This originally appeared here, and I wish to thank Alan for allowing me to publish his work.
Can you love nature when it is covered with wind
turbines? Or solar panels?
Putting aside the scientific, engineering, and economic
idiocy behind the use of wind turbines and solar panels to generate less than
three percent of the electricity used nationwide—or that, if the wind is not
blowing and the sun not shining, electrical energy must be supplied by back-up
traditional coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants.
My personal objection to wind power is the sheer ugliness
of these devices. The notion of covering hillsides and plains with them is an
offence to the land—to the nature Greens profess to love—and to the many
thousands of birds they slaughter every year.
I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the only reason we
have any wind energy, i.e. windmills and solar panels, anywhere in the U.S. is
a combination of the huge propaganda power of the Greens, bribery, the
stupidity and chicanery of politicians, and the gullibility of people who
actually believe that wind—which does not blow all the time—is a rational
source of power generation.
Suffice to say, the wind power industry would not exist
without state government mandates for its use, federal tax credits, and the
deafening silence of environmentalists who want to save every species on Earth
with the exception of the wind turbine's slaughter of a million of eagles,
hawks, geese, bats, and other flying creatures every year.
The cliché is that great minds think alike and recently
there have been a spate of editorials and commentaries, all coincidently
written by colleagues of mine. One of them is Dr. Jay Lehr, the science
director of The Heartland Institute, for which I am a policy advisor along with
others with far more impressive credentials than my own as a longtime science
and business writer. On June 17, The Wall Street Journal published Dr. Lehr’s
commentary,
“The Rationale for Wind Power Won’t Fly.”
“After decades of federal subsidies—almost $24 billion
according to a recent estimate by former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm—nowhere in the
United States, or anywhere else, has an array of wind turbines replaced a
single conventional power plant.” Dr. Lehr inferentially raises the question of
why any nation would spend that kind of money without receiving sufficient and
equivalent electrical power. It is a very good question.
As Dr. Lehr noted, “It’s known to everybody in the
industry that a wind turbine will generate electricity 30% of the time—but it’s
impossible to predict when that time will be.” There are about 24,000 of these
hideous machines according to the American Wind Energy Association and, given
their lobbying, that number could double in the next decade. They will still
not produce sufficient electricity—let alone predictable and constant
electricity—for a small city.
Neither wind nor solar power will provide
sufficient electrical energy. This begs the question why they even exist.
The short answer is that wind and solar have been sold to
the public (which pays more for the electricity they produce) as not producing
“greenhouse gas emissions” that are blamed for a global warming which is not
happening, but the main gas, carbon dioxide, is vital to all life
on Earth, being the “food” for all plant life, much of which we consume as
crops such as wheat, corn, and rice. As a demonstration of the idiocy and
hypocrisy of environmentalists, huge quantities of corn are, by government
mandate, converted to ethanol—moonshine—that must be added to gasoline.
Another colleague, Rich Kozlovich, has a commentary in
circulation that asks why the “Precautionary
Principle” that is beloved by the Greens is not applied to wind turbines.
Rich quoted another colleague of mine, CFACT’s Paul Driessen, “The
Precautionary Principle insists that no new technology should be permitted
until it can be shown that it will pose no threat to human health or the
environment.” If fully applied, humanity would be denied another medication,
chemical, or technological innovation.
“The hard reality is that the green movement does
not care about facts, wildlife or humans,” says Kozlovich, “and logical
consistency is totally alien to them…Green elites ‘know’ what is best for all
of humanity,”
I doubt he will get the plaudits and recognition he
deserves, but Dr. John Droz, Jr., a physicist, has devoted his knowledge to
providing the best collection of scientific date available regarding the
futility and stupidity of wind power. Dr. Droz has a website where you can learn the
FACTS about wind power or you can Google his name to find his many excellent
articles on the subject.
I have cited some of those facts, as has Dr. Lehr, Paul
Driessen, and Rich Kozlovich, but it does not take an advanced degree in
physics or any other science to grasp why constructing thousands of wind
turbines to produce a miniscule amount of electricity has been one of the most
idiotic enterprises to emerge from the vast global warming/climate change hoax.
Instead, we live in a nation whose president insists that
climate change is the greatest threat to mankind and who is devoting the powers
of government to shut down coal-fired plants, deter exploration and extraction
of energy reserves on lands owned by the federal government, delaying the
construction of a new pipeline, and the construction of new nuclear facilities.
One of his suggestions for power generation is algae, pond scum.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
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