings and its recommendations. Wind turbines are giant industrial installations, and here again, just as with birds and bats, the assumption is backwards. Of course there are adverse impacts. As Wendy Todd, who lives 2,600 feet from the new wind energy facility on Mars Hill, Maine, testified to her state legislature on April 30, 2007: "Noise is the largest problem but shadow flicker and strobe effect are close behind. ... Some find that it makes them dizzy and disoriented; others find that it can cause headaches and nausea." Although this report is perhaps the first quasi-official study to acknowledge that fact, it still puts the burden of proof on the wrong people.
Before we destroy another landscape, natural habitat, community, or individual human life, governments at every level, conservation groups, and environmentalists need to seriously assess the claims made to promote and defend industrial wind energy development.
National Wind Watch information and contacts are available at www.wind-watch.org.
May 4, 2007
Fools or Liars: the sham of "100% wind"
They are either fooling themselves or lying to their customers. Hardly a week goes by without another prominent company announcing that it is suddenly "100% wind powered." Some of the companies that make the transparently ridiculous claim are Frontier Co-op and its divisions Simply Organic and Aura Cacia ("we're 100% green powered"), Tom's of Maine ("100% of our electricity consumption is powered by wind energy"), Aveda ("manufacturing with 100% certified windpower"), and Co-op America.
Like every otherwise socially conscious event, politician, and rock band that is also playing this game, all of these companies are getting the same electricity -- and paying for it -- as before. They are not buying wind energy. They are buying "renewable energy credits" (RECs), or "green tags," in addition to their regular electricity.
RECs are only the environmental packaging of the desired power. They were invented by Enron so they could sell the same energy twice. Just as they helped enrich that famously corrupt company, RECs still provide substantial gravy on a scheme for moving public funds into private bank accounts that rivals Halliburton's purchase of the U.S. presidency to start its own wars.
The fact is that RECs are free money for the likes of General Electric (the purchaser of Enron Wind), Florida Power & Light, Babcock & Brown, J.P. Morgan Chase, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, and other energy and investment giants. Not only is three-quarters of the capital costs of a wind energy facility paid for by taxpayers, not only do governments force utilities to by it, but otherwise socially and environmentally conscious people willingly give the companies even more to offset their guilt for using electricity.
They still use all that electricity, of course, but somehow they convince themselves and their customers that buying certificates for their walls is the same as not using all that electricity, or as using someone else's electricity (which that someone else pays for and uses, too).
Like the whole idea of "offsets" that allow consumers to continue consuming the same as ever -- like medieval indulgences to allow sin and enrich the church -- RECs are an obvious fraud. But when they support wind energy, they are also irresponsible.
Not only is wind energy of doubtful value in reducing the use of other fuels, it represents a massive industrialization of rural and wild places -- a heedless destruction of landscapes, the environment, and animals' (including peoples') lives. All for very little, if any, measurable benefit.
Not only are they wrong to claim they are "wind powered," industrial wind energy is incompatible with the social and environmental values that these companies claim and otherwise commendably put into practice. Let them know:
Like every otherwise socially conscious event, politician, and rock band that is also playing this game, all of these companies are getting the same electricity -- and paying for it -- as before. They are not buying wind energy. They are buying "renewable energy credits" (RECs), or "green tags," in addition to their regular electricity.
RECs are only the environmental packaging of the desired power. They were invented by Enron so they could sell the same energy twice. Just as they helped enrich that famously corrupt company, RECs still provide substantial gravy on a scheme for moving public funds into private bank accounts that rivals Halliburton's purchase of the U.S. presidency to start its own wars.
The fact is that RECs are free money for the likes of General Electric (the purchaser of Enron Wind), Florida Power & Light, Babcock & Brown, J.P. Morgan Chase, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, and other energy and investment giants. Not only is three-quarters of the capital costs of a wind energy facility paid for by taxpayers, not only do governments force utilities to by it, but otherwise socially and environmentally conscious people willingly give the companies even more to offset their guilt for using electricity.
They still use all that electricity, of course, but somehow they convince themselves and their customers that buying certificates for their walls is the same as not using all that electricity, or as using someone else's electricity (which that someone else pays for and uses, too).
Like the whole idea of "offsets" that allow consumers to continue consuming the same as ever -- like medieval indulgences to allow sin and enrich the church -- RECs are an obvious fraud. But when they support wind energy, they are also irresponsible.
Not only is wind energy of doubtful value in reducing the use of other fuels, it represents a massive industrialization of rural and wild places -- a heedless destruction of landscapes, the environment, and animals' (including peoples') lives. All for very little, if any, measurable benefit.
Not only are they wrong to claim they are "wind powered," industrial wind energy is incompatible with the social and environmental values that these companies claim and otherwise commendably put into practice. Let them know:
- Frontier Co-op (Simply Organic, Aura Cacia)
- customercare@frontiercoop.com, 1-800-669-3275
- Tom's of Maine
- Susan Dewhirst, Media & Public Relations Leader
sdewhirst@tomsofmaine.com, 1-800-367-8667 - Aveda
- 1-800-644-4831, www.aveda.com/contactus/contactus.tmpl
May 3, 2007
Impacts of industrial wind
The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science today released an examination of industrial wind energy in the U.S. They want $66 for it, but PDFs are available from Endangered Species and Wetland Report and the appendices along with lower-resolution PDFs (smaller downloads) of the rest of the report from Virginia Wind.
The report is important in acknowledging the serious negative impacts of industrial wind energy development and recognizing that a proper weighing of the benefits against those adverse effects must be done. On the other hand, it perpetuates the assumption that the benefits are exactly as the industry presents them to be.
The report calls for greater study of the impacts on wildlife, the environment, and people, but unfortunately it does not call for greater study of the actual rather than the theoretical effects of wind on carbon emissions from other fuels.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights
The report is important in acknowledging the serious negative impacts of industrial wind energy development and recognizing that a proper weighing of the benefits against those adverse effects must be done. On the other hand, it perpetuates the assumption that the benefits are exactly as the industry presents them to be.
The report calls for greater study of the impacts on wildlife, the environment, and people, but unfortunately it does not call for greater study of the actual rather than the theoretical effects of wind on carbon emissions from other fuels.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights
April 29, 2007
No choice between birds and wind energy
In the Winter 2007 issue of Bird Scope from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, John Fitzpatrick recalls the old water-pumping windmills in the Minnesota prairies of his childhood and writes,
He also repeats the fallacy that the lower rpm of modern wind turbines makes them safer for birds. The rpm is lower because the rotor blades are so much longer -- a diameter of almost 300 feet (the length of a football field!) is now typical. At the tips, the blades are slicing through the air at 150-200 mph.
Instead of calling for post-installation studies to count the corpses, he should call for for a moratorium until thorough studies to determine the actual benefits of large-scale wind are done. The fact is, the evidence from Denmark is that there are little, if any, benefits to be weighed against the inevitable deaths.
Another article in the same issue describes a new effort to study the effects of man-made noise on whales. In addition to oil and gas drilling the pulsating vibrations from off-shore giant wind turbines ought to be a concern as well.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights
Even by the 1950s these inexpensive water pumps already were being eclipsed by the national power grid, which brought reliable energy to farmhouses and electric pumps even on windless days.He then goes on to extoll the expansion of modern industrial-scale wind turbines, ignoring the obvious that he already stated: They don't provide reliable energy. They therefore won't affect carbon emissions or coal-burning. And therefore Fitzgerald's effort to balance the toll on birds and bats is delusional.
He also repeats the fallacy that the lower rpm of modern wind turbines makes them safer for birds. The rpm is lower because the rotor blades are so much longer -- a diameter of almost 300 feet (the length of a football field!) is now typical. At the tips, the blades are slicing through the air at 150-200 mph.
Instead of calling for post-installation studies to count the corpses, he should call for for a moratorium until thorough studies to determine the actual benefits of large-scale wind are done. The fact is, the evidence from Denmark is that there are little, if any, benefits to be weighed against the inevitable deaths.
Another article in the same issue describes a new effort to study the effects of man-made noise on whales. In addition to oil and gas drilling the pulsating vibrations from off-shore giant wind turbines ought to be a concern as well.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights
April 25, 2007
"The walls of brass contract around us"
The wind-farming industry's mechanization of great tracts of countryside is a profound tragedy, whether or not it is necessitated by the onset of global warming. Like any other extractive industry, mining the wind produces spoil heaps; in them lie foregone landscapes of fenced-off hillsides, closed paths, culverted steams, plant life bulldozed aside. This is a sudden additional encroachment of the machine world on the natural world. Ever increasingly, the old, wild, weird places become inaccessible except to the imagination. And now the sea is not inviolable. The desert isle becomes a factory in which the wind itself, no longer the spirit of freedom, is condemned to drudge like Caliban. Experience and the imagination can no longer accompany one another on the voyage to Ogygia, and both suffer and decline, the latter starved of sensory detail, the former chilled by its own indifference.
--Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, 2006
(thanks to Angela Kelly of Country Guardian)
April 21, 2007
Corpse-eating at Seven Days
Suzanne "I want meat" Podhaizer, the food writer for Burlington weekly Seven Days, chose for this week's "Animal Issue" to highlight pasture-fed "beef."
While the rest of the newspaper looks at caring for, rescuing, and protecting animals both domestic and wild, Podhaizer explores the question of whether muscles cut out of dead cows who were not fattened on grain but grazed and exercised more naturally in pastures are indeed tastier.
Chip Morgan, owner of Wood Creek Farm Beef, "where the farmers process 400 head of Angus and Hereford cattle each year," sez: "We think that animals raised in a natural environment are healthier, happier and taste better."
According to Podhaizer, "Morgan describes Wood Creek as if it were a spa for steaks of the future." She irrelevantly notes that "the lucky animals get to enjoy views of the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain with their dinners." Perhaps she envied their happy lives, where "a healthy diet and lots of movement are key."
But what about being slaughtered and having her body parts drooled over and judged by other food writers? Podhaizer appears to have missed that part of the story. The Wood Creek Farm will be featured on next week's "Regeneration" show on VPT. I have a feeling they will not follow the whole process any more than Podhaizer did.
Although Morgan is to be commended for not polluting the land and waterways as much as he could, the end result is the same as on the filthiest feed lot. The animals are slaughtered (the "head" of "cattle" are "processed"). These intelligent animals are raised for a single cruel purpose: to be killed and their corpses rended and eaten.
Yet that crucial step to what Podhaizer finds so tasty is never described, let alone photographed or filmed, to enlighten readers and viewers.
tags: Vermont, ecoanarchism, animal rights, vegetarianism
While the rest of the newspaper looks at caring for, rescuing, and protecting animals both domestic and wild, Podhaizer explores the question of whether muscles cut out of dead cows who were not fattened on grain but grazed and exercised more naturally in pastures are indeed tastier.
Chip Morgan, owner of Wood Creek Farm Beef, "where the farmers process 400 head of Angus and Hereford cattle each year," sez: "We think that animals raised in a natural environment are healthier, happier and taste better."
According to Podhaizer, "Morgan describes Wood Creek as if it were a spa for steaks of the future." She irrelevantly notes that "the lucky animals get to enjoy views of the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain with their dinners." Perhaps she envied their happy lives, where "a healthy diet and lots of movement are key."
But what about being slaughtered and having her body parts drooled over and judged by other food writers? Podhaizer appears to have missed that part of the story. The Wood Creek Farm will be featured on next week's "Regeneration" show on VPT. I have a feeling they will not follow the whole process any more than Podhaizer did.
Although Morgan is to be commended for not polluting the land and waterways as much as he could, the end result is the same as on the filthiest feed lot. The animals are slaughtered (the "head" of "cattle" are "processed"). These intelligent animals are raised for a single cruel purpose: to be killed and their corpses rended and eaten.
Yet that crucial step to what Podhaizer finds so tasty is never described, let alone photographed or filmed, to enlighten readers and viewers.
tags: Vermont, ecoanarchism, animal rights, vegetarianism
April 20, 2007
Coming up in the Vermont legislature: impeachment and IRV
Impeach Bush and Cheney, already! In a surprise move, the Vermont Senate voted early Friday morning to request that U.S. Representative Peter Welch begin impeachment proceedings against the would-be emperor and his cardinal. It should be noted that there was almost no debate. It was raised. It was passed. So much for the claim from House Speaker Gaye "Simple" Symington that there's not enough time for it.
The same resolution is planned to be raised in the House by David Zuckerman, who graciously let Peter Welch run uncontested for last year. Welch ran a strongly anti-war campaign but has since voted in support of the Iraq occupation. Acting to remove the people who illegally invaded Iraq and are responsible for the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis might redeem that pathetic vote.
So, Vermonters! Write or call your house members! The list of their addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses is at www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/districts.cfm?Body=H.
And in the Senate, a bill to institute instant runoff voting (IRV) for U.S. House and Senate races will be voted on next week. So write or call your senators to vote for that, too: www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/districts.cfm?Body=S. Read about IRV and other election reforms that would move us more towards democracy at www.kirbymountain.com/rosenlake/electionreform.html.
In other legislative business, auto racers want to be exempt from the ban on the MTBE additive for gasoline. And the Progressive Party thinks it might be valid consideration. In other words, although they recognize how dangerous a pollutant MTBE is, they would shoot a huge hole in the ban on it:
"The question for Progressives is weighing the environmental concerns versus penalizing an activity who's fans are mostly working families."
It was "mostly working families" who once enjoyed occasionally lynching individuals of other working families who happened to be of African or Jewish descent (or "flatlander," maybe). And it's "mostly working families" who are poisoned by industrial chemicals that are allowed for the pleasure of a few money-making entities. How patronizing and bogus this question is! As if working families can't have environmental concerns, too. As if the activity in question is threatened by the ban on MTBE!
Vermont
The same resolution is planned to be raised in the House by David Zuckerman, who graciously let Peter Welch run uncontested for last year. Welch ran a strongly anti-war campaign but has since voted in support of the Iraq occupation. Acting to remove the people who illegally invaded Iraq and are responsible for the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis might redeem that pathetic vote.
So, Vermonters! Write or call your house members! The list of their addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses is at www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/districts.cfm?Body=H.
And in the Senate, a bill to institute instant runoff voting (IRV) for U.S. House and Senate races will be voted on next week. So write or call your senators to vote for that, too: www.leg.state.vt.us/legdir/districts.cfm?Body=S. Read about IRV and other election reforms that would move us more towards democracy at www.kirbymountain.com/rosenlake/electionreform.html.
In other legislative business, auto racers want to be exempt from the ban on the MTBE additive for gasoline. And the Progressive Party thinks it might be valid consideration. In other words, although they recognize how dangerous a pollutant MTBE is, they would shoot a huge hole in the ban on it:
"The question for Progressives is weighing the environmental concerns versus penalizing an activity who's fans are mostly working families."
It was "mostly working families" who once enjoyed occasionally lynching individuals of other working families who happened to be of African or Jewish descent (or "flatlander," maybe). And it's "mostly working families" who are poisoned by industrial chemicals that are allowed for the pleasure of a few money-making entities. How patronizing and bogus this question is! As if working families can't have environmental concerns, too. As if the activity in question is threatened by the ban on MTBE!
Vermont
April 19, 2007
Maori landscape saved from industrial wind development
Press Release from The Maori Party (New Zealand), via National Wind Watch (also see related news story):
The Maori Party has today welcomed the findings of the Environment Court in ruling against the erection of 37 turbines along Te Waka Range skyline on the Napier-Taupo Road.
“The site of the Te Waka –Titiohanga-Maungaharuru range is a distinctive feature of the Hawkes Bay” said Maori Party Co-leader, Dr Pita Sharples. “It creates an unique skyline which has great value as a landform, as a recreation resource, and a milestone landmark”.
“I am sure that the Prime Minister, as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage would appreciate how landscapes of such exquisite beauty, feed the soul and nourish the spirit” said Dr Sharples.
“Importantly, it is also of great significance to the peoples of Ngati Tukuru of Ngati Kahungunu” said Dr Sharples. “The Maungahururu Ridge recalls the journey of the Takitimu Canoe, is a navigation aid, and a traditional source of kereru (wood pigeon).
“The naming of ‘Te Waka’ reflects its appearance as the shape of the waka on the skyline” added Dr Sharples. “There are values and stories associated with this landscape which our people hold great meaning by”.
“The land is also of special value to the Hineuru people of Tuwharetoa, the descendants of whom still occupy this land” said Dr Sharples.
“We are pleased that the relationship Ngati Kahungunu and Tuwharetoa have with their ancestral lands, waahi tapu and other taonga has been acknowledged in this decision”
The Maori Party is also pleased that the Environment Court has recognised the national importance of protecting outstanding natural features and landscapes (as required by Section 6 of the Resource Management Act 1991).
“Judge Thompson has carefully considered the adverse effects of the visual pollution that would dominate the Te Waka landscape and balanced this, and the important ancestral beliefs of mana whenua, alongside the benefits of establishing alternative energy sources” said Dr Sharples.
“These landscapes are of importance to all New Zealanders” said Dr Sharples.
“While we must all do what we can to look at renewable energy resources, the Environment Court has, on balance, respected the views of Ngati Kahungunu and Tuwharetoa, the advice of landscape specialists, and the local Hawkes Bay community in reaching their decision”.
Dr Pita Sharples, Co-leader, Maori Party
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights
The Maori Party has today welcomed the findings of the Environment Court in ruling against the erection of 37 turbines along Te Waka Range skyline on the Napier-Taupo Road.
“The site of the Te Waka –Titiohanga-Maungaharuru range is a distinctive feature of the Hawkes Bay” said Maori Party Co-leader, Dr Pita Sharples. “It creates an unique skyline which has great value as a landform, as a recreation resource, and a milestone landmark”.
“I am sure that the Prime Minister, as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage would appreciate how landscapes of such exquisite beauty, feed the soul and nourish the spirit” said Dr Sharples.
“Importantly, it is also of great significance to the peoples of Ngati Tukuru of Ngati Kahungunu” said Dr Sharples. “The Maungahururu Ridge recalls the journey of the Takitimu Canoe, is a navigation aid, and a traditional source of kereru (wood pigeon).
“The naming of ‘Te Waka’ reflects its appearance as the shape of the waka on the skyline” added Dr Sharples. “There are values and stories associated with this landscape which our people hold great meaning by”.
“The land is also of special value to the Hineuru people of Tuwharetoa, the descendants of whom still occupy this land” said Dr Sharples.
“We are pleased that the relationship Ngati Kahungunu and Tuwharetoa have with their ancestral lands, waahi tapu and other taonga has been acknowledged in this decision”
The Maori Party is also pleased that the Environment Court has recognised the national importance of protecting outstanding natural features and landscapes (as required by Section 6 of the Resource Management Act 1991).
“Judge Thompson has carefully considered the adverse effects of the visual pollution that would dominate the Te Waka landscape and balanced this, and the important ancestral beliefs of mana whenua, alongside the benefits of establishing alternative energy sources” said Dr Sharples.
“These landscapes are of importance to all New Zealanders” said Dr Sharples.
“While we must all do what we can to look at renewable energy resources, the Environment Court has, on balance, respected the views of Ngati Kahungunu and Tuwharetoa, the advice of landscape specialists, and the local Hawkes Bay community in reaching their decision”.
Dr Pita Sharples, Co-leader, Maori Party
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights
April 18, 2007
Resistance is Never Futile
By Jason Hribal, Counterpunch, April 17 (click on the title of this post for the complete essay):
Whether from the thoughts of the owners or the print of the media, the language used to describe these "escapes" (their term) is most illuminating: "captured," "fugitive," "amnesty," "outlaw," "criminal." These words, in reality, reflect a hidden truth -- a truth that is only exposed when actions are taken by other animals against human domination. In other words, when the curtain is pulled back, our fellow creatures emerge as active beings -- each of whom has the ability to shape the world around them. Agency is not unique to the human animal. Cows, pigs, monkeys, and elephants can also resist their exploitation. Over the centuries, humans have learned to deal with this.
Farmers, ranchers, factory owners, and managers have tried a multiplicity of methods to deter or prevent escapes. Wooden-post fences were erected. Cows leapt over them or crawled under them. Taller, stronger metal fences were developed. Cows found their weak points and busted through them. Barbs were put on the wire to cause pain. A few cows still got over them. The wire was then electrified to cause even more pain.
Humans have used tethers, clogs, and yokes to lessen movement. They have used bull-whips, bull-hooks, and electrified cattle-prods to scar and frighten. They have cut tendons, pulled out teeth, blinded eyes, ringed noses, and muzzled mouths to punish. They have castrated testicles, removed ovaries, and chopped off horns to control aggressiveness. These techniques are not called "breaking" because their targets are mindless, spiritless machines. Quite to the contrary, they are deemed as such because turning autonomous, intelligent beings into obedient, productive workers is difficult.
If these methods failed, humans employed specialized bounty-hunters. They constructed pounds for the detained. Local, state, and federal laws were written. Fines and penalties were levied. The death penalty has always been the final option for those chronic troublemakers. FEMA itself has detailed strategies on how to deal with animal escapes. For this form of resistance can have serious consequences for owners, businesses, and governments. The run-away macaque from Davis, CA, for example, almost brought about the closure of the entire research center. The Tamworth two incited spot inspections and steep fines for the Wiltshire slaughterhouse. But more than bad press and possible loss in profits, these escapes can produce a public awareness of exploitation and resistance. This combination of struggle and recognition then ultimately forces such industries -- their operators, executives, scientists, and engineers -- to adopt animal-welfare legislation and practices.
anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism
Whether from the thoughts of the owners or the print of the media, the language used to describe these "escapes" (their term) is most illuminating: "captured," "fugitive," "amnesty," "outlaw," "criminal." These words, in reality, reflect a hidden truth -- a truth that is only exposed when actions are taken by other animals against human domination. In other words, when the curtain is pulled back, our fellow creatures emerge as active beings -- each of whom has the ability to shape the world around them. Agency is not unique to the human animal. Cows, pigs, monkeys, and elephants can also resist their exploitation. Over the centuries, humans have learned to deal with this.
Farmers, ranchers, factory owners, and managers have tried a multiplicity of methods to deter or prevent escapes. Wooden-post fences were erected. Cows leapt over them or crawled under them. Taller, stronger metal fences were developed. Cows found their weak points and busted through them. Barbs were put on the wire to cause pain. A few cows still got over them. The wire was then electrified to cause even more pain.
Humans have used tethers, clogs, and yokes to lessen movement. They have used bull-whips, bull-hooks, and electrified cattle-prods to scar and frighten. They have cut tendons, pulled out teeth, blinded eyes, ringed noses, and muzzled mouths to punish. They have castrated testicles, removed ovaries, and chopped off horns to control aggressiveness. These techniques are not called "breaking" because their targets are mindless, spiritless machines. Quite to the contrary, they are deemed as such because turning autonomous, intelligent beings into obedient, productive workers is difficult.
If these methods failed, humans employed specialized bounty-hunters. They constructed pounds for the detained. Local, state, and federal laws were written. Fines and penalties were levied. The death penalty has always been the final option for those chronic troublemakers. FEMA itself has detailed strategies on how to deal with animal escapes. For this form of resistance can have serious consequences for owners, businesses, and governments. The run-away macaque from Davis, CA, for example, almost brought about the closure of the entire research center. The Tamworth two incited spot inspections and steep fines for the Wiltshire slaughterhouse. But more than bad press and possible loss in profits, these escapes can produce a public awareness of exploitation and resistance. This combination of struggle and recognition then ultimately forces such industries -- their operators, executives, scientists, and engineers -- to adopt animal-welfare legislation and practices.
anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism
April 16, 2007
Denmark vs. Finland
Here's an interesting comparison.
Denmark and Finland have nearly identical populations (in number, that is) -- 5.4 million in Denmark and 5.3 million in Finland. Finland uses about 50% more total energy than Denmark and generates twice as much and uses 2.5 times more electricity.
Denmark generates 20% of their electricity from wind, and Finland generates almost none from wind.
Yet, according to the IAEA, their CO2 emissions from energy are virtually the same.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
Denmark and Finland have nearly identical populations (in number, that is) -- 5.4 million in Denmark and 5.3 million in Finland. Finland uses about 50% more total energy than Denmark and generates twice as much and uses 2.5 times more electricity.
Denmark generates 20% of their electricity from wind, and Finland generates almost none from wind.
Yet, according to the IAEA, their CO2 emissions from energy are virtually the same.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
The power of greenwash
To the Editor, New York Times Magazine:
Thomas Friedman, in his enthusiasm for "green" industry ["The Power of Green," April 15], forgets that there are other impacts to be considered along with carbon emissions. Nuclear's shortcomings are well known [waste, uranium supply, radioactivity, warming rivers, WMDs]. The proposal to use a sixth of our croplands (or mow down more rainforests) to fuel our cars with ethanol raises obvious questions. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs contain toxic mercury. Replacing coal with natural gas would add another source of volatile geopolitics to that of oil. The new infrastructure that Friedman envisions would industrialize more of our landscape without any suggestion that old infrastructure would be replaced.
[As part of his unwillingness to give up any part of "our way of life," Friedman barely mentions conservation, reviving rail travel, or decentralizing our shopping and work setups, and, like Scolow and Pacala, he completely ignores the raising of animals for meat and milk, responsible for 18% of manmade greenhouse gases, according to the U.N. -- more than transport.]
And large-scale wind turbines -- now commonly over 400 feet tall, with blades nearly 300 feet across, in arrays of a dozen up to hundreds -- are already destroying rural and wild landscapes: fragmenting and degrading valuable wildlife habitat, threatening populations of bats and birds, and wrecking the lives of people who have to live with their intrusive thumping and shadow flicker.
It is no surprise that George W. Bush made Texas a leader in wind energy. His friend Ken Lay's Enron had bought Zond Wind (subsequently bought by GE) and together they gamed the system to make big wind profitable without having to prove its usefulness. Theirs is the model still followed by other states. It is not an example of environmental leadership, but of a boondoggle and environmental debacle that does little, if anything, to move us away from carbon and other environmental and political problems.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism
Thomas Friedman, in his enthusiasm for "green" industry ["The Power of Green," April 15], forgets that there are other impacts to be considered along with carbon emissions. Nuclear's shortcomings are well known [waste, uranium supply, radioactivity, warming rivers, WMDs]. The proposal to use a sixth of our croplands (or mow down more rainforests) to fuel our cars with ethanol raises obvious questions. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs contain toxic mercury. Replacing coal with natural gas would add another source of volatile geopolitics to that of oil. The new infrastructure that Friedman envisions would industrialize more of our landscape without any suggestion that old infrastructure would be replaced.
[As part of his unwillingness to give up any part of "our way of life," Friedman barely mentions conservation, reviving rail travel, or decentralizing our shopping and work setups, and, like Scolow and Pacala, he completely ignores the raising of animals for meat and milk, responsible for 18% of manmade greenhouse gases, according to the U.N. -- more than transport.]
And large-scale wind turbines -- now commonly over 400 feet tall, with blades nearly 300 feet across, in arrays of a dozen up to hundreds -- are already destroying rural and wild landscapes: fragmenting and degrading valuable wildlife habitat, threatening populations of bats and birds, and wrecking the lives of people who have to live with their intrusive thumping and shadow flicker.
It is no surprise that George W. Bush made Texas a leader in wind energy. His friend Ken Lay's Enron had bought Zond Wind (subsequently bought by GE) and together they gamed the system to make big wind profitable without having to prove its usefulness. Theirs is the model still followed by other states. It is not an example of environmental leadership, but of a boondoggle and environmental debacle that does little, if anything, to move us away from carbon and other environmental and political problems.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism
April 7, 2007
The gap between the blades
A story from this week's Billings (Mt.) Outpost (click the title of this post), brought to our attention by the News Watch service of National Wind Watch, describes the problem that wind brings to the grid, namely, the need for NEW backup power. This is the same case described in an earlier post, a unique situation where the utility is actually stuck with the wind energy rather than just shunting it off into the larger grid where its effects are minimal.
Who will spark the gap?
With the standby power necessary to smooth the erratic output of Montana's premier wind power facility becoming difficult to come by at any price, the state's energy technocracy wonders.
The Judith Gap wind farm is an impressive operation. According to the company that runs it, Invenergy, its 90 turbines stretch 400 feet into the Big Sky when the blades are fully extended, and each one produces enough electricity to power 300 homes. It's a showcase project in Montana's move toward renewable energy.
Yet the cluster of dynamos itself faces a looming power shortage.
To integrate the Gap's green electrons into the area's power delivery system, a back-up source of power is required. When the wind isn't blowing, the power that is scheduled to come from the farm has to come from somewhere else.
All forms of large-scale power generation need other sources of power to help them stay in sync with the demand for electricity or the "load" as the pros call it. Those sources are sometimes called "regulating reserve." NWE had some trouble matching the wind to the load during Judith Gap's first year of operation, an activity that Mr. Fine described as "chasing the wind."
From moment to moment, government regulations require that supply stays within 90 percent of demand, or the utility is considered to be out of compliance. If the company stays out of compliance for too long, fines result.
Before Judith Gap, NWE had never been out of compliance. In 2006 the company violated the standard repeatedly, NWE officials told the PSC. In order to stabilize its lines, the company added another 25 megawatts of reserve power to the 30 megawatts that it traditionally required, PSC Vice Chairman Doug Mood said. The cost of reserve power is passed on to ratepayers.
NWE has the situation under control for now, but at the end of the year one of the primary contracts for that back-up juice will end, and so far NorthWestern hasn't found a new outlet to plug into, company and PSC officials have said.
Public Service Commissioner Brad Molnar, R-Laurel, has noted that with other wind projects in the region coming online, firming power might become impossible to obtain. If that leads to crippling fines for line instability, the Judith Gap facility might have to shut down, he said. ...
Gov. Brian Schweitzer added that energy costs from the wind project are competitive with new coal plants.
"Here are the numbers," the governor said. After one year of operation the Judith Gap project was producing power at $41.63 per megawatt. The wind portion of that was $32 per Mw. That was put together with natural gas from Butte to get $41.63. The new coal plant in Hardin came in at $44 per Mw, and the proposed Great Falls plant will produce power at $48, the governor said.
"Those are the facts," he said. "That's NorthWestern Energy's numbers. It may be that some people don't have all the facts."
The governor was comparing apples and oranges, Mr. Molnar said. The power generated at Judith Gap could not be matched to the load. It was not "dispatchable, curtailable or reliable," meaning that the wind power couldn't be used to back up other sources of power and can't easily be reduced to match demand.
The governor's remarks were "just the usual blather," he said.
Forty percent of the power produced at Judith Gap has been sold into the Idaho system at a loss, because there was no market for it here, Mr. Molnar said. "Why would you pay $42 for a waste product when you can buy usable product for $46?" ...
As back-up power resources get scarcer and more expensive, the company has had to look at building its own, [NWE Communications Director Claudia Rapkoch] said. ... Will Rosquist, a rate analyst for the PSC, concurred that NWE would have to provide its own ancillary power if the third party market dried up. Failure to do so was not an option. ...
wind power, wind energy
Who will spark the gap?
With the standby power necessary to smooth the erratic output of Montana's premier wind power facility becoming difficult to come by at any price, the state's energy technocracy wonders.
The Judith Gap wind farm is an impressive operation. According to the company that runs it, Invenergy, its 90 turbines stretch 400 feet into the Big Sky when the blades are fully extended, and each one produces enough electricity to power 300 homes. It's a showcase project in Montana's move toward renewable energy.
Yet the cluster of dynamos itself faces a looming power shortage.
To integrate the Gap's green electrons into the area's power delivery system, a back-up source of power is required. When the wind isn't blowing, the power that is scheduled to come from the farm has to come from somewhere else.
All forms of large-scale power generation need other sources of power to help them stay in sync with the demand for electricity or the "load" as the pros call it. Those sources are sometimes called "regulating reserve." NWE had some trouble matching the wind to the load during Judith Gap's first year of operation, an activity that Mr. Fine described as "chasing the wind."
From moment to moment, government regulations require that supply stays within 90 percent of demand, or the utility is considered to be out of compliance. If the company stays out of compliance for too long, fines result.
Before Judith Gap, NWE had never been out of compliance. In 2006 the company violated the standard repeatedly, NWE officials told the PSC. In order to stabilize its lines, the company added another 25 megawatts of reserve power to the 30 megawatts that it traditionally required, PSC Vice Chairman Doug Mood said. The cost of reserve power is passed on to ratepayers.
NWE has the situation under control for now, but at the end of the year one of the primary contracts for that back-up juice will end, and so far NorthWestern hasn't found a new outlet to plug into, company and PSC officials have said.
Public Service Commissioner Brad Molnar, R-Laurel, has noted that with other wind projects in the region coming online, firming power might become impossible to obtain. If that leads to crippling fines for line instability, the Judith Gap facility might have to shut down, he said. ...
Gov. Brian Schweitzer added that energy costs from the wind project are competitive with new coal plants.
"Here are the numbers," the governor said. After one year of operation the Judith Gap project was producing power at $41.63 per megawatt. The wind portion of that was $32 per Mw. That was put together with natural gas from Butte to get $41.63. The new coal plant in Hardin came in at $44 per Mw, and the proposed Great Falls plant will produce power at $48, the governor said.
"Those are the facts," he said. "That's NorthWestern Energy's numbers. It may be that some people don't have all the facts."
The governor was comparing apples and oranges, Mr. Molnar said. The power generated at Judith Gap could not be matched to the load. It was not "dispatchable, curtailable or reliable," meaning that the wind power couldn't be used to back up other sources of power and can't easily be reduced to match demand.
The governor's remarks were "just the usual blather," he said.
Forty percent of the power produced at Judith Gap has been sold into the Idaho system at a loss, because there was no market for it here, Mr. Molnar said. "Why would you pay $42 for a waste product when you can buy usable product for $46?" ...
As back-up power resources get scarcer and more expensive, the company has had to look at building its own, [NWE Communications Director Claudia Rapkoch] said. ... Will Rosquist, a rate analyst for the PSC, concurred that NWE would have to provide its own ancillary power if the third party market dried up. Failure to do so was not an option. ...
wind power, wind energy
The courage of compromise
David Sirota has written a widely published patronizing apology for the "anti-war" Democrats who voted to fully fund the occupation of Iraq for another year and a half.
First, he praises the protesters for reminding the Democrats that they had to package their vote to continue the war vote as a vote to end the war.
Then he instructs them that passable bills in the legislature are rarely perfect, so they should stop complaining because they succeeded in getting plenty of lip service.
Sirota, however, is the one who needs to stop complaining. We know that legislators have to make compromising decisions, that they must deal with the possible not the perfect. If they thus lack the courage of conviction, they should at least stand by their courage to compromise. Instead, they lie. They tell us that a bill to continue full funding of the war is a bill to end the war.
And the compromising on this issue has hardly begun. Bad money drives out good, and the good is already being shunted out of the room. What will Sirota say about a final bill that no longer even pretends to urge the end of the illegal occupation of Iraq? Or if a bill passes with a suggested or mandated end date and magically withstands a veto, what will he say when the occupation is still going as disastrously "strong" as ever when that date goes by?
What does he say every day, as another hundred Iraqis and a few more Americans are killed while the Democrats bask in their heroic compromises?
Actually, we know what he does and will say: "That's why we need to elect more Democrats," who, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are supposed to believe actually care what we think.
The choice of "anti-war" Democrats to support the continued funding of this death policy is a clear betrayal of all conviction. They do not deserve our gratitude or admiration and certainly not our votes.
P.S. Peter Freyne, in Burlington's Seven Days this week, quotes (approvingly!) Vermont's now pro-war congressman, Peter Welch: "The question is, are you going to make the unattainable perfect be the enemy of the barely achievable good?" Don't count your chickens, Peters W. and F. -- we have yet to see even the slightest "good" and are unlikely to see it in another 18 months of illegal occupation. Only more death. That's what your "serious" yes vote was for.
First, he praises the protesters for reminding the Democrats that they had to package their vote to continue the war vote as a vote to end the war.
Then he instructs them that passable bills in the legislature are rarely perfect, so they should stop complaining because they succeeded in getting plenty of lip service.
Sirota, however, is the one who needs to stop complaining. We know that legislators have to make compromising decisions, that they must deal with the possible not the perfect. If they thus lack the courage of conviction, they should at least stand by their courage to compromise. Instead, they lie. They tell us that a bill to continue full funding of the war is a bill to end the war.
And the compromising on this issue has hardly begun. Bad money drives out good, and the good is already being shunted out of the room. What will Sirota say about a final bill that no longer even pretends to urge the end of the illegal occupation of Iraq? Or if a bill passes with a suggested or mandated end date and magically withstands a veto, what will he say when the occupation is still going as disastrously "strong" as ever when that date goes by?
What does he say every day, as another hundred Iraqis and a few more Americans are killed while the Democrats bask in their heroic compromises?
Actually, we know what he does and will say: "That's why we need to elect more Democrats," who, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are supposed to believe actually care what we think.
The choice of "anti-war" Democrats to support the continued funding of this death policy is a clear betrayal of all conviction. They do not deserve our gratitude or admiration and certainly not our votes.
P.S. Peter Freyne, in Burlington's Seven Days this week, quotes (approvingly!) Vermont's now pro-war congressman, Peter Welch: "The question is, are you going to make the unattainable perfect be the enemy of the barely achievable good?" Don't count your chickens, Peters W. and F. -- we have yet to see even the slightest "good" and are unlikely to see it in another 18 months of illegal occupation. Only more death. That's what your "serious" yes vote was for.
April 1, 2007
Two-thirds backup for one-third power from wind
An interesting bit of data was found in a news article (click the title of this post) about the costs of the "successful" wind energy facility in Judith Gap, Montana.
To make it work, the utility has to buy 90 MW of "firming" power. The Judith Gap facility has a nameplate capacity of 135 MW. As with all wind turbines, because the power generation varies with the wind, the average output over a year is likely less than 45 MW.
So to get an average of 45 MW from wind, the utility is buying 90 MW from other sources that it didn't have to before.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
To make it work, the utility has to buy 90 MW of "firming" power. The Judith Gap facility has a nameplate capacity of 135 MW. As with all wind turbines, because the power generation varies with the wind, the average output over a year is likely less than 45 MW.
So to get an average of 45 MW from wind, the utility is buying 90 MW from other sources that it didn't have to before.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
March 29, 2007
Wind Energy in the Third World
It has just been announced that Energias de Portugal (EDP) is buying Horizon Wind Energy from Goldman Sachs (for $2.15 billion, twice what Goldman Sachs paid for it less than 2 years ago). This follows the purchase of Community Energy and PPM Energy (the latter through its purchase of Scottish Power) by Spanish energy giant Iberdrola.
Other foreign companies active in U.S. wind energy development include Ireland's Airtricity, Spain's Gamesa and Naturener, Australia's Babcock & Brown, Electricité de France (via Enxco), Nedpower of The Netherlands, Shell, BP, and the various UPC Wind companies funded by European investors through Italian parent UPC Group.
Beyond the fact that prospects for wind energy expansion are drying up in Europe while subsidies in the U.S. can cover up to 75% of the cost of erecting a wind energy facility, might there be another reason for so much foreign investment in wind energy?
Spain's Iberdrola is also erecting wind turbines in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca. Spanish regulators have ruled that the electricity produced there can be applied towards Spain's Kyoto (and now E.U.) obligations. That's because Mexico is exempt from the Kyoto accord.
The U.S. has not signed on to the Kyoto accord and has not established similar requirements. As in Mexico, might the foreign owners of wind energy facilities in the U.S. be intending to claim the "renewable energy credits" for their own countries?
Thus, all that industrialization of rural and wild landscapes, the fragmentation and degradation of natural habitat, the destruction of wildlife, and the wrecking of people's peaceful enjoyment of their homes would not even serve to meet the goals of expanded renewable energy established in many states.
This ineffective tokenism is also seen in the misdirected effort of renewable portfolio standards. The goal, as with the Kyoto accord, is to reduce emissions from fossil fuels. But the requirement is only to add non-carbon sources of electricity (and ignoring transport, heating, and industry uses of fossil fuels).
If the goal is indeed to reduce emissions, then that should be the requirement.
Spain will not be reducing its carbon emissions by building giant turbines in Mexico. Yet they will nonetheless be credited for doing so, based only on the production from those turbines without any proof of a corresponding reduction of fossil fuels even in Mexico, let alone in Spain.
It appears that much of the U.S. has become a third-world country as well, ripe for exploitation by global capitalists as well as our own "developers."
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism, human rights
Other foreign companies active in U.S. wind energy development include Ireland's Airtricity, Spain's Gamesa and Naturener, Australia's Babcock & Brown, Electricité de France (via Enxco), Nedpower of The Netherlands, Shell, BP, and the various UPC Wind companies funded by European investors through Italian parent UPC Group.
Beyond the fact that prospects for wind energy expansion are drying up in Europe while subsidies in the U.S. can cover up to 75% of the cost of erecting a wind energy facility, might there be another reason for so much foreign investment in wind energy?
Spain's Iberdrola is also erecting wind turbines in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca. Spanish regulators have ruled that the electricity produced there can be applied towards Spain's Kyoto (and now E.U.) obligations. That's because Mexico is exempt from the Kyoto accord.
The U.S. has not signed on to the Kyoto accord and has not established similar requirements. As in Mexico, might the foreign owners of wind energy facilities in the U.S. be intending to claim the "renewable energy credits" for their own countries?
Thus, all that industrialization of rural and wild landscapes, the fragmentation and degradation of natural habitat, the destruction of wildlife, and the wrecking of people's peaceful enjoyment of their homes would not even serve to meet the goals of expanded renewable energy established in many states.
This ineffective tokenism is also seen in the misdirected effort of renewable portfolio standards. The goal, as with the Kyoto accord, is to reduce emissions from fossil fuels. But the requirement is only to add non-carbon sources of electricity (and ignoring transport, heating, and industry uses of fossil fuels).
If the goal is indeed to reduce emissions, then that should be the requirement.
Spain will not be reducing its carbon emissions by building giant turbines in Mexico. Yet they will nonetheless be credited for doing so, based only on the production from those turbines without any proof of a corresponding reduction of fossil fuels even in Mexico, let alone in Spain.
It appears that much of the U.S. has become a third-world country as well, ripe for exploitation by global capitalists as well as our own "developers."
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism, human rights
Oil is for transport and heating, not electricity
Farnham Woods comments on an idiotic article in yesterday's Salon:
Only about 3% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from oil, and that's mostly from sludge left over after refining.
Mandelstam keeps talking about the newness of wind on the grid but also notes that Europe has 15 years of experience with it. That experience is notably missing from this article. Europe is still using fossil fuels at the same rate as ever. Germany, the world's leader in wind capacity, has 26 new coal plants planned. Denmark, the per-capita leader, hasn't put up a new turbine since 2004. In Spain, with the third largest wind plant, energy giant Iberdrola is moving much of its investment to North America. Wind has proven to be a dead end. It has proven to be an expensive, destructive boondoggle.
Also missing from this article is any hint that opposition is not limited to the rich protecting their ocean views. In fact, there are hundreds of opposition groups around the world, many of them in poor rural communities, protecting the only thing of value they have -- peace and quiet -- from sprawling industrial plants. Opposition includes indigenous communities in Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and India -- all fighting not a "green alternative" but the same predatory developers they have always had to fight.
Finally, the claim that birds are not threatened by "modern" turbines is belied by the continuing fact of their deaths. The Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society in New York recently acquired the draft report of the first-year study of bird and bat deaths at the 120-turbine facility in Lewis County. The company-sponsored survey estimated that at least 3,000 to 6,000 birds and bats were killed by the turbines last year. The rpm of the turbine blades is indeed lower, but they now sweep a vertical area of 1 to 2 acres with tip speeds of 150-200 mph. And the much higher towers put them into the paths of many more migrating birds.
Nobody questions the obvious problems with coal. But no matter how many giant wind turbines we build, it will unfortunately not reduce our use of coal one lump.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights
Only about 3% of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from oil, and that's mostly from sludge left over after refining.
Mandelstam keeps talking about the newness of wind on the grid but also notes that Europe has 15 years of experience with it. That experience is notably missing from this article. Europe is still using fossil fuels at the same rate as ever. Germany, the world's leader in wind capacity, has 26 new coal plants planned. Denmark, the per-capita leader, hasn't put up a new turbine since 2004. In Spain, with the third largest wind plant, energy giant Iberdrola is moving much of its investment to North America. Wind has proven to be a dead end. It has proven to be an expensive, destructive boondoggle.
Also missing from this article is any hint that opposition is not limited to the rich protecting their ocean views. In fact, there are hundreds of opposition groups around the world, many of them in poor rural communities, protecting the only thing of value they have -- peace and quiet -- from sprawling industrial plants. Opposition includes indigenous communities in Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and India -- all fighting not a "green alternative" but the same predatory developers they have always had to fight.
Finally, the claim that birds are not threatened by "modern" turbines is belied by the continuing fact of their deaths. The Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society in New York recently acquired the draft report of the first-year study of bird and bat deaths at the 120-turbine facility in Lewis County. The company-sponsored survey estimated that at least 3,000 to 6,000 birds and bats were killed by the turbines last year. The rpm of the turbine blades is indeed lower, but they now sweep a vertical area of 1 to 2 acres with tip speeds of 150-200 mph. And the much higher towers put them into the paths of many more migrating birds.
Nobody questions the obvious problems with coal. But no matter how many giant wind turbines we build, it will unfortunately not reduce our use of coal one lump.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights
March 28, 2007
Against the Giants in Oaxaca
Al Giordano wrote in the Feb. 9, 2006, Narco News:
This is not about windmills, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos thundered on Monday morning across this windswept plain. "It is about giants."
The greedy grab for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the narrowest stretch of land in Mexico -- is a mega-project by Capital and State that does not stop at windmills. It also includes new highways and oil pipelines connecting the ports on both oceans, an expanded hydroelectric dam in Jalapa del Marques along the way, tourist Meccas to replace small fishing communities between Salina Cruz and Huatulco and a new zone for maquiladoras -- those cheap-labor mills that generate power not from wind but from human muscle and bone along the US-Mexican border -- that will exploit the poverty of the workers that the mega-developments displace from their lands and the natural resources they cultivate.
And so it is to this breezy plain that Zapatista "Delegate Zero" came on Monday morning to harness the wind that only human hands, and not machines, can tap: that of rebellion. "You are not alone," he told yet more communities of fighting (read: still human) people throughout the Isthmus. In La Venta's town square he said, "We will fight with you against these windmills."
Nancy Davies wrote on Mar. 28:
... here's the article I've been predicting: "Teachers and APPO and communal land owners announce the boycott of Venta II," accompanied in action by other organizations including The Front of the People of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land. President Felipe Calderon and Governor Ulises Ruiz are inaugurating the construction of the new wind farm to generate electricity, owned by a Spanish transnational, on Wednesday March 28 (see the video newsreel, The Windmills of Capitalism). About two hundred hectares of communal land and about nine sub-municipalities of Juchitán are in dispute. The wind farm is seen as a basic part of the development of the Plan Puebla Panama, and infringes on the autonomy of the indigenous residents of the area. The area is protected, according to Noticias, by a circle of military soldiers.
Ninety-eight wind generators already operate with a supposed capacity of 83.3 megawatts. In the second stage the transnational company, Iberdrola, has invested $100 million. The World Bank has recently loaned $20 million for the development of La Venta III, which confirms that regardless of who's protesting, the project will go ahead.
On March 3 three-hundred-and-sixty men from the Federal Preventative Police, traveling in vehicles with dark windows and carrying high power weapons, evicted the communal land owners from the neighborhood Tres de Abril located within the polygon of Venta II, because they were an "obstacle to the project." Many believe that the outcry against the wind generators has more to do with the offensively low rental and a voice for the people whose land has been "rented" for thirty years. The rental was reportedly carried out by agents who ignored the community assembly process and were in turn allegedly paid off handsomely by the government and/or Iberdrola.
And George Salzman wrote on Mar. 25:
"Harvard contributes to reconstructing Oaxaca" is the grand headline splashed across the Sunday, March 25, 2007 front page of Noticias, the major daily newspaper published in Oaxaca City. When I saw that announcement this morning I thought, "Oh, my God! (Never mind that I'm an atheist.) That's both good news and bad news."
The good news is that the popular struggle in Oaxaca is serious enough that it is being seen by those pre-eminent intellectual guardians of global capitalism as a potential threat to the status quo. The bad news is that Harvard University, always in the service of the super-rich, and therefore in step with (or ahead of) U.S. government plans and actions, is preparing to put its gloved but dirtied hands to work for the PAN/PRI government of Felipe Calderon and the local PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The message is clear. It's going to take more than sheer military suppression to crush the popular revolution. But it must be crushed, in the interest of global capitalism, and therefore the 'intellectual power' of Harvard University will be brought to bear in addition to the military state of siege already put in place in the city. What we can be certain of is that Harvard's intellectual prowess will not be used to uncover the fates of the people disappeared and still unaccounted for by the Federal and State armed agents or to assist in the struggle for justice and dignity for the people of Oaxaca.
Also see the press releases posted here from the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights
This is not about windmills, Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos thundered on Monday morning across this windswept plain. "It is about giants."
The greedy grab for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the narrowest stretch of land in Mexico -- is a mega-project by Capital and State that does not stop at windmills. It also includes new highways and oil pipelines connecting the ports on both oceans, an expanded hydroelectric dam in Jalapa del Marques along the way, tourist Meccas to replace small fishing communities between Salina Cruz and Huatulco and a new zone for maquiladoras -- those cheap-labor mills that generate power not from wind but from human muscle and bone along the US-Mexican border -- that will exploit the poverty of the workers that the mega-developments displace from their lands and the natural resources they cultivate.
And so it is to this breezy plain that Zapatista "Delegate Zero" came on Monday morning to harness the wind that only human hands, and not machines, can tap: that of rebellion. "You are not alone," he told yet more communities of fighting (read: still human) people throughout the Isthmus. In La Venta's town square he said, "We will fight with you against these windmills."
Nancy Davies wrote on Mar. 28:
... here's the article I've been predicting: "Teachers and APPO and communal land owners announce the boycott of Venta II," accompanied in action by other organizations including The Front of the People of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land. President Felipe Calderon and Governor Ulises Ruiz are inaugurating the construction of the new wind farm to generate electricity, owned by a Spanish transnational, on Wednesday March 28 (see the video newsreel, The Windmills of Capitalism). About two hundred hectares of communal land and about nine sub-municipalities of Juchitán are in dispute. The wind farm is seen as a basic part of the development of the Plan Puebla Panama, and infringes on the autonomy of the indigenous residents of the area. The area is protected, according to Noticias, by a circle of military soldiers.
Ninety-eight wind generators already operate with a supposed capacity of 83.3 megawatts. In the second stage the transnational company, Iberdrola, has invested $100 million. The World Bank has recently loaned $20 million for the development of La Venta III, which confirms that regardless of who's protesting, the project will go ahead.
On March 3 three-hundred-and-sixty men from the Federal Preventative Police, traveling in vehicles with dark windows and carrying high power weapons, evicted the communal land owners from the neighborhood Tres de Abril located within the polygon of Venta II, because they were an "obstacle to the project." Many believe that the outcry against the wind generators has more to do with the offensively low rental and a voice for the people whose land has been "rented" for thirty years. The rental was reportedly carried out by agents who ignored the community assembly process and were in turn allegedly paid off handsomely by the government and/or Iberdrola.
And George Salzman wrote on Mar. 25:
"Harvard contributes to reconstructing Oaxaca" is the grand headline splashed across the Sunday, March 25, 2007 front page of Noticias, the major daily newspaper published in Oaxaca City. When I saw that announcement this morning I thought, "Oh, my God! (Never mind that I'm an atheist.) That's both good news and bad news."
The good news is that the popular struggle in Oaxaca is serious enough that it is being seen by those pre-eminent intellectual guardians of global capitalism as a potential threat to the status quo. The bad news is that Harvard University, always in the service of the super-rich, and therefore in step with (or ahead of) U.S. government plans and actions, is preparing to put its gloved but dirtied hands to work for the PAN/PRI government of Felipe Calderon and the local PRI governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. The message is clear. It's going to take more than sheer military suppression to crush the popular revolution. But it must be crushed, in the interest of global capitalism, and therefore the 'intellectual power' of Harvard University will be brought to bear in addition to the military state of siege already put in place in the city. What we can be certain of is that Harvard's intellectual prowess will not be used to uncover the fates of the people disappeared and still unaccounted for by the Federal and State armed agents or to assist in the struggle for justice and dignity for the people of Oaxaca.
Also see the press releases posted here from the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, human rights
Are We Politicians or Citizens?
From Howard Zinn, writing in the May 2007 Progressive:
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.
When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.
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