Phenomenology of School

(chapter 2 of Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich, 1971, Harper & Row)

Some words become so flexible that they cease to be useful. "School" and "teaching" are such terms. Like an amoeba they fit into almost any interstice of the language. ABM will teach the Russians, IBM will teach Negro children, and the army can become the school of a nation.

The search for alternatives in education must therefore start with an agreement on what it is we mean by "schooL" This might be done in several ways. vVe could begin by listing the latent functions performed by modern school systems, such as custodial care, selection, indoctrination, and learning. We could make a client analysis and verify which of these latent functions render a service or a disservice to teachers, employers, children, parents, or the professions. We could survey the history of Western culture and the information gathered by anthropology in order to find institutions which played a role like that now performed by schooling. We could, finally, recall the many normative statements which have been made since the time of Comenius, or even since Quintilian, and discover which of these the modern school system most closely approaches. But any of these approaches would oblige us to start with certain assumptions about a relationship between school and education. To develop a language in which we can speak about school without such constant recourse to education, I have chosen to begin with something that might be called a phenomenology of public school. For this purpose I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.

1. Age

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning.

We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Mankind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas

Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century, middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children now prevails in the practice of the Church.

Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.

Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "niño." Marcos, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: "Don Ivan, I guess you're right." Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Marcos primarily as his "son," I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell the New York slum-dweller that his working son is still a "child," he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. The son of Marcos has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the New Yorker's son feels deprived.

Most people around the world, then, either do not want or cannot get modern childhood for their offspring. But it also seems that childhood is a burden to a good number of those few who are allowed it. Many of them are simply forced to go through it and are not at all happy playing the child's role. Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of inhuman conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. Neither Stephen Dedalus nor Alexander Portnoy enjoyed childhood, and neither, I suspect, did many of us like to be treated as children.

If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, "childhood" would go out of production. The youth of rich nations would be liberated from its destructiveness, and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth. The social decision to allocate educational resources preferably to those citizens who have outgrown the extraordinary learning capacity of their first four years and have not arrived at the height of their self-motivated learning will, in retrospect, probably appear as bizarre.

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.

2. Teachers and Pupils

By definition, children are pupils. The demand for the milieu of childhood creates an unlimited market for accredited teachers. School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We have all learned most of what we know outside school. Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers. Most tragically, the majority of men are taught their lesson by schools, even though they never go to school.

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, and to work without interference from a teacher. Even children who are under a teacher's care day and night are no exception to the rule. Orphans, idiots, and schoolteachers' sons learn most of what they learn outside the "educational" process planned for them. Teachers have made a poor showing in their attempts at increasing learning among the poor. Poor parents who want their children to go to school are less concerned about what they will learn than about the certificate and money they will earn. And middle-class parents commit their children to a teacher's care to keep them from learning what the poor learn on the streets. Increasingly educational research demonstrates that children learn most of what teachers pretend to teach them from peer groups, from comics, from chance observations, and above all from mere participation in the ritual of school. Teachers, more often than not, obstruct such learning of subject matters as goes on in school.

Half of the people in our world never set foot in school. They have no contact with teachers, and they are deprived of the privilege of becoming dropouts. Yet they learn quite effectively the message which school teaches: that they should have school, and more and more of it. School instructs them in their own inferiority through the tax collector who makes them pay for it, or through the demagogue who raises their expectations of it, or through their children once the latter are hooked on it. So the poor are robbed of their self-respect by subscribing to a creed that grants salvation only through the school. At least the Church gave them a chance to repent at the hour of death. School leaves them with the expectation (a counterfeit hope) that their grandchildren will make it. That expectation is of course still more learning which comes from school but not from teachers.

Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning. Bright and dull alike have always relied on rote, reading, and wit to pass their exams, motivated by the stick or by the carrot of a desired career.

Adults tend to romanticize their schooling. In retrospect, they attribute their learning to the teacher whose patience they learned to admire. But the same adults would worry about the mental health of a child who rushed home to tell them what he learned from his every teacher.

Schools create jobs for schoolteachers, no matter what their pupils learn from them.

3. Full-Time Attendance

Every month I see another list of proposals made by some U.S. industry to AID, suggesting the replacement of Latin-American "classroom practitioners" either by disciplined systems administrators or just by TV. In the United States teaching as a team enterprise of educational researchers, designers, and technicians is gaining acceptance. But, no matter whether the teacher is a schoolmarm or a team of men in white coats, and no matter whether they succeed in teaching the subject matter listed in the catalogue or whether they fail, the professional teacher creates a sacred milieu.

Uncertainty about the future of professional teaching puts the classroom into jeopardy. Were educational professionals to specialize in promoting learning, they would have to abandon a system which calls for between 750 and 1,000 gatherings a year. But of course teachers do a lot more. The institutional wisdom of schools tells parents, pupils, and educators that the teacher, if he is to teach, must exercise his authority in a sacred precinct. This is true even for teachers whose pupils spend most of their school time in a classroom without walls.

School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, preacher, and therapist.

In each of these three roles the teacher bases his authority on a different claim. The teacher-as-custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a drawn-out labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the intricate rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines.

The teacher-as-moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong, not only in school but also in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state.

The teacher-as-therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right.

The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.

Teachers are by no means the only professionals who offer therapy. Psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and job counselors, even lawyers, help their clients to decide, to develop their personalities, and to learn. Yet common sense tells the client that such professionals should abstain from imposing their opinion of what is right or wrong, or from forcing anyone to follow their advice. Schoolteachers and ministers are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience.

Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest, the teacher. The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution-church or state.

Defining children as full-time pupils permits the teacher to exercise a kind of power over their persons which is much less limited by constitutional and consuetudinal restrictions than the power wielded by the guardians of other social enclaves. Their chronological age disqualifies children from safeguards which are routine for adults in a modern asylum-madhouse, monastery, or jail.

Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless.

Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. The attendance rule makes it possible for the schoolroom to serve as a magic womb, from which the child is delivered periodically at the schoolday's and school year's completion until he is finally expelled into adult life. Neither universal extended childhood nor the smothering atmosphere of the classroom could exist without schools. Yet schools, as compulsory channels for learning, could exist without either and be more repressive and destructive than anything we have come to know. To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to reform the educational establishment, we must now focus on the hidden curriculum of schooling. We are not concerned here, directly, with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets which brands the poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing room which benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to the fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such a hidden curriculum. Even the best of teachers cannot entirely protect his pupils from it. Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds prejudice and guilt to the discrimination which a society practices against some of its members and compounds the privilege of others with a new title to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this hidden curriculum serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented consumer society for rich and poor alike.

More:
By Their Institutions You Shall Know Them
The New Alienation
Promethean Fallacy
Deschooling Society
Also:  Energy Efficiency and Consumerism

Which Side Are You On?

Eric Rosenbloom, president of National Wind Watch, replies (larger roman type) to Robert Freehling, research director of Local Power, Oakland, California (smaller italic type) ...

Subject: RE: [Fwd: rfk jr + on wind energy]
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:15:25 -0700
From: rfreeh

... Wind Watch, the principle source of anti-wind material in this thread, opposes all wind power and refuses to support any form of renewable power. See this quote from their FAQ webpage:

“What do you support?

National Wind Watch supports an open and honest debate about our energy use and the costs and benefits of all methods of generation, efficient use, and conservation. NWW supports continuing research and development of new energy sources. NWW supports the protection of rural communities and wild places threatened by fruitless industrial development. The mission of National Wind Watch is to provide the information needed for proper debate about industrial wind power, particularly that which isn't provided by government agencies or the industry and its supporters.” http://www.wind-watch.org/faq-aboutus.php

In other words the only things that Wind Watch supports are “debate” and “research and development”. They cannot name one source of renewable energy that they support, even on their own FAQ page when they ask themselves this question. On this same FAQ page, Wind Watch acknowledges climate change and the destructive character of our current energy use.

Wind Watch's mission is to provide information about industrial wind, not to endorse any other energy source, renewable or otherwise. It is true that many opponents of industrial wind are skeptical about other renewables as well. It is also true that most support decentralized solar and geothermal. But Wind Watch's mission is to serve all opponents of industrial wind, no matter their views on other forms of energy.

They are the archetype of the NIMBY organization, yet they deny that they are NIMBY’s because they don’t like the negative implication of that label. In reality, they are planet destroyers claiming the garb of being pro-environment. They twist the facts to their case, and make statements removed from the full context. For instance, they try to minimize the contribution of wind to getting rid of coal, based upon the argument that “wind power does not and cannot contribute significantly to our electricity needs.” (wind-watch.org (http://wind-watch.org/) faq page)

The negative implication of "Nimby" derives from hypocrisy in one's opposition. Wind Watch supports such "Nimby"s in their local battles, but not their suggestion that industrial wind development is more appropriate elsewhere. Wind Watch advocates for local opposition because it is more more meaningful to fight to protect your own back yard, and most opponents — because they have been compelled to learn about what will be affecting their back yards — recognize that industrial wind development is not appropriate anywhere else as well.

In other words, most opponents are indeed fighting locally — that's called civic engagement — but without the hypocrisy implied by the "Nimby" pejorative.

Similarly, it is ridiculous to call such people "planet destroyers" who are fighting, after learning and weighing the costs and benefits of industrial wind development, to protect their part of the planet from large-scale industrial development.

What they fail to mention is that they personally want to do everything in their power to insure that wind never contributes significantly to our electricity needs.

This would be a more valid criticism if we did not already have the experience of Europe to learn from. Large-scale wind, even to the extent that Denmark boasts of, has not appeared to reduce coal use. It is the nature of wind energy that ensures that it can never contribute significantly to our electricity needs.

They also do not mention that wind is by far the most successful and fastest growing source of renewable energy. And that wind is on track to become one of the world’s major sources of energy within the next two decades. And that is why it is so important for opponents of renewable energy to take down wind above all.

This year worldwide installed wind power grew past 200 Gigawatts, with about 40 Gigawatts of new wind going in every year. By 2015 the rate of installation is forecast to increase to over 80 Gigawatts per year, with cumulative capacity reaching 500 Gigawatts. Total installed wind capacity should reach one Terawatt (trillion watts) sometime in the early to mid 2020s.

News on global wind capacity: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/08/world-wind-market-record-installations-but-growth-rates-still-falling

Success in building wind turbines is not success in replacing other sources of energy. In fact, there was virtually no new coal capacity built in the U.S. for 20 years, until wind energy started to be developed in a big way. Similarly, natural gas keeps pace with wind, because it is necessary to add for dealing with wind's variability.

For scale: one Terawatt is the capacity of all the generation in the US combined, and the total world electric generation capacity is today about 4.5 Terawatts.

One Terawatt of wind will generate more electricity than all the coal plants in the US combined. Wind infrastructure has the fastest payback for embodied energy and carbon used in its construction of any energy source currently being used; and when generating electricity it consumes no fuel and emits zero carbon or other greenhouse gases. Thus, to say that hundreds of Gigawatts or a Terawatt of wind cannot contribute significantly to our electricity needs, and cannot reduce pollution and help protect the climate, is beyond absurd.

If there is already 200 GW of wind capacity installed, surely its contribution to meeting electricity demand, reducing pollution, and protecting the climate should be detectable.

I became involved with this issue in 2003 when I sought out information about what a small wind facility bordering where I lived at the time would entail. While I was concerned about the impact of such constructions on a wild ridgeline, I had no reason to be skeptical about the benefits. But I started to notice that the promises of wind were always in the future or expressed in theoretical equivalencies. There were no actual data showing benefits that justify the industrialization of any rural or wild place. There still aren't.

As comments about wind only being commercially viable due to “subsidies from taxpayers” in the form of tax credits, this is at best a half truth. The wind tax credit is about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour and it is only paid for the first ten years of a wind plant’s operation. Since wind turbines have an economic life of 20 years, this tax credit is only about 1 cent per kilowatt-hour when averaged over the life of the plant. This credit is paid for every kilowatt-hour generated, and thus is performance and value based.

Very few wind turbines last 20 years. Ten years is in fact a more realistic span for their useful life. Many don't make it that long. Besides the production tax credit, wind developers enjoy 5-year double-declining depreciation and in many places a forced market, not only of actual energy generated but also of "green tags", or renewable energy credits, a lucrative secondary market invented by Enron.

Again, however, generation of energy by a wind turbine does not necessarily translate to comparable reduction of fossil fuel use or carbon or other emissions.

This compares with solar power, which gets a 30% tax credit upfront. An investment credit established as a percentage of the initial cost of the solar plant means that the more the solar plant costs the higher the value of the tax credit. It also means that the solar plant gets the credit irrespective of how much electricity it generates. Thus, the wind power—unlike solar— has to actually earn its tax credits.

As part of the recent economic stimulus package, wind developers also have had the option of taking a 30% tax credit up front, or a 30% cash grant, instead of the 2.2-cents/kWh production tax credit.

In general, wind power tax credits are not “paid for” by taxpayers, they are simply taxes not collected by the federal government. In the case of wind, the infrastructure would mostly otherwise not get built; thus there is little or no real “revenue loss”. However, there are US congressional rules that require the credits to be offset by other adjustments to the budget.

On the other side of the balance, there will be significant tax revenues gained by the commercial activity of manufacturing, constructing and operating a wind plant. The California Energy Commission’s most recent in-depth report on cost of electricity generation shows that wind plants would pay, over the full life of the plant, about 8/10ths of a cent per kilowatt-hour in “ad valorum” expenses; i.e., property taxes. The report also shows that a wind plant will pay four times the amount of property tax per kilowatt-hour than a natural gas combined cycle baseload plant.

CEC Cost of Generation report (Table 6 on pdf p. 46 = document p. 28): http://www.energy.ca.gov/2009publications/CEC-200-2009-017/CEC-200-2009-017-SF.PDF

If wind worked, this would be a valid — and unnecessary — argument. Since wind does not show measurable benefits to the environment, and in fact shows significant adverse impacts to the environment, proponents are reduced to presenting it as a (very inefficient) works program.

The message to rural towns throughout the country, like that from any predatory capitalist in a third-world country, boils down to: "Give us your mountain/fields and we'll give you a shiny new firetruck."

The new local tax revenue from a wind plant offsets the federal tax revenue lost due to the Production Tax Credit. Thus, the federal government’s Wind Production Tax Credit helps local government raise more taxes by stimulating local economic activity in renewable energy. Other tax revenues will be created by employment and business activity of the wind plant, both direct and indirect. The result is that there is little to no net cost to taxpayers.

Again, that's no doubt what Exxon and GE and Florida Power & Light say to rationalize their nonpayment of income tax. And this critique does not consider the simple passing on to ratepayers the costs to utilities of integrating wind.

As for the ultimate NIMBY group Wind Watch’s claim that wind power is not “competitive” without tax credits, the RETI data base shows wind projects with cost of energy averaging about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour—with all tax benefits stripped away, and the CEC Cost of Generation report shows new natural gas combined cycle plants generating electricity at a levelized cost of about 12.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. If tax benefits are factored in, then the cost is lower. Both natural gas and wind power vary in cost over a wide range, and thus wind projects can generate electricity at a similar cost of energy as a new natural gas plant, when both plants are compared over their full lifecycle. It is noteworthy that the CEC’s cost estimate for natural gas power does not include any cost for carbon, and thus does not capture the externalized burden of climate change.

RETI database of potential renewable energy powerplants and cost of energy from them: http://www.energy.ca.gov/reti/documents/phase2B/CREZ_name_and_number.xls

Externalized costs are indeed important to consider. Wind has them, too, including a complete dependence on petroleum products, steel, concrete, and rare earth metals. But again, these are accounting games. Wind does not appear to measurably reduce the impacts of other sources; it just adds its own.

The email thread also points to an article and video from KATU.com in Portland citing a staffer from Bonneville Power Administration that wind does not provide any carbon benefit. Taken out of context that might seem an embarrassment for wind. However, Bonneville is quite different from most electric power providers in the US in its carbon profile, since its primary source of energy is from hydropower which has no carbon emissions. If you actually read the article it paraphrases a secondary source— Todd Wynn— from the Cascade Policy Institute who is paraphrasing a statement allegedly made to his think tank by an unspecified staffer from Bonneville. But the actual quote from Wynn is quite specific:

“So when the wind blows, the dams stop generating electricity, and when the wind stops, the dams continue to generate electricity,” said Wynn. “So, in fact, wind power is just offsetting another renewable energy source. It’s not necessarily offsetting any fossil fuel generation.” http://www.katu.com/news/local/87439577.html

In other words, zero carbon wind power is displacing zero carbon hydropower in Bonneville’s service territory. Of course, if you start with a source of power that has no carbon emissions, then adding wind will have no carbon benefit. By cherry picking such cases as Bonneville, wind can be made to look bad to those who don’t have any information to make a reasonable judgment. It would be far more valid to look at how adding wind affects carbon emissions in the US as a whole, which gets about 70 percent of its electricity from the greenhouse gas emitting sources of coal and natural gas. The US electricity supply does not look anything like Bonneville’s.

Thus, this Bonneville case is an idiotic argument against wind. Sorry, but there is no kinder word for it.

But it is a very good argument against wind in the BPA control area. And it is a good example of how the claims made for wind by its salespeople and lobbyists don't quite hold up in the real world.

There are so many misleading statements in this thread of emails and articles, that it would be very time consuming to disprove them all. I am only picking some key issues to provide a sense of the scale of misrepresentation. The most amazing, is that Marin critics of the oil, gas and coal industry would first accuse MEA and wind developers of being pro-nuclear and pro-fossil fuel, and then include a full article by Robert Bryce (see below in thread)—one of his attack pieces on wind.

Bryce throws in “everything but the kitchen sink” in his attempt to “refute” wind power, piling bits of “evidence” taken out of context, to “prove” that wind a) causes noise, b) costs too much, c) does not reduce carbon emissions, and d) kills bats and birds. Some of these have a loose connection to reality. The wind industry is not, after all, spotless, and has significant problems which we have a duty to press wind developers to address. However, several major problems caused by our current reliance on coal, nuclear and natural gas electric power- causing catastrophic climate change, killing tens of thousands of people per year from air pollution, nuclear proliferation and radioactivity, and global energy wars— are not among the problems caused by wind, to put the discussion in the correct perspective.

(Briefly, again, there is a leap from noting the problems of our current energy use to claiming wind as a solution — that is a form of both ad populum and non sequitur logical fallacies. But we are not arguing about the existing problems; we are arguing about wind's usefulness.)

The low frequency whooshing noise from the rotating blades can be a problem for some people who live near large wind turbines. The facilities should probably be generally located at a good distance from people, and especially so for those who are sensitive to this sound. On the other hand, there are many noises that people accept as part of daily life that probably do not have worse effect than wind, such as the sound of cars and trucks on freeways and streets, construction equipment, the repeated humming and buzzing of electrical appliances such as air conditioners, refrigerators and transformers, the ground shaking and squealing sounds of railroads and light rail, etc. But the one that gets singled out for major action is, of course, windmills.

It is callous to disregard the continuing reports of people suffering ill effects from wind turbine noise. Noise regulations exist — often already inadequate — for noises we have had experience with. The unique sounds generated by giant wind turbine blades moving through different layers of air at tip speeds approaching 200 mph — and their physiological and psychological effects, from loss of sleep and stress to "wind turbine syndrome" — are still being researched and are clearly not adequately regulated.

As for cost, Bryce discusses the variable price of natural gas as the “determining factor” for whether wind power is competitive. However, he is misinformed, as apparently is his favorite source for information on wind cost and aesthetics: Texas fossil fuel billionaire T. Boone Pickens. At this point in time, natural gas is not the main expense for new natural gas plants in the US. Fuel may be the big expense for legacy plants that have paid down their initial investment, but not for new plants. Natural gas fuel becomes the main expense only when power plants operate in “base load” mode—running at steady output 24/7. Coal and nuclear plants operate that way, but most natural gas plants do not. When natural gas plants operate at fractional capacity, then the major cost is not the fuel, but the power plant. And while natural gas fuel prices are relatively moderate in 2011, natural gas power plants have skyrocketed in cost. Indeed, all new conventional power plants—coal, natural gas and nuclear power, have gone up dramatically in cost over the past decade. This is reflected by the Power Capital Costs Index, which reached 219 based upon a 100 starting index in 2000, meaning that a power plant built in North America in 2011 would cost more than double what it did in the year 2000. http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/ElectricPower/6253299

A natural gas plant built today and operating at, say, only 23 percent capacity, would produce electricity at about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. This assumes the current cheap price for natural gas that Bryce proposes--$4.50 per million btu. Most modern wind plants can beat this cost of natural gas electricity—even without any tax subsidies. With tax benefits and offering lower early year prices in a escalating price contract, the first year price of wind may be as low as 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Take away the tax credit and the first year price on a similar contract might go up to 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Fixed price contracts might be 8 or 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is cheaper than any other new form of electric generation, including nuclear or coal.

Again, these are arguments as if there is a choice. Since a complete non-wind grid needs to be in place for times when the wind is not blowing sufficiently (or blowing too hard, or not in the right direction), you have to pay for both. So the comparison needs to be between wind plus gas versus gas alone.

... [Robert Bryce on Cape Wind costs] ...

Bryce’s analysis of the cost of natural gas power is closely related to his misrepresentation of the carbon benefits of wind. When modern “combined cycle” natural gas plants operate as base load—steady 24/7 at full output—they can reach efficiencies near 50%. Bryce argues that wind pulls natural gas plant out of operating as efficient base load to operating at part load to compensate for wind power. In partial or variable load, the natural gas plants may only operate at 35% or less efficiency, meaning the plant burns more fuel to generate each kilowatt-hour of electricity than when operating as a base load plant. Thus, if wind changed natural gas plant operations from base load to partial and variable load, the efficiency loss would increase fuel use and offset much of the carbon benefit of wind.

This assumes, however, that current natural gas plants generally operate in base load. That turns out to be quite incorrect for the general fleet of gas plants in the US. The vast majority of base load power in this country comes from coal and nuclear power, and to much a lesser extent from hydro and natural gas. In general, natural gas is used as a flexible resource mostly operating in partial and variable load—meaning it is already operating at lower efficiency in the vast majority of cases. This can easily be demonstrated with data about operations of US natural gas plants.

The US Government reports that as of 2009 there was 459,000 Megawatts of nameplate natural gas capacity. http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p2.html Those plants generated 920 Billion Kilowatt-hours of electricity. http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/txt/ptb0802a.html If 459,000 Megawatts of power plants operated 24/7 year round, they would generate .459 × 8760 = 4020 Billion Kilowatt-hours of electricity. In other words, natural gas plants only operated about 920/4020 = 22.8% of their capacity. That means that natural gas plants in the US overall do not typically operate in highly efficient base load, but rather operate at their least efficient mode— the same as they would do for backing up wind.

In other words, Bryce’s argument that wind power reduces the efficiency of natural gas plants is highly misleading, since natural gas plants already operate at relatively low efficiency, and in this context wind power will make relatively little difference.

But the goal is to replace coal, i.e., base load. That could be done with very efficient combined-cycle gas turbines, effectively reducing carbon emissions by three-fourths. If wind is part of that effort, then half as efficient open-cycle gas turbines would have to be used, since CCGT isn't able to respond quickly enough to wind's variability. So the question is, again, what is the carbon effect of wind plus OCGT versus CCGT alone? Many analysts have found it to be no better and in some cases worse.

This also means that Bryce’s argument for “cheap” natural gas power— based on the current low fuel price— is wrong, since the low capacity utilization of natural gas plants means that the power costs are mostly driven by the cost of the power plant, not the cost of natural gas.

Bryce brings back another round of “bait and switch” comparisons on carbon benefit of wind power. He says:

“The American Wind Energy Association insists that the wind business ‘could avoid 825 million tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030.’ (http://www.awea.org/_cs_upload/learnabout/publications/4136_1.pdf) That 825 million tons sounds like a lot. It’s not. In 2010, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 33.1 billion tons. Thus, if the US went on a wind energy binge, and installed thousands of turbines in every available location, doing so might reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by about 2.5%. And that calculation assumes that global carbon dioxide emissions will stay flat over the next two decades. They won’t.”

It is a clever trick to make 825 million tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions avoided by wind power disappear into insignificance. This is actually a double bait and switch. First, if you go to the linked article, this savings claim is NOT from the American Wind Energy Association— it is a scenario from the US Department of Energy. The scenario is that 20% of US electricity comes from wind by 2030, which is equivalent to taking 140 million cars off the road and offsetting 20% to 25% of greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. Not a trivial accomplishment. The second bait and switch is that Bryce compares the US wind scenario against global carbon reduction. This assumes that only the United States is installing wind, which is very far from the truth, and it compares apples to oranges. US wind power should be compared to US carbon emissions or you will make incorrect inferences about the result.

These criticisms are valid. But Bryce doesn't need to make 825 million tons look insignificant. That avoided CO₂ is already an imaginary projection based on theoretical equivalences, not real-world data.

Bryce goes on to the “bird and bat” argument. He cherry picks a study about bird kills at Altamont, considered by most wind experts as just about the worst case scenario for wind. Indeed, some wind advocates think that wind power should never have been developed at Altamont, as— in addition to being questionable environmentally— it is not a particularly good wind site.

Nevertheless, wind turbines do kill lots of birds and bats. Of course, so do many other things, such as power lines, buildings, cats, chemicals, and catastrophic climate change. It has been estimated that the average turbine kills about 2 to 3 birds per year. Getting all US electricity from wind would take about 1 million turbines that are 1.5 megawatts in size. That might kill about 2 to 3 million birds per year— assuming we got all of our electricity from wind, which no one expects ever to happen.

By comparison, communication towers are estimated at present to kill between 4 million and 50 million birds per year, and electric power lines may kill anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 175 million birds per year. http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr191/Asilomar/pdfs/1051-1064.pdf

And cats are estimated to kill hundreds of millions of birds per year, and more than a billion small mammals—including rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks— according to the American Bird Conservancy. http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/cats/index.html

All this is not to minimize the very real problem with birds and bats.

Actually, it obviously is meant to minimize the problem by comparisons irrelevant to the issue of wind's additional impacts.

Wind turbines do threaten certain specific species, such as raptors and certain types of bats. However, Bryce again goes out of his way to present selective data that skews the results against wind. He mentions that “In 2008, a study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency (http://www.altamontsrc.org/alt_doc/m30_apwra_monitoring_report_exec_sum.pdf) estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks – as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the MBTA – are being killed every year by the wind turbines located at Altamont Pass, California.”

True enough, but he leaves out the most important finding of the study—the new “Diablo” turbines killed between 60% and 80% less birds than the old “Non-Diablo” ones. This means that the high level of bird kills at Altamont is a mostly legacy problem that can be greatly reduced with modern wind technology. Bryce is absolutely silent on this aspect of the Altamont study. Table ES3: http://www.altamontsrc.org/alt_doc/m30_apwra_monitoring_report_exec_sum.pdf

A reduction of an appalling death rate remains unacceptable. If bird mortality were no longer a problem, then why is the AWEA fighting new Fish and Wildlife guidelines that would make them comply with migratory bird treaties and eagle protection laws? Besides the 3,500 to 5,000 raptors estimated by ecologist Shawn Smallwood being killed annually at Altamont, other facilities also continue to report thousands of bird and bat deaths, e.g., at Wolfe Island, Ontario, and Maple Ridge, New York.

This takes us back to the question about why Bryce is chasing wind with a hatchet. What is his agenda?

Bryce, in his banner energy policy book “Power Hungry”, supports a vision very different than what anti-wind environmentalists claim to believe:

“The United States has built a $14-trillion-per-year economy based on hydrocarbons: coal, oil, and natural gas. We cannot— and will not— quit using carbon-based fuels for this simple reason: they provide the power that we crave. Nine out of every ten units of energy we consume come from hydrocarbons.

Power Hungry proves that what we want isn’t energy at all— it’s power. Bryce masterfully deciphers essential terms like power density, energy density, joules, watts, and horsepower to illuminate the differences between political rhetoric and reality. Then he methodically details how the United States can lead the global transition to a cleaner, lower-carbon future by embracing the fuels of the future, a future that can be summarized as N2N: natural gas to nuclear. The United States sits atop galaxies of natural gas, enough to last a hundred years. By using that gas in parallel with new nuclear technologies, America can boost its economy while benefiting the environment.” http://www.manhattan-institute.org/power_hungry/

Bryce also hates energy efficiency, and explains why in his book:

“He goes on to eviscerate the notion that the United States wastes huge amounts of energy. Indeed, the facts show that over the past three decades the United States has been among the world’s best at reducing its energy intensity, carbon intensity, and per-capita energy use.”http://www.manhattan-institute.org/power_hungry/

In other words, Bryce opposes the entire green agenda. Bryce is a big believer in nuclear and natural gas power— explicitly. He defends these sources as cheap and necessary, and in this context attacks solar, wind and even energy efficiency. Bryce is a key policy guy at the Manhattan Institute, an institution described in Sourcewatch:

The *Manhattan Institute* (MI) is a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.

The Manhattan Institute is "focused on promoting free-market principles whose mission is to 'develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.'"

"The Manhattan Institute concerns itself with such things as 'welfare reform' (dismantling social programs), 'faith-based initiatives' (blurring the distinction between church and state), and 'education reform' (destroying public education)," Kurt Nimmo wrote October 10, 2002, in CounterPunch. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research

The Manhattan Institute, when it is not trying to destroy the environment and social programs, also likes to promote global energy wars. Perhaps its most famous contribution to public discourse was from David Frum, who left the institute to become a Bush speechwriter and coined the term “Axis of Evil”, a key concept that helped push the US into several international conflicts. The Manhattan Institute is big on “market competition”, also hard right style, which explains why it is so important to make the case that wind is dependent on welfare subsidies and “can’t compete” on the free market. Because if wind is lower cost without subsidies, Bryce and the other pro-fossil fuel and pro-nuclear folks decisively lose the battle on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Then they have to decide between dirty fuel and conservative principle.

So, if MEA and the wind developers are guilty of promoting wind and renewable energy, those who oppose wind are clearly siding with the authors of global energy wars, nuclear and fossil fuels.

Like Earth First, who have consistently recognized the predatory nature of industrial wind and led protests against construction of a facility in the mountains of Maine? Or the Zapatistas in Mexico supporting the Zapoteco farmers of the Isthmus of Tehuantapec against the theft of their land for a giant Spanish wind energy facility (the Zapotecos have written about "the imposition of neoliberal megacorporations destroying nature and our cultures")? Or the Adivasis of India, who are against being evicted from their forests so they can be mowed down for giant wind turbines? Or the diverse group of protesters camping out in northwest Denmark determined to save one of their last large forests from clearance for a giant wind turbine "test facility"? Or the anticapitalist antiwar Bread and Puppet Theater, who have been fighting big wind on Vermont's mountains? Or the established environmental advocate who lives off-grid and is leading the fight against industrial wind in Vermont?

Or do all supporters of wind power share the world view of all other supporters, such as T. Boone ("Swift Boater") Pickens; wind pioneers George W. Bush and Kenneth Lay of Enron (Bush was keynote speaker at the American Wind Energy Association convention in 2010); AWEA's own CEO, Denise Bode, former natural gas and petroleum lobbyist; anti-environment Christian fundamentalist Rick Perry; anti–environmental regulation lobbyist Frank Maisano of Bracewell-Giuliani, the spokesman for mid-Atlantic wind developers; nuclear plant builder and war profiteer GE, the country's biggest manufacturer of wind turbines (after buying Enron's wind division)? Or indeed, nuclear giant Electricité de France?

In fact, all of these supporters of wind are featured at Sourcewatch.org, and Counterpunch regularly reproduces Robert Bryce's work and has published an article by Nina Pierpont about wind turbine syndrome.

It is true that conventional energy companies are developing renewable energy projects, since many people in the energy industry see the writing on the wall. As Helen points out: “Wind developers are also oil and gas developers, they are one and the same.”

Well, the evidence shows that the opposite is true too: the wind opponents are supporters of oil, gas, coal and nuclear— they are one and the same. For, among renewable energy sources, wind is the closest to seriously challenge or displace fossil fuels in a big way. Strike down wind and you will set back renewable energy by 5 to 10 years. Of course, Bryce and Wind-Watch do not just want to get in the way of wind; their efforts also create roadblocks to other sources of renewable energy as well.

After the ad populum, non sequitur, red herring, and ad hominem efforts, now it's time for the straw man, or paper tiger. Robert Bryce does not represent all, or even most, opponents of wind. From that misrepresentation it is an unsupported leap to claim that "wind opponents are supporters of oil, gas, coal and nuclear" and "create roadblocks to other sources of renewable energy as well". Would Freehling similarly claim that opponents of big hydro are against other renewables? Rather than creating roadblocks, fighting the harm and waste of resources caused by industrial-scale wind is to the benefit of other renewables, such as decentralized small-scale vertical-axis wind. It would be more reasonable to argue that industrial wind itself has set back the cause of renewable energy with its aggressive encroachments on rural and wild land and habitats.

There is no choice about the fact that we are all— people who take pro-wind and anti-wind positions alike— enmeshed in a world controlled by conventional energy resources. But there is a big difference which side of this paradox you are on. Those who oppose wind because oil and gas interests are involved will leave us addicted to fossil and nuclear fuel, with no alternative energy source. That is not smart.

It was argued earlier that association with fossil fuel and nuclear interests adversely colored at least one writer's opposition to wind. But now it appears to be acceptable for wind proponents to consort with big energy. Clearly paradox, or real-world complexity, is allowed only for those who agree with Robert Freehling. Those with differing views must remain a caricature.

But to his final assertion, big wind is indeed big energy, and there is no sign that wind seriously threatens fossil fuels or nuclear. There is no justification for its novel impacts if it can not meaningfully diminish existing impacts from other sources of energy. At best, it might help drive the replacement of coal or even nuclear with natural gas (as required for back-up), but it would require less efficient gas turbines to be built than would be possible without wind. And then there's fracking.

To be pro-wind requires being pro–natural gas. Can we say therefore that to be pro-wind means to be pro-fracking? And to be pro-fracking is to be pro-Halliburton, and to be pro-Halliburton is to be pro-war ... (and former Halliburton division and war contractor Kellogg Brown & Root used to boast of being "in the vanguard of the development of offshore wind power in the UK" and still notes, "KBR has established itself as a key provider of services for the indispensable wind farm industry")?

Which side are you on, indeed.

~Robert

~~Eric R.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

10 short reasons to not be excited about wind power

In answer to a recent speech by Lester Brown, as reported in National Geographic's Energy Blog, a correspondent sends these 10 succinct reasons why wind power is undesirable:

1. It can not meaningfully replace more reliable sources, currently fueled by hydro, fossil fuels, or nuclear. Because wind is intermittent, highly variable, and nondispatchable, the rest of the grid must continue to operate as if it is not there. Large-scale batteries are very far from practicality and would provide only short-term mitigation of variability.

2. It can not meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. In addition to the reasons in (1), wind forces the grid to operate less efficiently, like switching from highway to city driving.

3. It requires huge machines spread over huge areas. Even "good" wind is a diffuse resource to capture.

4. It subjects rural and wild land to industrial development. For the reasons in (3), that's where the space is, and besides the turbines themselves, heavy-duty roads, transfer stations, and high-voltage transmission lines are needed.

5. It destroys, degrades, and fragments wildlife habitat. Again, This is for the reasons in (3) and (4).

6. It is a particular threat to migratory birds, raptors, and bats. These animals already use the wind, and the giant turbine blades are a direct physical danger or force the animals to detour or go elsewhere.

7. Its giant turbine blades create a disturbing thumping or deep swishing noise as they pass through different layers of air. The noises from large wind turbines make many people sick, and other animals are likely affected similarly.

8. It requires blasting on mountain ridges to create level platforms of 2-3 acres or more and wide slow-turning roads.

9. It adversely affects water headlands and runoff when built on mountain ridges. This is not only by the construction (blasting and compacting) of the roads and platforms, but also by the clearance of vegetation for them, as well as for the transfer stations and transmission lines.

10. It's ugly. Industrial wind turbines are now typically well over 400 feet tall and easily dominate the landscape, especially when the blades are turning. And a single facility consists of a lot more than 1, from dozens on mountain ridges to hundreds in the prairies, spread over miles.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

Populism Shopulism

After the 2000 election fiasco, I wrote "The election between them [Gore and Bush] came down to which brand of false populism you fall for more easily. So it is not surprising the vote was split right down the middle. ... The most corrupt candidate won [or rather literally 'took the prize']."

Huey Long (a true populist) once said, "They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."

That remains quite evidently true today, and one might add in the same spirit that the only difference between our two parties at the national level is in their campaign messages. Which lies do you prefer to believe?

Nope, no government programs for me

Percentages of government social program beneficiaries who report that they “have not used a government social program”:

529 or Coverdell:  64.3%
Home Mortgage Interest Deduction:  60.0%
Hope or Lifetime Learning Tax Credit:  59.6%
Student Loans:  53.3%
Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit:  51.7%
Earned Income Tax Credit:  47.1%
Social Security—Retirement & Survivors:  44.1%
Pell Grants:  43.1%
Unemployment Insurance:  43.0%
Veterans Benefits (other than GI Bill):  41.7%
GI Bill:  40.3%
Medicare:  39.8%
Head Start:  37.2%
Social Security Disability:  28.7%
SSI—Supplemental Security Income:  28.2%
Medicaid:  27.8%
Welfare/Public Assistance:  27.4%
Government Subsidized Housing:  27.4%
Food Stamps:  25.4%

Source: Social and Governmental Issues and Participation Study, 2008. Survey conducted by Survey Research Institute, Cornell University. Principal Investigator, Suzanne Mettler.

The Human Pretzel

"I am proud to have voted against this bill but I would have been just as proud to have voted in favor of it if my vote was needed to pass something that I am against."

—Peter Welch, U.S. Representative, Vermont

[thanks to Snarky Boy for catching this from the radio]

Vermont

No adverse wind turbine effects within 10 km radius!

Alec Salt, a researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine who has discovered interesting things about the inner ear's response to low-frequency noise, notes at Wind Concerns Ontario that reports finding no significant ill effects of wind turbines on health or property values all appear to use an cutoff of 5 or 10 kilometers or 5 miles.

It is obvious that with such a cutoff, you are guaranteed to dilute any effect by including a vastly larger number of people and property at greater distances from the wind turbines. Salt puts some hypothetical numbers to that fact, which I here adapt.

First, let us say that a wind facility is 12.6 square kilometers in area (3,105 acres), which as a circle would have a radius of 2 km.

The area within 1 km of the facility would then be the area of a 3-km-radius circle minus 12.6 km², i.e., 15.7 km².

The area would be 37.7 km² within 2 km, 66.0 km² within 5 km, and 301.6 km² within 10 km.

If we then assume that the residential density is consistent throughout these areas, it is clear that there would be 4.2 times more families within 5 km than within 1 km of the facility, and 19.2 times more within 10 km.

Particularly with health effects, where not everyone is affected or affected to the same degree, a significant proportion of affected individuals becomes minuscule in the larger pool: If, say, 10% of the people within 1 km become ill after the wind turbines begin operating (in fact, it appears that the rate is much greater), that becomes only half of one percent of the people living within 10 km (ignoring for now anybody becoming ill farther than 1 km away).

Problem solved!

Also, as a commenter to the Wind Concerns Ontario noted, the physical effects of wind turbines fall off exponentially with distance, further ensuring a dilution to insignificance with a larger distance.

In contrast, if you compare that rate of 10% within 1 km with, say, a 1% rate farther than 2 km, it is very clear that the risk of adverse health effects is increased tenfold by living within 1 km of a wind facility compared with living greater than 2 km from it. But such studies have yet to be done.

Goebbels is laughing

The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, calls his boss, Adolf Hitler, by hell-o-phone.

“Mein Führer,” he exclaims excitedly. “News from the world. It seems we were on the right track, after all. Anti-Semitism is conquering Europe!”

“Good!” the Führer says, “That will be the end of the Jews!”

“Hmmm … well … not exactly, mein Führer. It looks as though we chose the wrong Semites. Our heirs, the new Nazis, are going to annihilate the Arabs and all the other Muslims in Europe.” Then, with a chuckle, “After all, there are many more Muslims than Jews to exterminate.”

“But what about the Jews?” Hitler insists.

“You won’t believe this: the new Nazis love Israel, the Jewish State - and Israel loves them!”

... The New Anti-Semitism, by Uri Avnery (click here), describes how the new fascists have made common cause with the new zionists against the other Semites, the Arabs.

Danish Minister compares peaceful protesters to mass murderer

The Danish Minister of Integration and Development, Søren Pind, wrote on Facebook that the activists attempting to stop the cutting down of a forest to erect giant wind turbines are like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik:

Ekstremismen tager til. Flere og flere mener sig berettiget til at tage sig selv til rette. Optøjerne på Nørrebro. Kirkebesættere. Østerild. Og ekstremismens hidtil mest sataniske fjæs nu i Norge. Det er 70’erne om igen. De næste år handler om demokratiets og retsstatens klippegrund. Nok er nok. Enten er man med. Eller også imod.

Extremism is growing. More and more people see themselves entitled to take the law into their own hands. The riots in Nørrebro. Church occupiers. Østerild. And the most satanic extremism now in Norway. It's the 70s again. The next year is about democracy and the rule of law. Enough is enough. You are either with. Or against.

The Nørrebro church occupation refers to a group of rejected Iraqi asylum seekers who sought refuge in 2009 and the citizens who tried to block police from entering. Østerild refers to the citizens who for 10 days blocked the cutting down of trees in the klitplantage (dunes park) there. The Danish Nature Agency plans to clear it for the companies Vestas and Siemens to erect giant (250 m tall) "test" turbines. The blockade ended today when the number of tree-cutting machines was more than doubled and more than 50 police arrived, armed and with dogs, to clear out the activists and planning to keep guard around the clock until the first round of cutting is done.

Anders Breivik, of course, is the man who killed scores of people in Norway last Friday (July 22) in what he considered to be a strike against multiculturalism. Søren Pind, a member of the ruling right-wing Venstre party, is well known in Denmark for his own attitudes against multiculturalism. That well fits his obvious hatred of people who question their government's actionsculture.

Click here for the story in Danish.

Murðer Denmark

Cartoon by Jens Hage:

"As long as it's green — it doesn't hurt!"
"Nice mounds!"

(This is about the Danish government plan to cut down the forest in the Østerild Klitplantage (dunes park) in Thy to erect giant wind turbines for a "test center". The victim is "Mother [Mor] Denmark". The title in Danish is "Mord [Murder] Danmark". Since 2002, almost no new wind capacity on land has been erected in Denmark. From left to right are: Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Prime Minister, Ditlev Engel, Vestas President and CEO, Anders Eldrup, DONG Energy CEO, and Karen Ellemann, Environment Minister.)

(Similarly, a resident of Vermont in the USA wrote in 2005 about “blasting vermont's lovely ridgelines to ram monstrous turbine assemblies into the earth” [link])

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

Lucian Freud, 1922-2011

"Flesh and Its Discontents" by Jeffrey St. Clair

The Bourne Trilogy

The last of the three books on which these movies were based was published in February 1990. Now, thanks to Barack Obama, everything criminal in these movies is completely legal. Even so, they are superbly made thrillers. (Thanks to my son for introducing them to me.)

REMINDER

The war in Afghanistan costs only two billion dollars a week.

Going green

We use a lot of energy. This has been possible because of the energy density of fossil fuels — coal, oil, methane (natural gas). But the consequence has been a continuing decimation of the environment, not only due to extracting and burning these fuels, but also because of the massive human population they have been able to support, which simply crowds out other life, flora as well as fauna.

And now oil is running out. Obviously, extraction of the other fossil fuels also can not go on forever.

Hence the clamor for biofuels (plant-derived ethanol and diesel, even jet fuel) and renewable energy (wind and solar). We would have to ramp these up dramatically if we are to meet our future energy needs without depending on fossil fuels (or nuclear, with its own set of limitations and consequences).

But biofuels require taking crop land away from growing food, or mowing down new swathes of forest for temporarily lucrative monocultures. And the energy in the wind and sun is extremely diffuse, requiring massive plants (measured in square miles rather than acres) to collect any significant amount. Even then the sun sets each night, and the wind is intermittent and highly variable, requiring more build-up for storage and for tying together very widely separated facilities with the hope of providing some measure of steady power.

This is madness.

Just as more humans simply means fewer other species, our use of more green energy means even less for other life on the planet. At least fossil fuels aren't being used by others; "green" fuels are. The more we take, the less other lives have.

On a large scale, renewable energy is more harmful to life on earth than fossil fuels. It is madness to think that the wind and the sun can replace coal and oil and nuclear.

The only way to minimize the impacts of our energy use is to minimize our energy use.

Instead of ramping up large-scale wind and solar to meet our energy needs, we need to ramp down our energy needs to meet reality.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Wind energy's benefits always in the future

A new report commissioned by the Canadian Renewable Energy Association touts the creation of jobs in Ontario due to wind energy development — in the future, however, with little regard to the actual past record.

The language of the report's announcement in North American Windpower, July 2011, illustrates the problem: can create, in the next eight years, projected benefits, will flow, will contribute, will also boost. Not a word about jobs already created, despite an established history to draw on.

But this is typical of the wind industry in general. Even after decades of experience, it can only claim that actual benefits are still in the future.

A reality check is way past due.

wind power, wind energy

Wind energy against the world

A correspondent has informed us that the current (July 2011) issue of North American Windpower includes five articles decrying the imminent loss of subsidies and enforcement of wildlife regulations.

1. "Near-term U.S. policy incentives remain in limbo" — cover story by Allan Marks.
With several policy incentives set to expire, the wind industry is set to enter a period of great uncertainty.
With the upcoming expiration of many federal incentives for renewable energy technologies, the future of wind power projects will be left in a state of flux. By the end of 2012, several federal programs — including the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Section 1603 cash-grant program, the U.S. Department of Energy's Section 1705 loan-guarantee program and the availability of bonus depreciation — are scheduled to expire. The production tax credit and the investment tax credit for wind projects are also scheduled to expire at that time. [In fact, as far as we know all of these except the PTC expire at the end of 2011.] ... Another aspect affecting the future of wind power that is often overlooked is environmental policy. ... The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in February updated federal guidelines concerning wind energy projects, resulting in the Draft Voluntary Land-Based Wind Energy Guidelines and the Draft Eagle Conservation Plan Guidance. These draft guidelines contain more enhanced protocols for studying possible avian impacts during pre-construction and implementing mitigation measures post-construction than what were specified under the 2001 FWS interim guidelines for wind projects.

2. "It's loud and clear: '2013 needs an answer'" — by Angela Beniwal.
A group of wind industry leaders gathered at the recent Windpower 2011 conference to discuss the current state of wind development in the U.S. ... [They] agreed that the expiration of the Treasury Department's Section 1603 cash-grant program at the end of this year and the expiration of the production tax credit in 2012 are worrisome. ... Jan Blittersdorf, president and CEO of NRG Systems, said sales at her wind assessment equipment company are an indicator of where the U.S. wind market stands. ... "We well all over the world, and the markets we're selling into right now are in Asia. And, frankly, our percentage of sales in the U.S. is about as low as I've ever seen it."

3. "Policy uncertainty continues to linger" — by Mark Del Franco.
Although much of the federal policy driving wind power remains firm in the near term, there are dark clouds just over the horizon. For example, two of the primary incentives used by developers — the U.S. Treasure Department's Section 1603 cash-grant program and the production tax credit — will soon expire. ... Although the extension of either or both policy incentives would be welcome news for the industry, receiving such immediate satisfaction is unlikely. ... "There will be no extension of any wind subsidies until, at the earliest, late 2012 after the fall election, with a significant risk of no action until early 2013," says Edward Einowski, a partner at Stoel Rives. "What action will be taken will largely depend on the outcome of the election," he says, "which could range from Democrats taking back the House and gaining 60-plus seats in the Senate — in which event PTC and ITC grant extensions appear more likely — to further gains by the Republicans in both the House and Senate, in which event any extension of either the PTC or ITC grants may well be problematic."

4. "Rep. pledges policy support" — by Angela Beniwal.
During the opening session fot he Windpower 2011 conference in May, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., spoke about the need for implementing long-term energy policies that will help the wind industry fully come to scale. ... Blumenauer, a member of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, said people need to understand the importance of subsidies for the wind industry. ... But he said that transmission and integration issues must first be resolved. ... The congressman also advocated changing the regulatory process so that developing wind projects is not cumbersome. ... Blumenauer also expressed support for a national renewable electricity standard.

5. "Developers testify before Congress" (unsigned).
Land-based and offshore wind energy developers testified before Congress in June about the need for consistent and long-term federal policies to support the deployment of renewable energy, AWEA reports. The land-based wind developers also focused on rules recently proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that threaten hundreds of wind farms with years of delays and millions of dollars in costs, according to AWEA, which submitted extensive public comments on the two FWS policies of concern: the Draft Land-Based Wind Energy Guidelines and the Eagle Conservation Plan Guidance. ... James Gordon, president of Cape Wind Associates LLC, and Jim Lanard, president of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, also testified on the need for stable and longer-term federal policy support, including an extension of the ITC and extending the loan-guarantee program.

Solving the federal budget crisis.

About half of U.S. federal spending is for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Thus it would seem that savings (i.e., cuts) in those programs would contribute a great deal to balancing the budget.

Social Security and Medicare, however, are self-financed. They have nothing to do with the general budget.

On the other hand, military spending represents about half of the spending that's left after taking out Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. About a tenth of that is for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words, simply ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan would reduce the non–self-financed federal budget by about 5%. That alone is about one-quarter of the way to completely balancing the budget.

And the military budget itself is in dire need of trimming. It is about 10 times that of the next biggest military spender, China. U.S. military spending represents about 40% of the world's total, and with its closest allies accounts for up to three-quarters.

Such a pervasive military presence around the world obviously leads to resentment and resistance — and the need for more military spending. This is a vicious circle that benefits only arms manufacturers and other military contractors (who then don't even pay their fair share of taxes to help pay for it all). It is not a sustainable means of running a civilized society.

So end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and cut military spending by another 30% and the budget is balanced. And the U.S. would still be the world's biggest military spender by far. That is, we would still be safe from Canadian, Mexican, or Cuban invasion.

Destroying the world for "green" fuel

Tracy McVeigh writes in The Guardian (click the title of this post):

... The eviction of the villagers to make way for a sugar cane plantation is part of a wider land grab going on in Kenya's Tana Delta that is not only pushing people off plots they have farmed for generations, stealing their water resources and raising tribal tensions that many fear will escalate into war, but also destroying a unique wetland habitat that is home to hundreds of rare and spectacular birds.

The irony is that most of the land is being taken for allegedly environmental reasons – to allow private companies to grow water-thirsty sugar cane and jatropha for the biofuels so much in demand in the west, where green legislation, designed to ease carbon dioxide emissions, is requiring they are mixed with petrol and diesel.

The delta, one of Kenya's last wildernesses and one of the most important bird habitats in Africa, is the flood plain of the Tana river, which flows 1,014km from Mount Kenya to the Indian Ocean. ...

Vermonters for a Clean Environment

Click the title of this post to download the VCE 2011 midyear report.

Articles include:

Trouble with Snowmobiles, State Stonewalls, by Kate Scarlott and Rob MacLeod (East Hardwick)

Working Together to Save the “Nature of Vermont”, by Steve Wright (Craftsbury Common)

Why Water Quality Matters, by Paul Brouha (Sutton)

Is Anyone Listening? by Candice Shaffer (Waitsfield)

Protecting Water, by Susan Shaw (Florence)

Plus legislative and news updates.

environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Wind industry decries "delegitimization"

The industrial wind industry is a lot like the state of Israel. Both began in an idealistic spirit of creating an vibrant alternative. Both soon came to antagonize their neighbors. As uncomfortable facts about their operations became undeniable, both have retreated to an aggressive self-righteous bravado and emphasize their important economic contributions: rural jobs and nanotechnology. Both rely on demonization of an imagined enemy behind all criticism: the coal lobby or Iran. Both can only answer their critics by calling them names: Nimby, climate science denier, antisemite.

Both have delegitimized themselves. The game is over.

Sheffield wind energy plant

From the Burlington Free Press, here is a photo of the substation construction from the 16-turbine 40-megawatt Sheffield facility on ridgelines overlooking Sutton, Vermont.

tags:  wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

The Deep Green Meaning of Fukushima

Don Fitz writes at Counterpunch (click the title of this post for the entire piece):

Humanity must decrease its use of energy. The decrease must be a lot (not a little bit) and it must happen soon. A failure to do so will lay the foundation for the destruction of human life by some combination of climate change and radiation. ... There is also a deeper green meaning: The limits of economic growth have long since passed and we need to design a world with considerably less stuff. ...

Claims that society must choose between fossil fuels and nukes are 100% false

Pretending to care about climate change, utility companies say that we must have more nukes to avoid increasing CO2 levels. Hansen and Monbiot parrot corporate propaganda when they present the false dichotomy: nukes or fossil fuels.

Their tunnel vision on climate change interferes with their ability to perceive global warming and nuclear power as different manifestations of the same problem. ... The deep green connection between radiation and climate change is that they are both part of the lockstep march toward economic growth. The question for both Hansen and Monbiot is what humanity will do when uranium ore is exhausted but the drive toward growth intensifies.

Coal, oil, natural gas and uranium will run out at some time in the future. None of them can ever be the basis of a sustainable economy. The issue is not whether society will or will not have to do without non-renewables — the only issue is whether humanity will stop using them prior to destroying the biological web of Life or whether humanity is forced to stop using them, either because it takes more energy to extract them than they yield or because our descendants have lost the mental or physical ability to process them.

Solar and wind offer no alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power

In a growth economy, solar and wind cannot replace fossil fuels and/or nukes, which they must depend on for their own creation and for making up energy short-falls. As Ted Trainer and others have clearly demonstrated, solar and wind power are subject to conditions like how much sunshine and wind exist at a given time. An industry which is geometrically expanding must be drawn to fossil fuel and nukes because they are not subject to weather fluctuations and they can produce enormous quantities of energy for manufacture.

Weather variability means that solar and wind power have a greater need to store energy than non-renewables. This means solar and wind lose even more energy during storage and retrieval. They also require considerable energy and resource extraction to produce associated technologies such as transmission lines and batteries. These are not green attributes.

During the opening of his seminal exposé of renewable energy, Trainer points to turf where solar and wind proponents dare not tread: The issue is not merely whether solar and wind can provide for the industrial needs of a modern economy — it is ridiculous to suggest that they could provide energy needs of a global economy which is 60 times its current size. Trainer calculates that bringing all the world up to consumptive standards of the overdeveloped countries, maintaining a 3% annual GDP growth rate, and reaching a population of 9.4 billion would require a 6000% increase in the economy between 2007 and 2070.

The mechanical impossibility of infinite solar and wind power leads to a deeper green problem: They reflect the same fetish on things as do non-renewables. Switching from one fetish to another in no way rejects the thingification of human existence. It is this worship of objects which is the core of the problem.

Failure to challenge the endless manufacture of artificial needs and the continual shrinkage of the durability of commodities means that no combination of nukes, fossil fuel, solar, wind, and other energy sources can ever satisfy bottomless greed. Seeking to replace human caring, sharing and community with object glorification will always result in feelings of emptiness and craving for more and more objects. Object addiction can never be satiated — even if those objects are “green.”

Stan Cox notes that a huge expansion of fossil fuel use would be necessary if solar and wind were to increase enough to replace nukes. Creating this solar and wind infrastructure would result in massive emissions of CO2. Thus, in a growth economy, renewables are no more separable from non-renewables than climate change is separable from radiation.

Recent increases in solar and wind power has resulted in lawsuits to protect native lands and sensitive species. [16] How many more valleys must be transformed into ugly wind farms and how many more deserts must be covered with solar collectors just to enable landfills of discarded junk to expand to the moon?

Why grow?

The ideology of growth is the bedrock of nuclear power. Growth requires the expansion of energy. As Robert Bryce demonstrates, “America’s energy consumption has grown in direct proportion to its economic growth.” Between 1913 and 2005, the 300-fold increase in oil imports was paralleled by a 300-fold increase in US economic output.

As energy sources have gone from wood to coal to oil to nukes, there has been a steady increase in the total amount of energy available. During most of this progression economic growth has meant an expansion of goods which people need. By the end of World War II this was no longer the case as there was enough to provide basic needs for everyone.

More than ever before, production for need gave way to production for militarism, for obscene wealth, for throw-away goods and for marketing to take precedence over utility. Nuclear power became the cornerstone of both militarism and the seemingly limitless energy necessary for planned obsolescence. Nuclear plants were born as a physical manifestation of social relationships underlying growth without need. ...

Is anti-growth feasible?

“Anti-growth” means that people will have better lives if society produces fewer things that are useless and dangerous. It assumes that the total quantity of things needed to make everyone’s lives better is vastly less that the total quantity of current negative production.

“Anti-growth” can be contrasted to “de-growth,” which has become synonymous with trying to change the economy by tiptoeing through the tulips. The phrase “anti-growth” aims to dismiss two myths: (a) the belief that a decrease in production requires people to suffer; and (b) the belief that lifestyle changes can substitute for social action. (Though altering individual lifestyles is important to show that a new and different world is possible, it does little to bring about the scale of needed changes.)

The corporate line on reversing growth is that it would bring agony worse than nuclear radiation and is therefore impossible. Sadly, many progressives (including environmentalists, anti-war activists and even “Marxists”) swallow the line.

Let’s not confuse an increase in provision of basic needs like housing, clothing and education with overall economic growth. Reducing unnecessary and destructive production (such as military spending) can be done at the same time as increasing preventive medical care. Reducing the advertising of food, packaging of food, long-range transportation of food and animal protein can occur simultaneously with increasing healthy food. Nobody’s quality of life is going to deteriorate because they have a simple coffee pot that lasts for 75–100 years rather than one with a mini-computer designed to fall apart in six months.

To reiterate: The economy can shrink while the amount of necessary goods expands. Anti-growth is not too complex to fathom. The idea that we should make more good stuff and less bad stuff is so simple that anyone except an economist can understand it.

Unfortunately, many advocating a smaller economy shoot themselves in the foot by rejecting anti-corporate struggle. ...

A radical rethinking

... The survival of humanity is at not only odds with right wing politicians and “free market” economists who preach growth by engorging the rich. Human existence is simultaneously threatened by “liberal” politicians and Keynesian economists who promote growth by governmental intervention. Preserving a livable environment is likewise at odds with “environmentalists” who advocate growth via purchasing green gadgets. “Socialists” and wooden “Marxists” walk less than a shining path when they demand a planned economy for the purpose of “unleashing the capitalists fetters on production” (i.e., unlimited growth). Planetary extermination under workers’ control does not fulfill dreams of Karl Marx.

In the wake of Fukushima many scream that we must abandon nukes as rapidly as possible. Yes, yes, and yes. Join their screams and demand a halt in the production of new nukes and a rapid shut down of those that exist!

We must do the almost the same for fossil fuels, with a rapid reduction to 90% of current levels, then 80%, and so on until we level off at perhaps 10% of where we are at now. If and only if this reduction is made can solar, wind and geothermal (along with a very judicious use of fossil fuels and biofuels) meet energy needs in a sane society.

But all of us, especially environmentalists, must abandon the illusion that solar, wind and geothermal can be a source of infinite economic growth. And all of us, especially social justice activists, trade unionists and socialists, must abandon any misplaced belief that a massive reduction of energy requires any sacrifice in the quality of life. We must affirm if we change our values, change our society and change our economy, we can have great lives by focusing on people rather than the eternal accumulation of objects.

‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society

Searching for a Miracle

Post Carbon Institute & International Forum on Globalization - September 2009 [read the full report: »Download the PDF (2.61 MB)]:

Overview

This report is intended as a non-technical examination of a basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100? In the end, we are left with the disturbing conclusion that all known energy sources are subject to strict limits of one kind or another. Conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal, and nuclear are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed—but in any case they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment. And contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations. To achieve such a transition would require (1) a vast financial investment beyond society’s practical abilities, (2) a very long time—too long in practical terms—for build-out, and (3) significant sacrifices in terms of energy quality and reliability.

Perhaps the most significant limit to future energy supplies is the “net energy” factor—the requirement that energy systems yield more energy than is invested in their construction and operation. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century.We will come back to this point repeatedly.

The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

***

The world’s current energy regime is unsustainable. This is the recent, explicit conclusion of the International Energy Agency1, and it is also the substance of a wide and growing public consensus ranging across the political spectrum. One broad segment of this consensus is concerned about the climate and the other environmental impacts of society’s reliance on fossil fuels.The other is mainly troubled by questions regarding the security of future supplies of these fuels—which, as they deplete, are increasingly concentrated in only a few countries.

To say that our current energy regime is unsustainable means that it cannot continue and must therefore be replaced with something else.However, replacing the energy infrastructure of modern industrial societies will be no trivial matter. Decades have been spent building the current oil-coal-gas infrastructure, and trillions of dollars invested. Moreover, if the transition from current energy sources to alternatives is wrongly managed, the consequences could be severe: there is an undeniable connection between per-capita levels of energy consumption and economic well-being.2 A failure to supply sufficient energy, or energy of sufficient quality, could undermine the future welfare of humanity, while a failure to quickly make the transition away from fossil fuels could imperil the Earth’s vital ecosystems.

Nonetheless, it remains a commonly held assumption that alternative energy sources capable of substituting for conventional fossil fuels are readily available—whether fossil (tar sands or oil shale), nuclear, or a long list of renewables—and ready to come on-line in a bigger way. All that is necessary, according to this view, is to invest sufficiently in them, and life will go on essentially as it is.

But is this really the case? Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of a modern society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Can alternative energy sources perpetuate this kind of society? Alas, we think not.

While it is possible to point to innumerable successful alternative energy production installations within modern societies (ranging from small home-scale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of three-megawatt wind turbines), it is not possible to point to more than a very few examples of an entire modern industrial nation obtaining the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One such rare example is Sweden, which gets most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources, not found in most other countries. Even in these two cases, the situation is more complex than it appears.The construction of the infrastructure for these power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, materials processing, transportation, manufacturing of components, the mining of uranium, construction energy, and so on. Thus for most of the world, a meaningful energy transition is still more theory than reality. But if current primary energy sources are unsustainable, this implies a daunting problem. The transition to alternative sources must occur, or the world will lack sufficient energy to maintain basic services for its 6.8 billion people (and counting).

Thus it is vitally important that energy alternatives be evaluated thoroughly according to relevant criteria, and that a staged plan be formulated and funded for a systemic societal transition away from oil, coal, and natural gas and toward the alternative energy sources deemed most fully capable of supplying the kind of economic benefits we have been accustomed to from conventional fossil fuels.

By now, it is possible to assemble a bookshelf filled with reports from nonprofit environmental organizations and books from energy analysts, dating from the early 1970s to the present, all attempting to illuminate alternative energy transition pathways for the United States and the world as a whole.These plans and proposals vary in breadth and quality, and especially in their success at clearly identifying the factors that are limiting specific alternative energy sources from being able to adequately replace conventional fossil fuels.

It is a central purpose of this document to systematically review key limiting factors that are often left out of such analyses.We will begin that process in the next section. Following that, we will go further into depth on one key criterion: net energy, or energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).This measure focuses on the key question: All things considered, how much more energy does a system produce than is required to develop and operate that system? What is the ratio of energy in versus energy out? Some energy “sources” can be shown to produce little or no net energy. Others are only minimally positive.

Unfortunately, as we shall see in more detail below, research on EROEI continues to suffer from lack of standard measurement practices, and its use and implications remain widely misunderstood. Nevertheless, for the purposes of large-scale and long-range planning, net energy may be the most vital criterion for evaluating energy sources, as it so clearly reveals the tradeoffs involved in any shift to new energy sources.

This report is not intended to serve as a final authoritative, comprehensive analysis of available energy options, nor as a plan for a nation-wide or global transition from fossil fuels to alternatives. While such analyses and plans are needed, they will require institutional resources and ongoing reassessment to be of value.The goal here is simply to identify and explain the primary criteria that should be used in such analyses and plans, with special emphasis on net energy, and to offer a cursory evaluation of currently available energy sources, using those criteria.This will provide a general, preliminary sense of whether alternative sources are up to the job of replacing fossil fuels; and if they are not, we can begin to explore what might be the fall-back strategy of governments and the other responsible institutions of modern society.

As we will see, the fundamental disturbing conclusion of the report is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can reliably be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of the current century.

This preliminary conclusion in turn suggests that a sensible transition energy plan will have to emphasize energy conservation above all. It also raises questions about the sustainability of growth per se, both in terms of human population numbers and economic activity.

Denmark: More CO₂ emissions with more wind

Some time ago, I created the following graph, juxtaposing annual Danish wind energy production and total CO₂ emissions from 1996 to 2006. The CO₂ emissions are on a reverse scale so that as they decrease the line would parallel an increase in wind production. But as can be seen, while wind production rose dramatically, CO₂ emissions remained essentially flat.

A related graph in the latest annual Energy Statistics report from Denmark (p. 37) shows two different measures of CO2 emissions just in electricity generation (below). The blue line is CO₂ emissions per fuel unit, which steadily declines as natural gas replaced oil and combined heat and power is increasingly used. But in the later 1990s the amount of CO₂ emissions per unit of electricity generated (the red line) starts to decrease at a slower rate, dramatically so after 1999.

This indicates that more fuel is being burned, or being burned less efficiently, per unit of electricity produced since the 1990s. And that phenomenon corresponds with the build-up of wind energy, as shown in the graph below, from page 9 of the same report.

tags:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Heinrich Biber violin and basso continuo sonata in F major

The Amphion Consort: Jennifer Bennett on violin and Yair Avidor on theorbo.

Black shorts for the English countryside

Turnips, not turbines!

—Sir Roderick Spode (according to Rosemary Brian [click title])

tags:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights