"Violating ridges"

[letter published in Burlington Free Press, May 5, 2005]

Barbara Grimes, general manager of Burlington Electric Department (Free Press, April 18), insists that there will not be a string of giant turbines from one end of the state to the other. But some proponents have said we could get 50 percent of our electricity from the wind, which would require precisely the endless string of towers that Grimes dismisses as "scare tactic."

Searsburg's 11 turbines, with a capacity equivalent to the 4 "foot-in-the-door" turbines proposed for East Haven, produce power equal to 0.2 percent of Vermont's electricity use, and it is less every year. To get to 50 percent would therefore require at least 1,000 giant new turbine assemblies, costing about $2 million each along with clearing and blasting of mountain tops and construction of new roads, substations, and high-voltage transmission lines.

And because wind-based production doesn't coincide with demand, they wouldn't even provide much electricity that we would actually use (e.g., western Denmark had to dump 84 percent of its wind production in 2003).

So, with little persuasive argument, she evokes "Vermont" values and the working landscape, as if that is not a feature everywhere that humans dwell. New Jersey has a working landscape. Vermonters old and new have worked for 100 years to restore and preserve the state's wild mountain ridges. The desire to violate them with collections of 330-foot-high steel and composite turbines -- for insignificant benefit except profits for a few -- is not what most people, wherever they come from, usually think of as "values."

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

Meat in style

The New York Times published their Spring "Style" Magazine today, featuring plenty of animal corpses as de rigueur entertainment fare. Amanda Hesser goes to market to buy a dead chicken, as "young chickens are at their best this time of year." She says, "It is time to stop being squeamish," that bringing the "cycle of life" (meaning raising animals to kill them for your enjoyment) out of the shadows is "healthier" and a challenge to the industry. That's like saying it was better when the Nazis shot people individually rather than killing them en masse in gas chambers. It's still an industry of death. It's also rather creepy that the dead chicken in one of the photos for Hesser's piece is tied with the same fabric adorning the drugged-looking (human, female) model. Sex, food, death, beautiful victim. Spring chickens trussed up to fulfill the human appetite.

And Todd Purdum writes about Joel Salatin, an inspiring organic farmer in Virginia. He describes the farm as a "peaceable kingdom." But those animals, allowed to do what is natural to them, are raised for a very unnatural end, when Purdum must distance the reader from fostering the lives of cows, pigs, and chickens to write about "raising beef, pork and poultry." He quotes mid-20th-century novelist and farmer Louis Bromfield to describe Salatin as "the happiest of men, for he inhabits a world that is full of wonder and excitement over which he rules as a small god." This evil little god "harvests" over 10,000 chickens, 100 cows, 250 pigs, 800 turkeys, and 600 rabbits every year. What wonder and excitement must he see in so much slaughter?

The Salatins sell much of their "inventory" directly from a walk-in freezer on the farm, in which Purdum spots a "perfect six-pound chicken" among other parts and pieces of the various animals once tended "with such care." In what moral universe is an animal that has been deliberately killed in its prime "perfect"? Is an animal's worth, its "perfection," determined only by someone's desire to eat it? Only then -- killed and presented as "food," is its value fulfilled?

Again, the "cycle of life" is evoked to suppress the "occasional pang when it comes time to kill an especially kindly old cow." Sorry, bucko -- you are not God. Maybe your imagined god has a bottomless hunger for willfully spilled blood. But betrayal of the love and trust nurtured in these animals, cutting short the joyful lives you have given them, is not only a violent mockery of the cycle of life but also reveals all that "care" as a cruel charade.

categories:  animal rights, vegetarianism, ethics

"The atheist"

An interview in Salon with Richard Dawkins:

'Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.'

"Cornell halts planning for wind project"

'ITHACA -- Cornell University decided not to proceed with its wind energy project on Mount Pleasant after more than four months of preparing to study the feasibility of eight 400-foot wind turbines. ...

'"They thought things over carefully, listened to community concerns and decided in favor of environmental policies and being a good neighbor."'

No-impact construction?

Here is a picture from the construction of a relatively small industrial wind turbine in Moorhead, Minn., a 750-KW NEG Micon. The tower is 180 feet high, and each blade extends another 83 feet. Newer turbines are at least 1.5 MW, around 330 feet high total, and they are getting bigger (see "Giants of the Amazon"). Nonetheless, this 750-KW model required a foundation hole 44.5 × 44.5 × 10 feet deep filled with 24 tons of steel rebar and 300 cubic yards of concrete. A new road had to be built that was able to carry not only the usual heavy equipment and dumptrucks but especially the 500-ton crane used to assemble the turbine. Whenever anyone says they can just be removed when something better comes along, you can see that rolling your eyeballs and scoffing is the mildest appropriate response. In fact, when a decommissioning agreement is required, the company generally agrees only to remove the top few feet of cement from the platform.


categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

"No EISs for Vic wind farms"

"The Victorian Planning Minister has decided that an environmental impacts statement (EIS) will not be needed for proposed wind farms near Warrnambool at Drysdale [30-40 2-3 MW turbines] and Woolsthorpe [25-30 2-3 MW turbines] in the state's south-west."

Somehow, industrialists have convinced planners that these 400-feet-high power plants -- along with their roads, power lines, and substations -- are by definition environmentally friendly and therefore require no such scrutiny as they are constructed in relatively (or even totally) undeveloped areas.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environmentalism

"An ugly face of ecology"

George Monbiot has written an incisive critique of industrial wind power and its "green" supporters. It is in the Guardian (click the title of this post) as well as on his own site, where it includes notes.

The people fighting the new wind farm in Cumbria have cheated and exaggerated. They appear to possess little understanding of the dangers of global warming. They are supported by an unsavoury coalition of nuclear-power lobbyists and climate-change deniers. But it would still be wrong to dismiss them. ...

Wind farms, while necessary, are a classic example of what environmentalists call an "end-of-the-pipe solution". Instead of tackling the problem - our massive demand for energy - at source, they provide less damaging means of accommodating it. Or part of it. The Whinash project, by replacing energy generation from power stations burning fossil fuel, will reduce carbon dioxide emission by 178,000 tonnes a year. This is impressive, until you discover that a single jumbo jet, flying from London to Miami and back every day, releases the climate-change equivalent of 520,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. One daily connection between Britain and Florida costs three giant wind farms.

Alternative technology permits us to imagine that we can build our way out of trouble. By responding to one form of overdevelopment with another, we can, we believe, continue to expand our total energy demands without destroying the planetary systems required to sustain human life. This might, for a while, be true. But it would soon require the use of the entire land surface of the UK. ...

I believe the Whinash wind farm should be built. But I also believe that those who defend it should be a good deal more sensitive towards local objectors. Why? Because in any other circumstances they would find themselves fighting on the same side.

Monbiot is right to express discomfort with the pro-nuclear and climate-change-denying tendencies of many wind energy opponents. Yet ultimately they are defending the landscape against needless industrialization. Many opponents are indeed conservationists and defenders of wildlife without the baggage Monbiot decries. Even Greenpeace, adamantly pro-wind, has balked at the extent of the proposed facilities on the island of Lewis, as has almost every wildlife and natural heritage group. Many opponents recognize the problem exactly as Monbiot describes it and agree with his assessment of the futility of building ever more giant wind farms. How he concludes from this forthright analysis that industrial wind facilities are "necessary" is a mystery.

Monbiot argues from the need to reduce carbon emissions, pointing out that wind turbines currently provide only 0.32% of the U.K.'s electricity. That represents the output from 888.8 MW of wind power, according to the British Wind Energy Association. The addition of the 67.5-MW Whinash Wind Farm would increase that to 0.34%. To get to the target of 10% would require the addition of 26,576 MW after Whinash (using the less-rounded figures from Monbiot's notes). No wonder capital is so excited. No wonder sensible people resist.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environmentalism