Big difference between green tags and wind energy

Recently, the National Geographic Society and the New York Audubon society, like many companies, such as Whole Foods and Tom's of Maine, have claimed that they are buying "wind power." But in fact they are only buying "green tags."

Green tags represent the output of a renewable energy plant, such as an industrial wind power facility, and they can be sold in addition to the actual energy produced. They were invented by Enron to increase the possible sources of revenue for wind plants.

But buying green tags does not add renewable energy to the grid, because that energy was already sold to the grid.

As National Wind Watch board member Eric Rosenbloom says, "It's as if a grocery store sold a box of cereal to someone but keeps the box to sell later to someone else. The first customer gets the cereal (and the prize), and the second customer just gets the empty box. You can put it on your shelf and tell people you bought a box of cereal, but in fact you did not."

In buying green tags, an organization thereby supports wind energy projects by providing them with extra money. That is all that can be claimed. They are not buying wind energy -- neither for themselves nor for others.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Israel out of control

Here are some Israeli girls writing notes on missiles to the people of Lebanon.


And here's one of the recipients.



Alexander Cockburn has written an excellent background piece at Counterpunch about Israel's attack on Lebanon. He looks at the already forgotten history of a few weeks before Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

... June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets . . . But no! Israel doesn't regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn't even bother to pretend to regret. It says, "We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the 'peace process.'"

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they're not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. ...

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far ... In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn't want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided to chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel's northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there'd been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon's forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2:42 and 3:38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel's case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its "fence." Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. ...

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can't endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it's the only thing they know how to do.

Who's misguided about wind power?

To the editor, Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer:

The editorial of July 21 ("What's the fuss over wind?") asks, "What is more of a danger? A spinning turbine blade, or nuclear waste by the Connecticut River? What is more damaging to Vermont? A wind farm on a ridgeline, or the trees on that ridgeline dying off from acid rain and pollution generated by coal-fired power plants?"

At this stage in the debate, the irresponsibility of those questions is inexcusable.

Even the promoters of wind power on the grid can no longer get away with pretending it will displace energy from coal or nuclear power plants. (Vermont doesn't even use electricity from coal plants!) Those plants provide base load power. As a highly variable and intermittent source of energy, wind turbines would only provide occasional peak load power, occasionally when actually needed.

If we erected all 350 megawatts of giant turbines that have already been proposed in Vermont, or twice that amount, which many advocates would like to see (without, as classic NIMBYs, actually having to see or hear them near their own homes), we'd still suffer from the same amount of nuclear waste and acid rain.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Violation of the mountains by wind erections

The Mountaineer wind power facility on Backbone Mountain, Tucker County, West Virginia, which kills thousands of bats every year (and owner Florida Power & Light has therefore halted access to researchers so they and other developers can get on with erecting hundreds more giant (and useless) turbines on this ridge that spans West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania).

"I looked around me, to a place where months before had been prime country for deer, wild turkey, and yes, black bear, to see positively no sign of any of the animals about at all. This alarmed me, so I scouted in the woods that afternoon. I am accustomed to these woods, and know them and the signs of animals well. All afternoon, I found no sign, sight, or peek of any animal about.

"I did notice, in the next few months, that the animals were more abundant down here in the valley, in the farmers' fields and such. Places that they had steered away from before, they now were in, and causing trouble for man, and, in turn, getting shot. I saw more bear and bobcats in the populated areas than I had ever seen. I went up to the windmills several times to check, and it seemed that the animals had moved away from that area. There were no sight of them, no prints, no sign."

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, ecoanarchism, ecofeminism, animal rights

Industrial wind destroying Flint Hills in Kansas

The Flint Hills in eastern Kansas were recently named by Yahoo as the fifth best travel destination in the U.S. As Yahoo's listing states:

Mostly treeless and curving gently across the ... landscape, the Flint Hills are home to the largest remnant of native tallgrass prairie in the world. Newcomers driving through this sublime setting ... are stunned by their first glimpse of this gorgeous landscape.

Yet this national treasure has already been desecrated by a massive industrial wind power facility and is targeted for yet more. Compare these pictures of the area before construction and the very unsublime result. And all those towers won't do a thing to change our energy use.





More pictures are available from Protect the Flint Hills.
wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Kansas

The wind whistles through it

To the Editor, Barre-Montpelier (Vt.) Times Argus:

The editorial of July 19 ("For the birds") rightly recognizes the need to curb the use of fossil fuels. It therefore warns of the damage from drastic climate change compared with that caused by "a few wind projects."

That is an irresponsible statement.

Wind turbines generate electricity, which in Vermont already comes almost exclusively from non-fossil fuel sources. So big wind would not "curb the use of fossil fuels."

Even in places where the electricity does come from fossil fuels, wind turbines would not threaten in any way the steady base load provided by coal. And wind's intermittency and variability require other sources to stay on line. The greater load balancing burden may even cause those sources to burn more fuel not less. Wind promoters can not show a single example of other fuels being reduced because of wind turbines on the grid.

That's just concerning electricity. Most fossil fuel is burned for transport and heating.

So it is irrelevant to compare the potential damage from "a few wind projects" to that from climate change. No matter how many giant wind turbines we erect, it will have no effect on fossil fuel use. Giant wind turbines will only add damage of their own, without any mitigating benefit at all.

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

Proposed wind projects in New York

Provided by Save Western New York.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, New York