A Wind Farm Is Not the Answer

Paul Kingsnorth, in the August 1 Guardian (U.K.), questions the green movement's fixation with technology:

How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. They will be almost 500 feet high, and will be accompanied by 73 miles of road. The development will require the quarrying of 1.5m cubic metres of rock and the cutting out and dumping of up to a million cubic metres of peat.

The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby who is probably in the pay of the coal or nuclear lobby, and you will campaign for thousands more like it to be built all over the country.

The project is, of course, a wind farm - or, if we want to be less Orwellian in our terminology, a wind power station. This particular project is planned for Shetland, but there are many like it in the pipeline. The government wants to see 10,000 new turbines across Britain by 2020 (though it is apparently not prepared to support the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight). The climate and energy secretary, Ed Miliband, says there is a need to "grow the market" for industrial wind energy, and to aid this growth he is offering £1bn in new loans to developers and the reworking of the "antiquated" (ie democratic) planning system, to allow local views on such developments to be overridden.

Does this sound very "green" to you? To me it sounds like a society fixated on growth and material progress going about its destructive business in much the same way as ever, only without the carbon. It sounds like a society whose answer to everything is more and bigger technology; a society so cut off from nature that it believes industrialising a mountain is a "sustainable" thing to do.

It also sounds like an environmental movement in danger of losing its way. The support for industrial wind developments in wild places seems to me a symbol of a lack of connectedness to an actual, physical environment. A development like that of Shetland is not an example of sustainable energy: it is the next phase in the endless human advance upon the non-human world - the very thing that the environmental movement came into being to resist.

Campaigners in Cumbria are fighting a proposed wind development near the mountain known as Saddleback, a great, brown hulk of a peak which Wordsworth preferred to call by its Celtic name, Blencathra. Wordsworth thought the wild uplands a place of epiphany. Other early environmentalists, from Thoreau to Emerson, knew too of the power of mountain and moor to provide a clear-eyed and humbling view of humanity.

Many of today's environmentalists will scoff if you speak to them of such things. Their concerns are couched in the language of business and technology - gigawatt hours, parts per million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers and "sustainable development". The green movement has become fixated on a single activity: reducing carbon emissions. It's understandable, what the science tells us about the coming impacts of climate change is terrifying. But if climate change poses a huge question, we are responding with the wrong answers.

The question we should be asking is what kind of society we should live in. The question we are actually asking is how we can power this one without producing carbon. This is not to say that renewable energy technologies are bad. We need to stop burning fossil fuels fast, and wind power can make a contribution if the turbines are sensitively sited and on an appropriate scale.

But the challenge posed by climate change is not really about technology. It is not even about carbon. It is about a society that has systematically hewed its inhabitants away from the natural world, and turned that world into a resource. It is about a society that imagines it operates in a bubble; that it can keep growing in a finite world, forever.

When we clamour for more wind-power stations in the wilderness, we perhaps think we are helping to slow this machine, but we are actually helping to power it. We are still promoting, perhaps unintentionally, the familiar mantras of industrial civilisation: growth can continue forever; technological gigantism will save us; our lives can go on much as they always have.

In the end, climate change presents us with a simple question: are we going to live within our means, or are we, like so many civilisations before us, going to collapse? In that question lies a radical challenge to the direction and mythologies of industrial society. All the technology in the world will not answer it.

See also:  Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, by Paul Kingsnorth.

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

Social stigmata

“Not every windfarm should be licensed, but the great bulk of them will need to be. In a country that is serious about tackling climate change, raising objections might need to become something that carries a certain social stigma, as the climate secretary, Ed Miliband, has suggested.” —The Guardian, Editorial, July 30

Anything other than entertain the possibility for a moment that for tackling climate change windfarms are useless ...

This is the same paper that consistently defends horrible and useless animal experimentation against stigmatization by those who are serious about tackling unnecessary cruelty. For a supposedly “liberal” paper, it might be upsetting to note that the common thread is a defense of corporate violence, whether against animals or against the landscape and rural residents – both activities pointless except as demonstrations of power.

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

Unselling single-payer

Helen Redmond writes at Counterpunch:

... There’s been virtually no stories about labor’s support for HR 676 [Representative John Conyers' single-payer legislation], despite the fact it’s been endorsed by 554 union organizations in 49 states and by 130 Central Labor Councils. But we heard plenty when Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU sat down with Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-mart to discuss solutions to the nation’s health care crisis. Those two are experts on providing health care to workers? What about the nurses and doctors who support single-payer and got dragged out of, and arrested in Max Baucus’s senate hearings in Washington, DC? If doctors and nurses had been arrested for any other political issue it would have been the lead story in every newspaper and online edition. Doctors and nurses never deliberately get arrested -- that’s news!

The sea change in the public’s attitude toward government financed health care, however, has gotten press. A New York Times poll in June found that 72 percent supported a government-administered insurance plan – like Medicare for everyone under the age of 65. That poll also reported 64 percent believed the federal government should guarantee coverage to the entire population, i.e. health care should be a human right. Another interesting number: 85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt. This is in stark contrast to President Obama’s position of tepid, incremental reform. Obama asserts if he was starting from scratch he might favor SP, but we aren’t so he can’t. He wants to build on the existing system and not “disrupt” the employment-based provision of health care. As if employment-based health coverage isn’t being massively “disrupted” by the economic depression that has laid off millions of workers and forced them down into the ranks of the 50 million uninsured.

But what is truly disgusting is how the “progressive” left has caved so quickly and cravenly, given up the fight for single-payer and support for HR 676. They have become the indignant foot soldiers, apologists and spinmeisters for Obama’s piece of shit legislation. They are betraying what they absolutely know to be true: the private insurance industry must be evicted in order to provide health care to everyone and end the fiscal crisis the multiple-payer system creates.

Even the insurance companies know that, according to revelations by Cigna whistleblower Wendell Potter. He reports the implementation of a single-payer health care system is what keeps the billionaire CEO’s of insurance companies and Karen Ignagni, the high priestess of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), awake at night cowering in fear and forced to spend 1.4 million dollars a day to make sure it doesn’t happen. They don’t fear a public option despite their protestations; they accept that due to the depth of the crisis, a few token compromises are in order to stay in business. It’s chump change and in exchange for perhaps losing a little market share, they’re going to get a mandate that legally obligates every person to buy their priced-to-make-profits “insurance products” or be financially penalized. If the Obama bill subsidizes the uninsured going into private plans, that’s millions of new customers to extract profits from and a transfer of taxpayer dollars into insurance industry coffers. The Massachusetts mandate madness gone nationwide. ...

human rights, anarchosyndicalism

Thoughts on Acceptable Wind Turbine Placement

Daniel Imhoff, Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, Watershed Media, 2007, p. 113 [paragraph breaks added]:

The scientific consensus on global climate change predicts inevitable disruptions and potentially dire consequences. The prescriptions are equally clear: significant reductions in fossil fuel emissions are being called for across the board. Agriculture is no exception. Tough choices will be made in the decades ahead. Regional production of diverse renewable energy sources should be aggressively scaled up.

At the same time, energy is not renewable if essential resources such as soil and water are despoiled in the process. Simply increasing the supply of renewable energy without a national strategy to make the United States "carbon neutral" may only succeed in providing more power to consumer.

Across the world, and prominently in agricultural areas, large wind farms are gaining traction as alternative electricity producers. The latest generation of turbines have been criticized as noisy, aesthetically polluting, and being "Cuisinarts for birds," particularly raptors.

Within an overall context of a more positive energy future, however, it should be possible to identify appropriate areas to locate utility-scale wind farms withexceptions such as these proposed by John Davis of the Adirondack Council:

• No energy production in roadless areas.
• No windmills or energy production in wildlife migration corridors.
• No windmills in parks or protected areas.
• Keep windmills away from water bodies.
• Complement renewable energy funding with a national energy conservation platform.

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

Missing the point about wind energy development

Bradford Plumer writes in The New Republic's environment and energy blog about the action in North Carolina to ban structures taller than 100 feet from the state's mountaintops, which would effectively ban industrial wind energy turbines. His analysis consists only of showing a picture of mountaintop-removal coal mining and asking whether in comparison wind turbines can still be called "unsightly".

If mountaintop-removal is the issue, then the blog should ask why it is allowed.

If coal in general is the issue, then the blog should ask just how much coal would be saved by adding wind turbines to the grid. (The answer is: none.)

Having learned that wind energy does not reduce coal use, then the blog should ask if industrial wind's own adverse environmental impacts, including not just aesthetic but also on birds, bats, hydrology, and wildlife habitat, can be justified by other benefits. (The answer is: hardly. Wind is a highly variable, intermittent, and diffuse resource that only adds to the grid's burden of supplying steady energy in response to demand.)

Instead, the false and unexamined premise that wind turbines on the grid provide substantial useful energy, leading to the next false and unexamined premise that nondispatchable, unpredictable, and variable wind energy displaces coal -- generally a baseload supplier (wind preferentially displaces first hydro, second open-cycle natural gas [at a loss of efficiency]), leads to Plumer simply ignoring the actual debate about industrial wind energy development on the wild mountains of North Carolina.

What is gained and what is lost? Very little, if anything, is gained, and very much is lost. That is not to deny the horrors of mountaintop-removal mining or the pollution from coal burning. Those are irrelevant to the debate about wind. Adding industrial wind development will not reduce them in the least. Wind only adds a new insult to the environment.

So to Plumer's challenge, "There's nothing wrong with finding wind turbines unsightly, but the relevant question here is: Compared to what?"

Compared to a wild mountaintop teeming with flora and fauna -- without heavy-duty cut-and-filled roads, blasted-in turbine platforms, 400-ft-high machines grinding around day or night, flashing lights, acres of tree clearance, miles of new transmission lines, substations, etc. Duh.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, human rights

The doctor is out to lunch

So Dr. Howard Dean tells us that we can't have the efficient and fair system of health care Europeans enjoy because the European system was "essentially destroyed during World War II" ("Doctor's Note," New York Times Magazine, July 9).

Ahem. World War II is long over, as is the post-war American boom when employers provided expanding benefits to their employees. After decades of seeing those benefits taken away and the cost of private health care skyrocket, it is not "crazy," as Dean asserts, to change to a public plan.

Canada's system was not destroyed during World War II, and they implemented a totally public plan. And in the U.S., private health care and insurance are not our only experience. Medicare is a successful single-payer insurance system, and the Veterans Administration is a successful government-run (socialized) health care system. Furthermore, the SCHIP program is a successful example of state-federal partnership -- much like what Canada's current system developed from -- to provide single-payer care to the children of working families.

It is crazy to pretend that these public plans don't already exist and to ignore not only the inefficiencies but also the horrors, even crimes, as many people experience it, of our private for-profit employment-based system. It is crazier still to dismiss out of hand the solution that every other civilized country in the world has established: a public health system by which we fairly share the costs of what we are all subject to.

Are American health needs somehow exceptional? Have we not "hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means ...? if you prick us, do we not bleed? ... if you poison us, do we not die?"

Freedom for tyranny, socialism for big business

The U.S.A., spreading freedom and democracy ...

Also see:  "A Few Facts About the Honduran Military Coup" by Ken Silverstein, Harper's, July 6; and "Honduras and the Big Stick" by Nikolas Kozloff, Counterpunch, July 20.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Independent, July 19, writes about the coup in Honduras:

... For some of the plotters it is their second attempt to overthrow an elected reformist government in Latin America: the group includes prominent figures involved in the 2002 ousting of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who was kidnapped for 48 hours and sent to a Caribbean island before being restored to office after widespread popular protest.

The temporary toppling of Mr Chavez was welcomed by the Bush administration, the Blair government and the International Monetary Fund [Ed:  and the New York Times]. This weekend, the US seems destined for a replay of 2002's Operation Chaotic Coup. Amid a stream of contradictory messages it is clear that last month's putsch against Mr Zelaya was brewed up in Washington by a group of extreme conservatives from Venezuela, Honduras and the US. They appear to have hidden their plans from the White House, but hoped eventually to bounce President Obama into backing them and supporting the "interim president" [Roberto Micheletti]. They are making much of Mr Zelaya's alliance with Mr Chavez, whose sense of nationalism challenges US hegemony.

Financial backing for the coup is identified by some as coming from the pharmaceutical industry, which fears Mr Zelaya's plans to produce generic drugs and distribute them cheaply to the impoverished majority in Honduras, who lack all but the most primitive health facilities. Others point to big companies in the telecommunications industry opposed to Hondutel, Honduras's state-owned provider. Parallels are being made with ITT, the US telecommunications company that offered the Nixon government funds for the successful overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

A key figure is Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan active against Mr Chavez in 2002, who later fled to the US. He runs the Washington-based Arcadia, which calls itself "an innovative 'next generation' anti-corruption organisation". Its website carries three video clips alleging, without evidence, that Mr Zelaya, his associates and Hondutel are deeply corrupt. Behind Arcadia are the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), the well-funded overseas arm of the Republican Party. Currently active among the Uighurs of western China, the NED has this year funnelled $1.2m (£740,000) for "political activity" in Honduras.

The focus of attention in the campaign against Mr Zelaya is now on the office of Senator John McCain, the defeated US presidential candidate, who is chairman of the IRI, takes an interest in telecoms affairs in the US Congress and has benefited handsomely from campaign contributions from US telecoms companies - which are said to have funded the abortive 2002 coup against Mr Chavez.

Mr McCain's former legislative counsel, John Timmons, arranged the visit of Micheletti supporters to Washington on 7 July where they met journalists at the National Press Club "to clarify any misunderstandings about Honduras's constitutional process and ... the preservation of the country's democratic institutions".

Meanwhile, within the US administration, difficulties in co-ordination have emerged between the State Department and the White House, with the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, issuing a low-key condemnation of the coup which was quickly superseded by stronger words from Mr Obama. The President called for Mr Zelaya's reinstatement, which Mrs Clinton had failed to demand.

The conservative-minded Mrs Clinton retains John Negroponte, an ambassador to Honduras under Ronald Reagan, as an adviser. He also represented George W Bush at the UN and in Baghdad. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd attacked Mr Negroponte in 2001 for drawing a veil over atrocities committed in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, by military forces trained by the US. Mr Dodd claimed that the forces had been "linked to death squad activities such as killings, disappearances and other human rights abuses".

During his time in Tegucigalpa, Mr Negroponte directed funds to the US-supported Contra terrorists seeking to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. He assured them of arms and supplies from the Palmerola airstrip, the main US base in Central America. As President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is in the final stages of closing the US base in his country, Mr Negroponte is conscious of what the US could lose if a Zelaya government banned its presence at Palmerola. For their part, Hondurans have noted that when Mr Zelaya tried to return on 6 July, and his plane was refused permission to land at Tegucigalpa airport, no room was found at Palmerola.

Since last July, the US ambassador in Tegucigalpa has been the Cuban-born Hugo Llorens. He was the principal National Security adviser to Mr Bush on Venezuela at the time of the failed 2002 coup, when he was working with two other well-known State Department hardliners, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.

Mr Reich, a former US ambassador to Venezuela, advised Mr McCain in his presidential bid and previously worked for AT&T, the US telecoms giant. As he goes into battle against Mr Zelaya, the website of his business consultancy, Otto Reich Associates, quotes Mr Reagan: "You understand the importance of fostering democracy and economic development among our closest neighbours."

Mr Abrams was also deep in the business of supplying the Contra terrorists. He tried to sabotage the Central American peace plans proposed by Oscar Arias, then the Costa Rican President, who later received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In 1991 Mr Abrams, a neoconservative passionately supportive of Ehud Olmert and other leading Israeli hawks, was convicted of hiding information from the US Congress investigation of the Iran-Contra affair. The New York Times reported in 2006 that he had strong ties to then vice-president Dick Cheney. ...

And Alexander Cockburn comments on, among other things, Obama's international lecturing:

“Africa’s future is up to Africans,” he said in Accra. No it’s not. Africa’s future is to a pervasive extent up to the World Bank, the IMF, international mining and oil companies, the US Congress (which for example votes cotton subsidies to domestic corporate farmers, thus undercutting and laying waste the cotton economies of Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali and Chad).

human rights