Threat to fungi, worms, and insects from wind turbines

A Scottish news story yesterday publicized concerns being raised about the effect of industrial wind turbine noise and vibration might have on "our tiniest and rarest creatures". Click the title of this post for the article archived at National Wind Watch.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism

Disappearance of wildlife around wind turbines

At most wind energy projects, people have noticed a decline in wildlife, presumably because of the noise disturbance. Don Woods continues:

I have also noticed a steep decline of almost all other wildlife in this area. Deer and turkey populations have declined by about 80% since the turbine installation. I firmly believe they are having adverse health effects on the local citizens, myself included. There are many, many unknowns about the problems of wind farms that definitely need to be addressed by the proper authorities before it becomes impossible to stop them, if it isn't already! Specifically, the problems associated with low frequency vibrations. If the moth decline is due to wind turbines it is very serious. This could cause a total collapse of the ecosystem to include the whole food chain. It is definitely worthy of further study.


wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont

Disappearance of moths around wind turbines

Don Woods writes:

I live in the Appalachian mts. of West Virginia. My property borders the vast Monongehela natl. forest. Each year we delight in the hundreds of different moth species we observe here. For some unknown reason they seem to be on a serious decline over the past 5 years or so, to the point of near extinction this year. Last weekend after 4 hrs with the outside lights on not a single moth of any kind was seen! We do not know if the forest service has possibly been spraying for gypsy moth infestation and killed all moth species. Is that possible or might there be some other reason for their disappearance? Recently giant wind turbines have been erected in this area at about the same time the moths started to disappear.

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Resistance Is Fertile

Your editor was interviewed on Matt Soltys's "Healing the Earth" program today, hosted by CFRU, University of Guelph, Ontario.

Click here for the MP3 recording (36 minutes, 25 MB).

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism<, human rights, animal rights, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Taste for Meat Marches On

Tim Flannery writes in the June 28 New York Review of Books:

Many readers will doubtless ask whether vegetarianism is better still. [Michael] Pollan [The Omnivore's Dilemma] tells us that even vegan lifestyles result in animal cruelty. Just think of the the thousands of field mice shredded by harvesters, the woodchucks crushed in their burrows by tractors, and the songbirds poisoned by pesticides when farmers grow the wheat for our bread. Pollan's message seems to be that to live we must kill, and the best we can do is both treat animals decently while they live and kill them humanely.

This is moral argument?!

Your ethical vegan practices ahimsa, or "do the least harm". Choosing organically grown food eliminates the harm from pesticides. Choosing food from small farmers reduces the harm done to animals in the fields. Growing one's own food reduces it yet more.

Michael Pollan, apparently with Tim Flannery's agreement, goes in the other direction. In recognizing that our sustenance does harm to the sustenance of other creatures, he justifies willful harm beyond unavoidable necessity.

His premise is that we must eat the corpses of other animals, and it is commendable that he would like to reduce the brutality of that practice. But that premise is invalid and based only on his unquestioned appetite.

The fact is, most of us do not need to eat the corpses of animals to survive. Many people live very well without eating flesh. So to continue eating flesh is a choice to kill unnecessarily. All the coddling of your "meal" while it is alive doesn't change the brutal fact of that choice. One can raise them and kill them less brutally, but the practice can never be called humane. The result of the feedlot is the same as that for the "happy" grass-grazing beef cow.

Flannery also reviews Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, in which we learn that McKibben is a corpse-eater, too. Has the pre-eminent voice about the dangers of global warming not heard that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gas effect than transport? Let alone the inexcusable pollution and waste of water, energy, land, and other resources.

How can anyone take these men seriously?

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism

Wind energy would not reduce coal emissions

Dan Boone, a naturalist in Maryland, explains in a letter to the Harrisburg, Pa., Patriot-News published Aug. 24 that air pollution would not be affected by adding wind turbines to the grid.

This is because air pollution is regulated under a "cap and trade" system that has very effectively reduced nitrous oxides (NOx) which create ozone and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) which causes acid rain emitted by electricity plants. It has even reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main greenhouse gas contributing to global warming: by 19% from 1995 to 2003 in Pennsylvania, according the the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

If thousands of giant turbines were erected in different regions so that between them there would be some predictably steady electricity generation, wouldn't that reduce coal emissions even more?

No, because even if that happened, the cap and trade system relies on an already established total cap on emissions. The incentive for a plant to reduce its emissions below its assigned cap is that it can then sell that extra to another plant to allow it to pollute more. Thus the total pollution remains the same.

And the cap is unlikely to be lowered because of wind energy. The potential contribution of wind is very small (the Dept. of Energy projects will will generate 0.89% of the total electricity in the U.S. by 2030) and the effect on fuel burning even smaller (because of ramping inefficiencies).

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Cape Wind would not reduce use of Canal Generating Plant

Wendy Williams, in yet another self-promotional piece, this one at Renewable Energy Access (Aug. 20), writes unconvincingly: "I'm not very polished when it comes to publicity." Another howler is this:

"Cape Wind would reduce the use of the oil-fired power plant on the Cape Cod Canal."

Cape Wind's massive turbines may reduce the electricity generated from that plant, but not necessarily the oil it burns.

The Canal Generating Plant in Sandwich is a traditional thermal plant. It can't be simply switched on and off as needed, because starting up first requires heating up water to make the steam that powers the generators, and that can take hours. As a back-up to wind, therefore, it would be switched to standby mode when the wind rises, in which mode it continues to burn fuel to create steam but the steam is released and not used to generate electricity. Thus, the plant would be ready to switch back to generation mode as soon as the wind drops again.

That's the sad fact. The 24-square-mile Cape Wind facility would not clean the air or reduce oil barge traffic.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism