Shall I Compare Thee to a Freaking Cow?

Common Dreams published an essay by Andrew Christie yesterday about the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) pointing out that exploitation and abuse of animals is akin to slavery, child labor, and concentration camps and why people are so outraged by such an obvious comparison.

... The larger lesson of Darwin (there are no superior species, only differently adapted ones) has not yet sunk in; instead, we are still ruled in every way that matters by the medieval Great Chain of Being, on which we placed ourselves one rung below the angels and far above all other manner of beaste, most low, foule and uncleane. When a black man in New Haven sees images of his ancestors and a cow side by side, equally mistreated and commodified, he is conditioned to see only the comparative sullying of his godliness, not the cruelty that is the lot of sentient beings who have no rights. He fears he will be cast down by the implication that the lot of the oppressed should be raised up.

Historically, he is not alone. That was the deepest fear of his ancestors' owners in the antebellum South. It was the fear of men confronted by women's suffrage. It was the fear of our founding fathers, the white male land owners who, in drafting the Constitution, struggled to find a way to exclude the rabble from too much participation in the democratic experiment, the better to keep the levers in the hands of the right sort of people while giving the others just enough by way of social rewards to keep them controllable.

Changing those paradigms were (and are) hard fights, but the animal rights movement is fighting 10,000 years of cultural conditioning and the tendency of the disenfranchised, in the words of Howard Zinn, to fall upon each other "with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country."

Thus the good people of New Haven recoil, the NAACP shouts at PETA, and the pundits trot out safe, predictable outrage, using generations of conditioning to studiously miss the point. It's a fight amongst ourselves on a deeper level than usual. It misses not only the fact of our increasing disenfranchisement but the dysfunctional ways in which the disproportionately distributed wealth is produced by a system that is impoverishing the Earth and our ethical sense alike. One of that system's most fundamental control measures persuades people that in their visceral rejection of the truth PETA is laying down, they are standing up for their dignity and humanity, when, in reality, they are defending a system in which commonality of suffering is not on the agenda, the members of only a single species have any right to life, liberty and freedom from harm, a chicken is of value only as a sandwich, and the idea that a chicken might be of value to the chicken is an idea that must not be thought.

categories:  animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism

Tom Gray spins with the wind

Thomas O. Gray, Deputy Executive Director and Director of Communications of the trade group American Wind Energy Association, wrote a letter to the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, pointing out, "Wind energy emits no air, water, or global warming pollution; it uses no water; and it requires no mining or drilling for fuel."

Neither does a dead log. And despite the cost and ecologic impact of wind energy the electricity output is not much different.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Nuclear power vs. conservation and global warming

An opinion piece by Mark Hertsgaard in last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle is entitled "Nuclear energy can't solve global warming: other remedies 7 times more beneficial." The following comment was posted at Sam Smith's Undernews.

This same argument is even more applicable to industrial-scale wind power. Two billion dollars, presumably for about a 1000-MW nuclear plant, would get at most 2000 MW of also heavily subsidized wind power capacity. But whereas the nuclear industry boasts that their 1000-MW plant will produce an average of 850 MW, the wind industry claims that their 2000 MW of turbines will produce an average of 667 MW. In reality, the nuclear plant may provide an average of 750 MW and the wind plant less than 260 MW (according to U.S. Energy Information Agency data). And not to diminish the huge negative implications of a radioctive plant, the nuclear plant is in a single location over a few square miles at most. Two thousand megawatts of wind power would require about 100,000 acres, over 150 square miles (see www.aweo.org/windarea.html). Further, the wind plant's output is highly variable and unpredictable, requiring the continuing and more inefficient (thus more polluting) use of other sources to compensate. Much of the time, as in Denmark, which must dump almost 85% of its wind plant output, turbines produce well when there is no demand. And (again, not to diminish its very serious problems) nuclear power has proved itself in providing roughly 20% of our electricity, whereas the practical potential for wind power is no more than 5%. Two billion dollars can easily save that amount and more, without industrializing our rural and wild landscapes. Or it could buy 2000 MW of giant intrusive and destructive wind turbines that might provide less that 0.1%.

If nuclear power is a boondoggle whose pursuit detracts from actually solving our energy issues, then that is even more the case with industrial wind power. It's true that wind turbines are nowhere near as dangerous and poisonous, but unfortunately they also don't produce much electricity (let alone other forms of energy) so you'll still have as much "dirty" sources as ever.

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

"Wind is on its way [out] as a powerful resource"

Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, August 7, 2005

Paired with an opposition piece by Lynn Korinek of Wisconsin Independent Citizens Opposed to Windturbine Sites, Michael Vickerman writes in his support piece (Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, August 7, 2005),

"wind power, with current federal tax credits, is now less expensive than natural gas-fired generating units. It makes no economic sense for utilities to burn natural gas at any time when wind power is available.wind power, with current federal tax credits, is now less expensive than natural gas-fired generating units. It makes no economic sense for utilities to burn natural gas at any time when wind power is available."

According to Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group ("The Environmental Case for Wind Power in Wisconsin," July 2005), only 2.9% of the state's electricity comes from oil and natural gas. 72.3% comes from coal, and 21.7% from nuclear. Nationally, about 15% of our electricity comes from natural gas, 20% from nuclear, and over 50% from coal.

I have seen this argument before, that with subsidies wind power is now economically competitive with natural gas. Natural gas is then lumped in with coal and oil (the latter is an insignificant source of electricity which would be unaffected by wind power) for the claim that wind power will clean up the air. But natural gas is relatively clean; coal, especially the bituminous ("brown") coal commonly burned in the midwest, is the main source of polluting emissions from electricity generation.

So wind power is now being touted for displacing the one source that was actually making inroads against coal.

And because people want to believe that ever-larger wind turbine technology will actually do what the salesmen claim, coal continues to burn as much as before -- but now without any effort to make it cleaner. In fact, wind power advocates have mocked the talk of "clean coal" even as smokestack scrubbers in existing plants and new coal gasification plants, or simply switching from bituminous coal to anthracite, have actually made the air cleaner -- to a degree that all the giant turbines dreamed of by the industry would never be able to achieve.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Wind power not worth it

To the editor, Green Bay (Wisc.) Press Gazette:

The editorial of August 7, "Give windmills chance to prove their worth," makes the valid point that next to the pollution from fossil fuel plants, the noise and visual intrusion of wind turbines may seem minor. Indeed, most opponents to industrial wind turbines would agree.

What they point out, however, is that next to the insignificant contribution that wind power can make to our energy needs, the impact is disproportionately large and not worth it.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

The difference between theory and practice

According to the New Hampshire Public Interest Research Group, the "wind farm in Searsburg, Vermont, produces enough power for 2,000 Vermont homes" ("New Energy Solutions," www.nhpirg.org).

According to Green Mountain Power (GMP), Searsburg's average annual production has been around 11,000 MW-h for the last two years, and their average residential customer uses about 7.5 MW-h per year. Searsburg therefore produces power equivalent to that used by fewer than 1,500 Vermont homes.

After a facility is built, there's no longer any excuse for using sales projections. There's a record of actual performance. Of course, it seems to be invariably disappointing in the case of wind power, so naturally the advocates choose to ignore it.

And lest 1,500 homes sounds significant, remember that production does not necessarily correspond to actual need (so the homes are not using the power), and residential use is less than a third of GMP's load. (Residential use is a little more than a third of the total load nationally.) Searsburg's 11 200-foot-high towers, with all the roads and clearcutting and new transmission lines, produce less than 0.2% of Vermont's electricity. (Vermont has about 600,000 people.)

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Low-frequency vibrations from wind turbines

The previous post, "The noise of a wind turbine," noted the very loud figure of 105 dBA 415 feet from the Clipper 2.5-MW model. The "A" in the unit designates that the measurement is weighted to the normal range of human hearing. A more serious problem may be low-frequency noise and vibrations that aren't measured in the dBA scale but have a profoundly debilitating effect on many people.

As reported in the Telegraph (U.K.) (January 25, 2004), a doctor in England had noticed that many people who lived near a 16-turbine facility in --- were complaining of migraines and sleep problems. She made a survey and found that 13 of 14 people who lived within 1 mile of the turbines complained of increased headaches, and 10 reported sleep problems and anxiety that started with the installation of the wind power facility two years before. Other complaints included nausea, dizziness, palpitations, stress, and depression. She is currently conducting a more scientific study of the phenonemon.

Another doctor presented a paper to the Royal College of Practitioners about a "marked" increase in depression among people in a northern Wales village where three turbines were erected in 2002. She said the cause is low-frequency noise that is felt rather than heard.

There are many reports of people who get dizzy and nauseous while they work near wind facilities, and the symptoms disappear immediately upon their leaving the site. People also report that windows in their houses often shake from the low-frequency sound waves from wind turbines. It was noted by a frequent visitor to Backbone Mountain in West Virginia that after the wind turbines went up, there was no longer any sign of wildlife where before it was teeming. That writer also noted, "the noise was incredible. ... It sounded like airplanes or helicopters. And it traveled. Sometimes, you could not hear the sound standing right under one, but you heard it 3,000 yards down the hill."

The Scotsman reported today ("Wind-farm noise rules 'dated'," August 5, 2005) that a study of the Dunlaw wind facility (26 660-KW turbines), which began operating in June 2000, found that infrasound and low-frequency vibrations as the turbines started to turn in low wind could be detected 10 km (6.2 miles) away.

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