Lying about bat kills

From the Winona (Minn.) Daily News, Oct. 23:

During a tour last month of Carleton College's 1.65 megawatt turbine in Northfield, Minn., project director Rob Lampa told a group of about 30 Winona County residents that the college had found no evidence of bird or bat kills in the first year of operating the 230-foot turbine [plus 135-foot blade radius], situated in a cornfield about 1 1/2 miles east of town.

As the group was leaving, Winona resident Marijo Reinhard pulled County Commissioner Dwayne Voegeli aside.

"Look," she said, pointing at the ground, where she had spotted a small, brown bat dead on the gravel below the slowly spinning turbine. A few feet away, she spotted another, also dead.

Lampa will have to make sure the clean-up crew does a better job before he gives the next tour!

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

Desire for wind turbines justifies killing

To the Editor, Providence (R.I.) Journal:

Jack Coleman (Opinion, Oct. 20), in citing two caveats from the Desholm and Kahlert study (Biology Letters, 2005) of geese and ducks flying around the off-shore wind facility near Nysted, Denmark, did not notice the most obvious limitations of the research: Monitoring was done only during fair weather and not during twilight. That is, it found a favorable outcome by restricting observation to favorable conditions.

Coleman then goes on to describe the toll of buildings, towers, cats, oil spills, soot, mercury, global warming, and habitat destruction on bird populations, as if that justifies the new mode of death he is advocating.

Of course he admits, apparently believing that opponents have never thought of it, that the new death toll "must be measured against the cost of failure to reverse climate change."

There he ends his opinion piece, simply implying that industrial wind turbines help mitigate global warming and thus save more birds that they kill, that they save more wildlife habitat than they degrade.

But that is precisely where the debate begins. Do large wind power facilities actually reduce the effects of fossil fuel use? Opponents look at the evidence -- instead of the industry's sales material -- and find that they do not. Therefore even the most downplayed impact is not justified.

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

RPS makes it cheaper to pollute

An interesting analysis of the effects of a "renewable portfolio standard" (RPS) in New Jersey that would require 20% of the electricity sold in the state by 2020 to be from renewable sources was brought to our (National Wind Watch's) attention by Dan Boone, Conservation Chair of the Maryland Sierra Club.

The 206-page report was prepared in December 2004 by the Center for Energy, Economic, and Environmental Policy, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, State University of New Jersey, for the Office of Clean Energy, New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, and is available as a 2-MB PDF at www.bpu.state.nj.us/reports/EIAreport.pdf.

One of the things it found, which is hidden deep inside the paper and completely absent from the summary, is that the RPS would have no effect on sulfur and nitrogen emissions except to make it cheaper to exceed current limits. The report notes that the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy came to the same conclusion about a national RPS. That is, the RPS would not reduce emissions and would benefit only the polluters, who would enjoy lower prices because of the greater supply of "green credits."

Only with correspondingly stricter caps on noxious emissions would this ironic effect be avoided. But then the RPS wouldn't be necessary. Politicians and their once-environmentalist supporters evidently prefer the easier path of imposing an RPS -- especially easy as it benefits polluter-donors more than our health and ecology, as long as the public believes we're all doing something grand to save the planet.

And so the market triumphs. Bad money drives out good.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism

Chinese herbs effective for asthma

As published in the September issue of Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and being widely reported this week, researchers who had previously found a traditional Chinese 14-herb combination to be an effective treatment for allergic asthma tried a formulation of just 3 of the herbs. The simpler combination was also effective. Unlike steroids and another herbal treatment, ephedra, these herbs have no side effects.

The full article is available at the link in the title of this post, and excerpts can be seen at www.kirbymountain.com/rosenlake/asthmanotes.html#wen.

The dosage, divided into 3 doses daily, was

• Ling-Zhi 20 g, Ganoderma lucidum -- Reishi mushroom
  
• Ku-Shen 9 g, Radix Sophora flavescentis -- root of S. flavescens or S. angustifolia, yellow mountain laurel
  
• Gan-Cao 3 g, Radix Glycyrrhiza uralensis -- root of G. uralensis or G. glabra, licorice

(Note: I have been using herbs instead of steroids to manage my asthma for a couple of years. See my notes at www.kirbymountain.com/rosenlake/asthma.html.)

categories:  asthma, herbal medicine

Wacky windfarm math

"Lee anticipates that the five turbines would provide four times as much energy as Searsburg's 11 smaller turbines."

That's Harley Lee of Endless Energy, who wants to erect five 1.8-MW turbines on Little Equinox Mountain in Manchester, Vt., as reported in the North Adams (Mass.) Advocate Weekly.

The existing wind facility in Searsburg, Vt., consists of eleven 555-KW turbines for a total capacity of 6 MW. Four times that capacity is 24 MW. Lee's proposed project has a total capacity of 9 MW.

Nine megawatts is quite a bit short of four times six megawatts.

Even if he expected a better capacity factor (actual output as a fraction of capacity) than Searsburg's 21%, it would have to be an impossible 56% to so produce four times as much as Searsburg. When Searsburg was erected, they too expected output about twice what they actually get.

It is not surprising that these salesmen exaggerate the prospects for their product so brazenly, while downplaying their negative impact. What is so troubling is that so many people just smile and nod and enthusiastically eat it all up, ignoring the actual record for this technology.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, Vermont

The end of empire

Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has a new essay about cultural decay in the U S of A. He goes on a bit long about music, but it is nonetheless an essential read. Here are some excerpts.

Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. He warned, "From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights." ...

Instead of being outsiders, critics and moral observers, the American intelligentsia have become players accepting many of the values of the system they should be scorning. ...

It is particularly telling that in the past thirty years, America has passed more laws than it did in its first two centuries, a sign of a country that has lost its way and trying desperately to compensate by making the results of its failures illegal.

[A few contributing factors to our cultural decay:]

ABUSE OF MYTHOLOGY -- ... the culture that accepts such a redefinition of its own myths becomes a prisoner of the myth twisters, causing it to turn - as in the present case - not to Christ but to a Karl Rove or George Bush for an understanding of what faith means. While plenty of cultures have thrived on mythological faith, it is impossible to do so when faith becomes a massive fraud.

TELEVISION -- ... has become the means by which leaders have escaped their own culture, and their culture has lost contact with them.

THE CORPORATIZATION OF CULTURE -- ... Inherent in this bizarre value system is the inference that those who make or create things are less important than those who manage or sell them. In other words, as a matter of government, economic, and intellectual policy, the content of our culture is no longer as important as how well it can be marketed. Any culture with such priorities does not have a long life expectancy.

FAILED COMMUNITIES AND FORGOTTEN STORIES -- ... "Where we are is a world dominated by a global economy that places no value whatsoever on community or community coherence. In this economy, whose business is to set in contention things that belong together, you can no nothing more divisive than to assert the claims of community. This puts you immediately at odds with powerful people to whom the claims of community mean nothing, who ignore the issues of locality, who recognize no neighbors and are loyal to no place." [Wendell Berry]

... it is long past time to drop the pretense. As I was walking through one of our frightened airports I heard the real motto of our land repeated over and over: "Caution, the moving walkway is about to end." It's true. We're on our own now.

This is good place to mention the Vermont Independence Convention next Friday, Oct. 28. See the Second Vermont Republic for more information.

categories:  anarchism

Hydra power

Greenpeace's Hallie Caplan is at it again, this time in a couple of Pennsylvania newspapers (the State College Centre Daily Times and the Philadelphia Daily News), railing against the high price and filthiness of natural gas, the even worse pollution and greenhouse gas emissions of coal, and the radioactive waste and water pollution of nuclear power. These are valid and serious issues. But she then insists that wind power could provide 20% of our electricity, replacing all of our nuclear power or a third of our coal burning.

Interestingly, 20% wind power penetration is exactly what is claimed for Denmark, which still burns as much coal, natural gas, and oil as ever.

(By that paragraph, she had apparently already forgotten that her letter was about natural gas. It doesn't make for a very coherent piece, but perhaps she noticed that unlike coal and nuclear, only a quarter of the natural gas we use is for generating electricity. And, after all, it is better than coal and nuclear, which is why it was promoted in the first place.)

As mentioned before, it is very difficult to respond to these letters -- which may be deliberate -- because the incoherence seems to feed on itself and multiply into a writhing quagmire, a hydra.

The main concern of her letter is global warming (or was it the price of natural gas?), caused by the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Then she throws in the dangers of nuclear power, the traditional focus of Greenpeace's activism. But nuclear fission doesn't emit any greenhouse gases, so what is the focus now? The doomsday approach to global warming seems to be driving people to support more nuclear power. Maybe more nuke plants is actually what Greenpeace wants, so they can stay in business opposing them.

Or if the price of natural gas is the concern, then coal is cheap and plentiful.

Or if the pollution from coal is the concern, then natural gas is much cleaner. And its expense might stimulate conservation and efficiency efforts.

Or if we should move away from all fossil fuels, then why the exclusive obsession with electricity, which is only two-fifths of our total energy use? Although nearly 90% of our coal and all of our nuclear power are used for electricity, 75% of our natural gas and 98% of our oil are used for other energy needs (such as heating and transport). Where's that in Hallie Caplan's urgent concern?

Or maybe Greenpeace is just a shill for big wind, and it doesn't matter what they say as long as they keep talking enthusiastically enough to shut out dissent and query. That seems to be the only conclusion that can explain letters like Caplan's.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism