“Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich nations, economic growth is the disease, not the cure.” – Paul Ehrlich
The widely-viewed JHU COVID-19 curve looks like a graph of world population growth. Why has the latter been normalized by society?
A wise species would spend far more time and energy trying to stop human overpopulation than cleaning up its endless symptoms with planning commissions, biologists, catalytic converters and medical disinfectants. We’d be in much better shape if the main driver of wilderness destruction, pollution and new contagions was itself contained. This has been discussed for decades and seems like a lost cause but it’s worth repeating amid extreme measures to stop a virus that barely registers on the scale of species annihilation, including human wars & famines. It also applies to climate warnings that treat CO2 as a tangential byproduct we must vanquish to maintain economic growth while pretending the scale of fossil fuels can be replaced. It’s a mental illness when people flail around reacting to side-effects while treating root causes as inevitable and desirable. “We need more economic growth!” say the politicians & business leaders, but we really need frugality, self-control, and more thinking, not tinkering in this over-engineered world.
The acronym COVID could also stand for Chinese Overpopulation Virus Disease. Around 1978 the Chinese government allowed wildlife to be farmed as a means to curb hunger among its 950+ million people, and in 1989 they further loosened restrictions on endangered species protections, calling it the Wildlife Protection Law (typical growthist apologia). Today, China has over 1.4 billion people and constantly boasts of economic growth, meaning more people, more consumption, more pollution and more heinous food sources. It’s considered racist to call SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” but it’s a highly accurate description of the origin. People should not be eating pangolins, bats, or shark fin soup. It’s disgusting and unnatural, just like the mindless overpopulation that spawned such desperation.
Attention China: When you reach a point where you’re eating pangolins, bats and other sick protein sources, you might want to retry stricter birth control.
The Internet also has physical limits to growth and its infrastructure can’t be endlessly expanded or supplied with adequate power. Data centers use a lot of electricity and water, and companies have been throttling bandwidth to accommodate more users working or video-conferencing from home. A lot of bandwidth is also used for arguably frivolous social media sites, plus spam. The impact of COVID-19 sheltering could be a preview of future overload as more people are connected, including a big increase in space junk if low-orbit Internet satellites get fully deployed. People need to know that the world is a physical place, not a spreadsheet with endless rows to add.
Reactions to any mention of population overshoot range from “How dare you say that about our Godly species?” to “It’s just a matter of inequitable food distribution” (treating hunger as the sole issue) to “Go kill yourself and lighten the load!” Few of those people bother to give counter-evidence, and are stuck on religious dogma, naive leftism or business greed. Another aspect of overpopulation-denial is ignorance of land-use and the scale of food production, physical infrastructure and energy sprawl. Those people claim there’s still “plenty of land” to fill up with farms, homes, roads, factories and wind turbines. They either won’t do the math or show little concern for what Man has already smothered. Acolytes of the late Julian Simon claim that human ingenuity can overcome physical limits, and see the Earth as not truly finite. They never prove it but they don’t care to because they view it as “optimism.” All that matters is attitude when you’re selling growth bubbles.
A big topic in mid-April 2020 was reopening economies after oppressive shelter-in-place restrictions and social-distancing. It’s understandable to want our freedoms back but the very economies we “need” to restart have been destroying nature for too long already. Scientists and laymen noticed less air & water pollution, roadkill, noise and other environmental impacts during coronavirus lock-downs. It gave a temporary glimpse of what the world might look like if we got serious about saving the planet vs. maintaining stock prices and compound interest. That wouldn’t mean building more “clean energy” sprawl, rather, scaling down human activity and limiting future births with government incentives and personal accountability. Nobody has an individual right to crowd the world to death, and all behaviors add up.
Old industrial scars and new sprawl branded as “clean energy” are compounding damage to nature. Viral machine overpopulation is no way to replace dense energy sources.
Stalling the global economy for COVID-19 has also revealed the truth of non-essential jobs and general economic bloat. Restaurants are a luxury unless your only food source is a cafe in the desert. For better or worse, film and music industries replaced people making their own entertainment. Energy-intensive sporting events are essentially showboating, with millionaires mimicking old hunting and war tactics. Other species put their energy into direct survival with little impact on their surroundings. Bears, moose, eagles and whales don’t need job-creation schemes, money or debt. People should question the true value of “passion jobs” enabled by fossil fuels, and interdependent (skilled and unskilled) professions that fall like dominoes in survival mode. Many of the highest paying jobs are non-vital, which says a lot about money itself. People seem to understand this when viewing apocalyptic dramas, but they lapse back into modern normalcy. When shale oil & gas production peaks (likely this decade) COVID-19 may be recalled as a mild economic preview.
This isn’t a call for returning to crude ancestral living, but we clearly ought to reduce wasteful labor-redundancy and ditch growthist ideology that seeks “More, more, MORE!” as it wrecks nature 24/7. People have been the main invasive species for centuries and should permanently back off to let the planet recover, just as we’re trying to recover from this virus.
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Criminals have killed over 16,000 Americans annually in recent years, so why dwell on random police mistakes during resisted arrests?
The vast majority of police fights and shootings occur when suspects resist arrest or behave unpredictably, inciting fear of injury & death. Police can’t react like passive robots.
Black crime rate denial has become the Left’s climate change denial. American society has reached a point where blacks literally have to kill someone to not be considered victims of police brutality and/or systemic racism. The brutality of criminals is treated as a sideshow and lethal risks faced by police are trivialized at a safe distance. Crime-apologists can’t comprehend why police would get edgy and jaded after dealing with dangerous people day after day. All it takes is a blink to die from a gunshot, knife or even fists, which is why they always yell “Drop the weapon!” when belligerent & intoxicated suspects resist instructions. People who’ve never been forced to conduct arrests should imagine themselves as cops with no option to remain nice or walk away from the scene. Cops have to be tough to handle their work, but exhibit far more patience than the average armed citizen during a home invasion, etc. Most of today’s “victims” in police encounters are people you wouldn’t want as neighbors (bass-bumpers, drug dealers and various sullen idiots) but cop-haters seek out racial narratives and treat actual crime as a sideshow. Fallible human cops are expected to act like fearless robots when their lives are on the line, while crooks achieve martyrdom. If we could draft SJWs to arrest violent felons, legally binding them to complete the arrests (not allowed to let resisters go) they’d shut up about “police brutality” in a few days.
“But until the black crime rate comes down, police presence is going to be higher in black neighborhoods, increasing the chances that when police tactics go awry, they will have a black victim.” – Heather Mac Donald
ACAB should stand for All Criminals are Bullshitters, not All Cops Are Bastards or Bad. Mindless leftists heap far more criticism on police than the scofflaws & degenerates who’ve always made cops necessary. This attitude had already gone too far before Trump’s election but many thugs thrive on Trump because he sets the moral bar so low. They play the Trump card, so to speak. Criminals are still doing what they’ve always done; trying to avoid or resist arrest while being dangerous to the pubic and cops who confront them. These people naturally resist those who threaten their shady livelihoods. “They won’t take me alive!” is no joke to cops. Imagine going to work every day knowing you could kill or be killed by random thugs. You have to focus on characteristics you know to be risky, with little time for racial sensitivity in the heat of battle. The moment an arrest is resisted, it turns from procedural mode to combat mode and skin color is a minor factor. A cop has to assume the worst and react with superior force. Suicide-by-cop was commonly acknowledged until the racism narrative took over. How can cops reliably discern a suicide attempt from resisting arrest? Even asking people to pay bus & train fairs (or not eat on public transit) and return library books on time is considered oppressive now. They won’t admit that certain groups are more likely to be scofflaws, so they call it racial profiling. Criminals of color are still criminals, and those who play the race card the most tend to deserve it the least.
Despite all that context, the media jumps on any story where white cops kill black people. They’re doubly complicit in the ensuing riots by calling them “protests against police brutality and systemic racism,” as if those motives are honest and undisputed. For every Elijah McClain they could report a Tony Timpa and leave race out of the headline. A major increase in “white cop, black victim” stories was triggered by President Obama, who semi-retracted his views in Dallas. In 2014, Ferguson and Michael Brown solidified Black Lives Matter, based largely on a debunked “hands up, don’t shoot” claim that portrayed the gun-grabbing Brown as no threat (lack of clear video didn’t help). Compounding all that, the media downplays same-race violence involving either police or private citizens. When you study what police actually face on the streets, often showing extreme patience with cop-taunting behavior, much of today’s reporting is criminally deceptive. It’s making police into pariahs, and hiring standards have dropped nationwide for lack of interest in the job. This is troubling to those who don’t want America’s quality of life to tank even more. As Lena Williams wrote in 1992, “Blacks worry that in crying racism too often …… legitimate cases in which racism is a factor may be undermined.” What’s being called “racism” is often just a frank assessment of real-world problems when diversity becomes adversity. Negative race-specific traits are ignored even by un-deniers, at least publicly.
“I would, without any hesitation, shoot a violent criminal again.” – Bernhard Goetz (Cops routinely face similar situations with remarkable restraint.)
Volatile flash mobs overwhelm store security. They’re typically black youths gathered via social media. News outlets deliberately don’t mention their race in many cases.
The real phenomenon is a combination of social media and smartphone cameras that omit context by recording after someone’s agitated the police, Their initial violence is downplayed and context is drowned out by slogans. The same bad behaviors that always drew police have been turned into Thug Life glorification, reflected in anti-social, anti-police, anti-female rap music that many criminals listen to. Yet this crass culture is seen by many as a mere reaction to history. Educational opportunities are often rejected by these people, as pointed out by a famous comedian. Throwing money at them rarely results in more than binge spending and ruined housing projects. The evidence shows that they’d rather be thugs than conformists. Pragmatically, they want the police to ignore their crimes because some might get offended if mistaken for others.
As a random example of this idiocy, Christopher Cukor’s father had been murdered by a black man in Berkeley, California years earlier, giving him innate reasons to mistrust blacks along with their high per-capita crime rate (big reason for “racial profiling”). He got caught up in a viral video after a black man entered his apartment building with no key-card, and was rightfully questioned about his resident status. The man refused to say who he was visiting, arousing more suspicion (very common in these cases). He turned out to be OK, but it became the latest “black guy gets picked on” incident before context was understood. Cukor was compelled to apologize for racial insensitivity.
An even more absurd case of martyrdom was the Patrick Kimmons shooting in Portland, Oregon. He’d just shot two people right in front of the police and they were expecting to be next, so they killed him out of fear for their own lives. In a balanced society it would have been clear that cops were doing what they had to do, and they prevailed later with video evidence. But Kimmons was made into a “family man” martyr with sidewalk vigils by deluded leftists. Odds are that none of those people had ever been forced to arrest or stop a dangerous suspect.
If their true goal is preventing deaths, Black Lives Matter is pushing a futile agenda. It’s no secret that blacks predominantly kill their own people, and cops get nervous around them for the same reasons other blacks do. In 1996, Chris Rock got candid about this, saying: “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people!” You can’t keep calling everything racism when many blacks admit they can be difficult. Those with street-cred like Taleeb Starkes are allowed to use frank terms like urban terrorists, Chiraq, and N-word variants. In America, thug culture is pervasive, with showy bad attitudes and crass desires to use women and kill rivals. Ask yourself what’s so great about the loud, insincere hustlers who populate many black neighborhoods? If someone’s shallow and obnoxious that’s just who they are! You can’t blame it all on slavery angst, since many of the same traits are found in Africa. If raised in Lagos, Nigeria instead of Phoenix, Arizona, BLM co-founder Opal Tometi would surely have a bleaker view of black culture. It’s easy to debunk the racism-is-everything angle when you study Africa’s slums and intraracial fighting. Several African nations are high on the list of the world’s most corrupt police. People can be simultaneously oppressed yet their own worst enemies. The woke need to wake up to their own character flaws. Most American protestors would run back after a stint in Africa, so whose culture are they fighting for?
The agenda of the closely-linked Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement would destroy modern society and remake it into something vulgar and unworkable, mostly to appease the lower class and criminals. Be careful of what you ask for when you’re clueless about human nature and the need for laws! If these schemes actually worked, they would work and expand. They’ve been tried in many incarnations, succumbing to the nature of humans to form power-structures. Absolute fairness is mythical.
To make it technically clear, Black Lives Matter unfairly vilifies police with bad math and the deceptive merging of historical racism with modern crime control. Of the roughly 1,000 Americans killed by police each year, about 25% are black, and BLM cites this as proof of racism since blacks are just over 13% of the U.S. population. Leftist blacks refuse to weigh black data in the context of higher crime rates than other races, which is why they have more police interactions. Cops go where evidence takes them. They don’t casually enter rough neighborhoods without cause, as they could be shot for simply pulling someone over. This 2016 study by black economist Roland Fryer showed no real effect of racism on arrest-related deaths with all factors accounted for. BLM’s dehumanization of police is convenient to their agenda but unfair to the majority of decent cops.
Eight critical points dismissed by Black Lives Matter:
While over-hyping random police mistakes, BLM ignores countless black-on-black crime victims (like looting casualty David Dorn) and perpetuates the image of cops as southern redneck types. They think whites have a corner on evil, though it’s easily debunked by events like the 1994 Rwandan genocide and routine rapes & murders in Africa (see specific case of South Africa). Slavery among blacks had long existed before whites perpetrated it, and they were mainly able to pull it off with superior weapons, not evil intrinsic to a single race, The upshot is that people are not basically good, and you can’t pigeonhole one race as the most sinister. The general control of one race by another usually depends on the best technology, societal organization and ambition for better or worse.
Black Lives Matter had a clear role in the 2016 ambush killings of 5 Dallas cops. At right is a protest over a typical case where a reckless man barely dropped his weapon.
This article isn’t solely about black criminals. They just get the most media sympathy and the narrative is seriously affecting police morale. You’ll find that “ghetto” blacks and “barrio” Hispanics have a lot in common with “trailer park” whites and right-wing trash. They share marginal intelligence, tend to have gun-identity personas, listen to anti-social music (including lowbrow rebel country) and are prone to using violence to get their way. They also tend to be owners of pit bull dogs which have come to symbolize “misunderstood” people. Specifically bred to be aggressive and powerful, their population exploded in recent decades, exposing their negative traits to a much wider demographic. Many of the people in denial of pit bull genetics also defend violent human traits as “sticking up for your own,” which includes vilifying the police.
Aside from some Old West and Prohibition figures, most whites don’t glorify their worst element, but blacks tend lump themselves into one big group of “the oppressed.” They only completely shun the worst cases, like black serial killers, including a U.S. record holder. Remember the happy black reaction to the first O.J. Simpson verdict, including a civilized audience on Oprah? They wanted revenge for past transgressions, not objective justice. Violence perpetrated on innocent bystanders after the Rodney King video (which also omitted him resisting arrest) was targeted at whites and Koreans. Jealousy over Asian economic success has been another chronic element in black rage (there was a time when whites treated Chinese poorly but they rose above it).
Similar behavior was unleashed decades later in the George Floyd “justice” riots. Before May 25, 2020 he was just another ex-con who’d done armed robbery, drugs, porn, and tried to pass bad money. Not someone you’d want as a neighbor, despite standard posthumous praise for thug martyrs. His luck ran out when he resisted a cruel cop who probably wasn’t intending to kill him in public. The dramatic video was overblown in the context of all arrests and the real issue of crime was trivialized once more. Stockholm syndrome spread among naive riot sympathizers with the phrase “property can be replaced, lives cannot.” Are random dead criminals really worth billions of dollars in losses? Many protestors want to defund and/or disband the police on top of that, assured to raise crime rates which they were part of in the first place. Criminals have long sought this scenario because they hate interruptions. One way to defund the police would be eliminating them from neighborhoods of color where most crime occurs. Officers would be freed from that dangerous grind and have more time for “community policing” where they don’t fear getting shot each day. This would allow bad neighborhoods to “take care of their own” as they claim to desire. Of course, law-abiding residents would quickly admit that criminals, not racism, were always the real problem, and beg for police to return, as would people everywhere, since thugs are mobile.
Degenerates of varying races live barely within the law and enjoy pushing the envelope, e.g. Cop Block and Sovereign Citizen charades where they stonewall and harass cops to catch predictably annoyed reactions on camera. They often call it a “First Amendment Audit” but it’s usually pointless harassment designed to reduce police morale. Effort put into dealing with pseudolaw gadflies can pull manpower from nearby crimes in progress. This foulmouthed punk took it to an extreme and was convicted for aggressive behavior. These people share the core premise that nobody has the right to investigate them as suspicious before a crime occurs. “I’m just filming” is the usual cover story. Many people wish Timothy McVeigh was investigated further before he snapped. He’d probably have bleated about his “rights” being violated. “What do you mean I can’t park at this curb?!”
Of course there are incidents where blacks are treated unfairly, but that’s not the focus of this post. It’s about the scales tipping too far toward criminals and their sympathizers, with too many videos taken out of context. Big Tech aids that agenda with routine censorship of anything that makes POC look less than saintly. Twitter suspended this author’s account for “hate speech” but the offensive tweet merely pointed out that blacks have a crime problem. If we want black lives to really matter, good blacks should stop making excuses for bad ones, and things like gangsta rap should be seen as creating culture, not reflecting it.
The long-running network TV series, COPS might never have gotten started in today’s thug-martyr climate. It would be seen as pro-police “propaganda.” A less edited view of similar encounters can be found on the PoliceActivity YouTube channel and various others. Watch enough raw footage and you’ll get a good idea of the stress police deal with. Also, talks by Sam Harris shed light on law enforcement psychology and the naive detachment of cop-haters. If you want to improve society, support the true victims in any given case.
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Even unscrupulous liars can be fundamentally right about a topic or two. Donald Trump, despite his crassness and pro-development attitude, was telling truths about industrial wind power years before the 2016 Presidential election. His motives didn’t have to be pure to describe the obvious. The public had been brainwashed by “clean energy” rhetoric associated with progressive causes, enabling widespread desecration of scenery. It caught many people off guard when the blight rapidly accelerated in Europe and under Obama’s PTC.
With growing resistance to onshore projects, Big Wind hopes to industrialize the oceans with even bigger turbines. You’re slammed as a climate-denier or NIMBY if you resist this.
Trump’s public involvement started when he opposed an offshore wind project that would blight views from his Aberdeen area golf course (map), which itself was under scrutiny for covering shoreline sand dunes. There was also local opposition to the wind farm but environmentalists focused on protecting the dunes. Many have turned a blind eye to Scotland’s growing wind power blight as urgent CO2 targets are chased. See videos of Trump facing Scotland’s Parliament and getting nothing but smug attitudes despite articulate experts testifying with him. The wind industry treats iconic landscapes like graffiti walls and Loch Ness residents now fear encroaching wind monsters, much realer than their mythic beast.
Someone famous needed to call out the environmental hypocrisy and Trump was it, but he’s tarnished the anti-wind-power movement during a critical phase where subsidies may not be extended. Whenever he speaks you can imagine greentech nerds smirking over “installed capacity” on some ruined horizon. The only places safe from new wind projects are either windless, officially designated as scenic from many angles, obvious flyways for birds & bats, or capable of angering enough landowners. Even though backlash is growing, the world faces an increasingly ugly future as civilization pretends to right its wrongs.
The documentary, “You’ve Been Trumped” (2011) covered the golf course dunes dispute. It was depicted as greedy old Trump vs. Nature, while a much bigger wind power invasion of Scotland and other countries was in full swing. Trump’s golf course is a relative blip compared to the total scope of land alteration. Both the dune-protectors and Trump were losers in that case, and nature loses to energy sprawl daily. People have built wind turbines directly amid sand dunes (below) and just about anywhere they can get away with it. Calling it green on the flimsy premise that it’s “fighting” fossil fuels (which allow it to exist) is the very sort of lie Trump would tell!
How many environmentalists cared when these sand dunes were targeted? These turbines happen to be in Brazil, but developers chase whatever locations they can get.
Using the logical fallacy of guilt by association, Trump is continually mocked for daring to criticize a “renewable energy” technology, with emphasis on his comments about birds and cancer. At rallies and conferences, he’s said that wind turbines are ugly, killing all the eagles, and actually cause cancer. It’s automatically assumed in politically-correct crowds that he’s lying or grossly exaggerating, since wind turbines still have a “green” sheen through extensive lobbying. They’re not killing all eagles (yet) and his cancer correlation should have focused on noise which can weaken immune systems and lead to greater disease risk. But he was telling a core truth when he said they’re an unreliable energy source because wind “only blows sometimes” (millions have seen idle blades). Trump erred by implying the power would go completely out, but fossil fuels usually provide backup, and new plants (typically gas) have been built to accommodate wind projects. They will never be 100% renewable, including their heavy manufacturing inputs.
2020 Presidential candidate Jay Inslee said of Trump: “Wind turbines do not cause cancer, they cause jobs.” He was cherry-picking Trump’s most dubious criticism while ignoring other big negatives. Inslee is a classic “bright green” progressive who thinks technology and rebranded growthism can fix everything. With that mindset comes denial of wind power’s big energy sprawl problem. As a long-time Washington Congressman, then Governor, he was OK with the southeast corner of his state being overrun by huge pinwheels and blinking red lights. The other end of the Columbia River has been under threat from the Whistling Ridge Energy Project which has more urbanites within its viewshed and may not happen. Scenery aside, Inslee’s job-creation angle is misleading, since wind projects generally bring in outside specialists with relatively few permanent local jobs. Emphasizing jobs as the gospel of progress also promotes economic growthism, which is what led to climate change in the first place. Most politicians will not touch that subject.
Typical example of wind energy sprawl in southeast Washington. Wide, scenic areas have become distracting industrial parks. This aspect of Big Wind is trivialized by tech junkies.
In time, as more turbines are built, Trump’s statements today will seem prescient, and he’s hardly the only one concerned. Even his rants about “fake news” have some merit in wind energy’s spun context. Highly intrusive due to their extreme size and acreage-needs, wind projects are no less harmful to the environment than any large structures displacing nature’s physicality, but they’re worse because of stark contrast with rural environs, like having Sky Whirl triple Ferris wheels all over the countryside, and much taller. Wind factories also require vast new road networks and forest clear-cuts, and their impact on birds and bats is well documented, despite industry attempts to understate it. Corpses are often eaten or dragged away; impossible to fully count over tens of thousands of acres per facility. Calling wind turbines “beautiful” is absurdly subjective if you see what environmentalists used to protect from bulldozers and chain saws.
If Trump proves that wind power is GOOD, Charles Manson proves that environmentalism is BAD. His general derangement didn’t debunk his deep ecology views, which were echoed by the likes of Arne Næss (as fair-minded as you’ll find). Trump is no Manson, just a greedy megalomaniac, but you don’t mock a logical message simply because the messenger is unpleasant. Almost everyone has valid views on certain topics, hard as it can be to admit. If Trump manages to slow the growth of wind power, the end could justify the means, especially since it’s doing very little to offset fossil fuels and can never replace them.
More thoughts on what ails industrial wind power:
John Muir Trust (Muir would have agreed on wind power vs. wilderness)
Struan Stevenson (well-reasoned Scottish conservative and scenery ally)
End note on Trump: In a fair world he’d be impeached for environmental policy corruption, like accusing California of Clean Air Act failures after running an anti-EPA campaign and trying to cut MPG standards. Still, he brings up important issues like excessive immigration, the main source of U.S. overpopulation. Immigration has declined since he took office. Few politicians are willing to say “Our country is full,” even if Trump is in denial of overpopulation, ecologically. A leader with similar views who didn’t conduct himself like a reckless teenager, could actually do some good in the world. It’s too bad Trump has shown few signs of maturing during his White House stay. Re-electing him would be a yuuge mistake, but we sure don’t need the Green New Deal either.
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Starting around 20 years ago, some otherwise intelligent people began asking whether we might live in a simulation created by computers. In other words, a fake reality conjured by devious entities. You’d not even know you were unreal. The idea was triggered by advancements in video games, CGI, and specifically “The Matrix,” which accelerated paranoia among conspiracy theorists, followed by people who ought to know better. The latter use disclaimers to appear sane, but some take it seriously.
At first, second and third glance, the whole thing reeks of blind faith in technology and chronic detachment from nature. Yes, there are visually impressive video games and 3D immersive experiences, but that’s all they’ll ever be in the world outside of Silicon Valley or Hollywood. The simulation hypothesis is the latest stretch of thinking that places people and machines above the very laws of nature. It’s the embodiment of a God complex. Anthropocentric arrogance is prevailing over everything, including “green” ideology.
Nick Bostrom, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon (space junk denier) Musk are among those who’ve floated the concept. Too much thinking or wealth can over-inflate human abilities.
Here’s why a simulated planet or universe defies logic:
Who or what built the computers, and what materials, energy and social structure maintains them? Is it powered by nuclear fusion? Just like the (planet-bound) “100% renewable energy” fallacy, no machines can exist or replicate in a vacuum.
Where do these creatures or entities live, if not on an actual planet, and where is it physically located? If they are actually us, it gets even nuttier, like looking at endless mirrored reflections. One may as well try to prove God exists.
Why would they go to such lengths? The notion that someone wants to “control us” can be explained by banal things like marketing. There’d be no logical gain in making a virtual society, just twisted entertainment for someone.
No computer is 100% reliable, even the combination of millions networked online, so the system would occasionally crash. Billions of people would notice something’s wrong, as would other species caught up in a simulation.
How can countless discrete instances of self-awareness exist in a computer? Simulating an external environment is one thing, but so many different selves wandering around is a tall order, including the minds of other species. As with belief in ghosts, people get confused by entertainment media vs. things they’ve truly seen.
Why would the makers allow accidents, diseases and the pitfalls of aging in a virtual environment? If it was done for a serious purpose you’d think they’d strive for Utopia. But if it’s all unreal, why would it even matter? The conflicts are endless.
Would the deep oceans and atmosphere all be part of it, or just the immediate surroundings that individuals perceive? Why would they allow numerous environmental problems to escalate or begin in the first place? A “runaway simulation” is absurd because the very capability of creating it should allow the ability to shut it down or destroy its hardware (again, the question of who’s maintaining the whole scheme).
Scientists have already debunked the hypothesis with other types of reasoning, if one needs more detail. Being dazzled by computer power doesn’t make Moore’s Law infinite, and YouTube will eventually run out of server space, if the power even stays on. People treat fallible systems like bedrock just because they still happen to work.
Elon Musk’s obsession with “population collapse” is a dangerous, unscientific extension of his growthist technology visions, including disruptive Starlink satellites. His claim that Earth’s environment would be “fine” with a doubled world population (equaling 16 billion when he said it) reveals little concern about wildlife and wilderness development, or chronic human hunger. Everything comes down to people as laborers for rich industrialists. On a finite planet, an aging workforce is less of a real problem than unsustainable credit and natural resource depletion. Peak Oil will squelch “renewables” fantasies unless nuclear fusion finally works. Like the sprawling wind power industry, Tesla electric cars ride on a contrived green sales pitch. Many EV buyers have become speed gluttons and drag racers, rather than hypermilers.
If someone insists we’re actually living in a simulated world (no less crazy than solipsism) they ought to join the Flat Earth club as well. Wild technology concepts distract people from human overshoot on a physically real planet.
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“Do people pretend to be Saving The Planet while simply rebranding business as usual? People DO.” (Chevron ad satire)
Ominously upbeat logos reveal the future loss of open space to Green New SPRAWL. Climate change didn’t make land-use issues vanish. Environmentalists just became sellouts.
As a hasty response to Republicans’ climate and fossil fuel myopia, Democrats are pushing the “Green New Deal” which claims to be pro-environment but looks like the biggest industrial invasion of rural lands & oceans ever conceived. Acreage thought to be immune from development would be wide open to exemptions under a Clean Energy banner. Trump’s attacks on national monuments were already outdone by Obama’s fast-tracked wind energy blight. There’s a new psychological construct wherein a technology is only dirty if it directly emits smoke or CO2. Both the material chain of its existence and its physical intrusion on nature are wished away.
The core problem with “clean energy” is the scale of weak, intermittent sources trying to replace dense, reliable sources (oil, gas and coal) which inconveniently build the weaker infrastructure. A common term for this is energy sprawl and it’s already happening, but the GND would speed it up while adding costly social agendas. Wind power blight has been covered at length here (1, 2) but the solar component of rural uglification is increasing. Well-meaning environmentalists are in denial about this new sprawl, which they frame as a special case. You can’t just put new wind turbines on brownfields, nor can you only see them from there. They must know this.
Before environmentalists sold their souls to techno-fixes, few would link BIGNESS with greenness, like praising Glen Canyon dam or maximizing the Atlantic Ocean’s generating capacity. Had the Internet existed in the 1980s, conscientious searchers would be dismayed by thousands of hits for MASSIVE NEW PROJECTS linked to pro-environment causes. The word MASSIVE brings images of invasion and disruption, which is exactly what’s happening to our last open spaces. Even when they just invade farmland (considered “developed”) they kill the former feeling of openness. Invert wind turbines and you’ve got a claustrophobic H.G. Wells scenario, including red lights at night. Those who praise them the most rarely live among giants.
ANOTHER MASSIVE NEW WIND FARM is about to go online! This clean energy project created new jobs and economic growth, which is always good for the planet, of course. Don’t be alarmed because fossil fuels built it and it resembles urban sprawl. It’s different this time because we call it Green.
Due to the paucity of wind and sun in broad regions, new transmission corridors are needed, like the planned 780-mile Grain Belt Express Clean Line; a relatively benign example where pristine wilderness isn’t crossed. Unfortunately it’s planned as an overhead series of pylons, despite using new HVDC technology. Underground power lines have cost & maintenance issues, so most hidden lines are necessitated by lakes or oceans. When wild areas are targeted, politically-pressured environmentalists who normally fight clearcuts and lost carbon sinks may have to cave in. Constant attempts are made by wind companies to build in or near wilderness, which usually requires new power lines. Projects at Steens Mountain, OR and Crescent Peak, NV were rebuffed, but pressure will mount, just as it did with the fracking invasion.
The fallacy of “100% Renewable Energy” has become the cornerstone of progressive energy policies and needs to be called out. It’s based on carbon credits posing as “zero carbon” through accounting tricks and venture capital. RE100 is physically impossible with any known technology but the story’s been repeated too often to be quickly debunked. Shiny objects fool people who don’t trace their history. Not one wind turbine or solar panel has been built solely with energy from its kind, and ERoI will always matter in the physical world. When you debate supporters of these projects you often get vague answers about scaling and net energy factors. They don’t want to know because they’ve latched onto something new and it must be better.
The pervasive arrogance of the “renewables” crowd is deeply annoying to deep ecologists. As an example, if you try to post any substantial criticisms of landscape-change-denial to Green New Deal diehards, you’ll get a message like this: “You have been permanently banned from participating in r/RenewableEnergy. …. Note from the moderators: No whitewashing of Nuclear or Fossil Power; No casting doubt about feasability [sic] of Renewables.” In other words, telling the truth about energy sprawl is forbidden by eco-shills who claim to respect nature and open space but do exactly the opposite. It’s the politically-correct version of Trump crying “fake news.”
Imagine a committee of Green New Dealers writing an open letter to The Planet:
Dear Planet Earth:
We’re embarking on an ambitious plan to free the world from fossil fuels and stop climate change while employing the poor in new industries for a bright green future. This will allow us to solve serious energy problems, clean our air & water, and lift people of color out of poverty, all in one cohesive plan.
Oh so happy and green! Never mind the false scale. Cue up the Hallmark music!
Imagine the countryside glistening with beautiful solar lakes and unimaginably tall white forests, far more attractive than grim derricks and gray tailings, and even some living trees. Spin, Baby, Spin! We’ll show nature that we can coexist with it while changing only what we need to. The key is proper siting, and we’ve got plenty of space for that, according to Smart Growth planners. There’s also lots of room for immigrants in our diverse melting pot. Green growth is much different than standard growth-based capitalism.
On the social front, millions of misunderstood urban youth who once dealt drugs, tagged bridges and bumped bass will be happily cleaning solar panels and climbing wind turbines as they spread cool new 3D graffiti and move tasteful infrasound beats into farm & mountain country. These efforts will create countless jobs along with social justice and economic parity. It’s a win-win for nature and people.
We’re obligated to note that these green projects use quite a bit of space, so you’ll have to travel some distance on vacation to see unaffected vistas. But don’t worry, National Parks will remain mostly intact and you’ll get there in electric cars with a 500-mile range! It’s all good. Furthermore, there will be a number of casualties in terms of birds, bats, insects and other displaced species, but special breeding centers will mitigate losses. They may not fly as freely but they’ll be grateful for our help.
We fully expect Planet Earth to understand our wonderful new undertaking and we can hardly wait to get rid of all those ugly coal mines! Below is a sneak preview of Earth’s future using samples from the present. Just imagine this multiplied manyfold (in carefully sited locations). It’s Green so it’s all good!
Scroll down to see just a small fraction of our b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l green future!
If the above looks like a bunch of un-green, bloated construction projects pretending to save the planet, you’re not mistaken. Quoting a famous rocker before climate fears buried aesthetic values, “How can everyone see it and yet be so blind?” The same capacity for denial that causes some people to ignore environmental problems makes others think they’ll be solved by the species that created them. It always comes down to building more stuff all over the place, never true conservation or personal restraint.
Earth, good luck with the Green New Deal if it ever gets fully implemented. This reluctant Democrat can’t support it. See “Roadmap to Nowhere” for one of the better take-downs of the whole scheme.
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“The most beautiful thing about a tree is what you do with it after you cut it down.” – Rush Limbaugh (denial payback)
Record fires burn in California & Oregon (August 2018). “Now is not the time to talk about climate change” say brain-dead Republicans. Such thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.
What sort of ignorant conspiracy-nuts would look at a scene like that and blame it entirely on lack of logging or “job-killing” water regulations while refusing to acknowledge global warming as a major factor? Who would keep parroting rationalizations like “the climate’s changed before” with chronic resistance to established facts and the latest insights?
Stubborn right-wing idiots, that’s who. With all due respect to conservatives who can see the world beyond money, let’s call these people what they really are. We need to thin the deniers, not the trees (housing sprawl justifies understory fire-suppression). It’s long past the point where debates about man-made environmental problems are a case of “agree to disagree.” There’s a swamp of avarice badly in need of draining.
Here are some typical right-wing views on the environment, loaded with greed, pettiness and evil:
They think the economy must grow indefinitely, spurred on by the weakest possible environmental regulations. It’s a mindset of making money and destroying anything that lacks a utilitarian or recreation purpose. They see wilderness-preservation as an economic impediment, unless of course hunting is allowed. Everything’s about human wants, with no intrinsic respect for nature. Zinke under Trump and Watt under Reagan are prime examples of that attitude. Note that “Green Growth” is driven by many of the same attitudes, covered at length elsewhere on this blog.
They decry immigration (wise in a carrying-capacity context) yet defund contraception for impoverished nations, which could actually reduce the pressure. They’d rather build yuugely expensive walls to support resource-guzzling, make-work construction jobs. Their ability to grasp root causes and effects is limited by archaic beliefs and small-mindedness. A typical right-winger wants to know as little as possible about the nuances of a topic and far more about the latest slogans. Mind you, this is also true on the far Left, but they’re more forgiving of racial differences, even though some of it is naive.
Mindless global warming denial is an automatic response from Republicans. CO2 supposedly disobeys the laws of physics just for them. Some of the smarter ones acknowledge the science but would rather tow the party line and keep the threat vague, or throw free-market solutions at it. They “forget” that the free-market necessitated the EPA after decades of industry inaction. They now support filth-mongers like Trump, bent on crippling the EPA’s taken-for-granted progress. This speech by Steven F. Hayward is one of the worst (or rather best) examples of AGW-denial. He’s got no science background but rubes are easily fooled by his calculated language, just as shapely Fox News babes beguile them.
A number of wingnuts literally hate nature and take pride in pillaging it. Look in any comment section on endangered species articles and you’ll find some GOP dirtbag wanting a cost-benefit analysis of its very existence, wishing it gone for economic expedience. “Wipe your ass with a spotted owl” was a popular white trash slogan, as if decimating forests is a good thing. If that’s not an evil, sadistic attitude, what is? Creationism is common among that ilk, with emphasis on “subdue” in Genesis 1:28. One species, arrogant under God, united to destroy.
They call themselves “pro-life” yet resist reasonable gun laws and wrap their egos in firearms (a tool is just a gun). Many enjoy killing non-human life for entertainment and sleazy pseudo-conservation, e.g. smokeapackaday.com. Many “avid hunters” will shoot anything they can label a pest or game animal, often just to test new rifles or bows. Trophy hunters are like people who’d cut down an ancient tree just so they can “own” it. The intrinsic quality of a trophy is lost the moment it’s taken by force. The evil motives of quasi-hunters have become very clear in online media. Here’s what many “sportsmen” are up to, grinning all the while. Clearly morally superior to any subhuman mongrel.
Greedy by nature, with “All the killin’, twice the humor, half the intelligence.” (spot-on slogan for a video game), plus prairie dog serial killers and wasteful diesel coal-rolling.
What exactly is a right-winger vs. an honest conservative? List of basic traits:
Like other crass individuals, these people make few attempts to control their reptilian brains and unrefined amygdalas, but they do it in a specific ideological context framed by ethnic heritage. They wallow in the worst human traits while framing it as a freedom agenda.
They tend to be shifty-eyed, incurious people who claim to be honest and fair but will lie & cheat if something cramps their style. You can tell when you’re speaking to one by a certain blank look, frequent sarcasm and flashes of anger. They like Trump because those behaviors suit him. Evangelicals who voted for Trump were sleazy all along (“mystery” solved).
They’re always gloating about God, guns and greed. The Chosen Ones preach the loudest, shoot the fastest and grab the most resources. They’ve twisted blatant self-interest into a frontier-morality legend. Their false belief that frontiers are still plentiful drives much of their anti-regulation mindset.
They prefer a bare minimum of knowledge to “git ‘er done,” e.g. “I don’t need book learnin’ to remove my catalytic converter and piss off the EPA.” If you ask them to think beyond what they “already lernt” they get agitated, in part because many lack intelligence and are jealous of those who have it. Basic stupidity explains some radical conservatism.
Having general disdain for expertise and intellectuals, they dumb-down complicated topics and over-complicate basic ones to suit ideology. Global warming denial is loaded with that attitude. Global shutdowns due to COVID-19 “coronapanic” (arguably extreme) were lumped in with “climate alarmism” in right-wing circles. Everything’s seen as a government control plot, with different cases and contexts ignored. Worrying about any major topic except bank accounts and gun restrictions is seen as personal frailty.
Morally, they’re the white equivalent of black or Hispanic ghetto thugs, with similar gun and vehicle obsessions. A common thread is “We do whatever we feel like and if others are affected, tough luck.” The appearance of having power, even when unearned, is vital to them.
As with ghetto gang-bangers, everything bad that happens to a right-winger is someone else’s fault, often the government’s. In morally decent countries (which America aspires to be) corrupt people whine the most about “big gub’mint” because they resent how it controls their corruption, which they pass off as “individual rights.”
They fixate on their own rights and everyone else’s responsibilities, choosing to shirk the latter when it cramps their style.
If you catch them doing something morally wrong or illegal, they’re likely to keep doing it just to spite their accusers. Polluting and wasting energy on Earth Day or shooting game out of season are typical examples.
When a right-winger lies about humans having minimal impact, or talks about “plenty of land remaining,” refer them to Google Earth time-lapse imagery. Start by showing them lands with so-called sustainable logging and watch them go silent. Forests are constantly being pillaged because the population never stops growing. The process is also known as “job creation” among those who respect no other benchmark.
Many conservatives apply logic and justifiable cynicism to social issues, but ditch the facts when nature is under discussion. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is a prime example. He calls for personal accountability when making life choices, yet pretends the laws of nature don’t apply to people and it’s OK to be an energy wastrel because Man must “thrive.” He’s claimed to not be a right-winger, yet shares their anti-environmental ideology, portraying concern for the planet as a leftist agenda (social angle, not scientific). Peterson thinks any real acknowledgment of climate change and human overpopulation would slow economic growth, which is all that really matters in that worldview.
Per the topmost photo, this was written while surrounded by forest fire smoke, which gets one thinking about mass stupidity and denial as a political agenda. Don’t just blame the likes of Trump, blame your neighbors who thought he was fit to lead and supported his anti-EPA, monument-shrinking agenda. The current POTUS is merely the latest incarnation of a piss-on-nature mentality that Reagan kicked into high gear. People like that have been around since America was founded, and exist all over the world. They should be corralled in the foulest possible cities while decent people try to do the actual RIGHT thing.
P.S. This author is not technically liberal; just pointing out the worst of human nature from various angles. There are still good conservatives, meaning ones who actually conserve resources and respect wildlife. They unfortunately get drowned out by the far right. More are switching to Independent status but it doesn’t do much for elections.
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“There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” – Herman Daly
The actual ratio of cleared forest to urban land is exponentially larger than this, along with water, food and energy acreage. Most cities are temporary illusions of prosperity.
We can’t preserve nature by coddling the “growing needs” of the very species destroying it. Mainstream environmentalism won’t fully acknowledge that people are committing crimes against nature, even the ones who seem to care. You can’t lower a city’s crime rate by shaking hands with criminals and passing off the problem as fixable attitudes. A vague goal of always giving people “what they need” while achieving balance with nature is like trying to save a house from termites while allowing their colonies to grow and fester.
The evidence is clear when you get past the veneer of endless hope, techno-fixes and greenwashing. We should just admit it and drop the ruse of “sustainability” as more people consume more resources each day. Nature is under a long-term siege because “The Economy” demands it. A POTUS was elected on an EPA-gutting mandate while environmentalists engage in overpopulation-denial to avoid offending immigrants. Rare leaders who promote serious conservation are seen as weak, or enemies of individual freedom (to take as one pleases). Manifest Destiny still prevails, framing wilderness as a place to be feared more than respected. People actually trying to save the biosphere are caught in an expanding charade that bows to economic growth. Wise people should certainly keep trying, but not with optimistic rhetoric that ignores root causes and placates the masses.
Humans are genetically programmed to overcome nature’s hazards simply to stay alive. This includes ruthless survival tactics like lying and cheating to gain advantage. For many centuries these traits had limited impacts on ecosystems, then fossil fuels greatly amplified our ability to harm nature while also enabling a population explosion. The expansion of technology and consumerism turned us from survivors into destroyers. Even well-meaning people behave as if the power balance never shifted from nature to Man. They were born into a system that served their post-industrial ancestors and assume it must be “the way of the world,” so they keep obeying primal instincts in outdated context. They’ll say things like “what a crazy system!” as in fun-crazy instead of terminally corrupt. Some never contemplate the growing scale of human impact or simply don’t care. “People are basically good” doesn’t explain the true state of the world. The belief that God will decide when humans have gone too far is foolish since hardships occur with or without prayer. Christians who practice Creation Care are at odds with Genesis 1:28 and similar Bible passages.
Some conservatives gloat about polluting and pillaging nature, combining ignorance with evil. They also call environmentalism “socialism” when regulations cramp their style. The greedy see greed-control as liberty-infringement. The history of tetraethyl lead in gasoline is typical of toxicity driven by expediency. Its inventor also introduced CFCs, so “big government” regulations have saved many lives. Meanwhile, many liberals who claim to be Green are so concerned about being fair to other cultures that they ignore blatant problems like overpopulation and criminality. Or they push destructive technology like IWTs to protest coal, etc. This complex combination of greed and naivety prevents intelligent policies from being carried out on a meaningful scale. The wealthy may think they’re above nature’s laws while the poor often trash their surroundings, e.g. homeless camps, nonexistent regulations in third-world countries and tropical deforestation. “Environmental & social justice” overlooks shared flaws in human nature. Growing numbers of people from all ranks are stifling environmental progress.
Desperate migrants on an overcrowded boat symbolize carrying-capacity overload. Stubborn pronatalists and cornucopians keep ignoring warnings about tipping points.
In crude but accurate terms, this is how a lot of people think:
I need stuff to live, so don’t question how I make money to get it. I’m special!
Hey, look at their stuff! I need some of that to boost my image and reputation.
I’ll do whatever it takes to get it, so screw the environment if need be. People first!
Is it wise to destroy your very life-support system to accomplish this? (voice of reason)
Look, I gotta feed my kids so get off my case. The guv’mint/tree-huggers just want to control me!
The conversation ends there because they won’t rise above their genetic programming.
Modern cultures are obsessed with economic growth, business and being busy with an industrious, industrial attitude. Action for its own sake is favored over letting things be. Slogans like “work hard, play hard” and “no limits” defy conservation and restraint. Most modern work depletes resources and the mantra of progress is to constantly build something, either physically or monetarily. It’s considered lazy to halt the grind and let nature recover, except temporarily for fallow fields, clearcuts or overfished waters. Everything’s about stock indices, housing-starts and production capacity, measured in flawed GDP terms. The ethos of “hard work” is seen as moral, regardless of what’s being sacrificed. One can feed a family designing war machines, or with barely ethical FIRE Economy schemes, including pyramids and Ponzis. Environmental shortcuts are inevitable in difficult, dirty jobs like mining, drilling, logging, construction and vehicle repair. The unnatural tedium and effort creates a mindset of “dump it in the creek so we can go home.” Workers are told to be grateful for miserable slogs that serve 24/7 manufacturing cycles and superfluous marketing, and union-busting is the trend. Countless jobs require hustling, lying and searching for loopholes, with no shortage of sleazy people willing to do it. Also, the words build and produce are not defined honestly. People merely convert nature into forms convenient to our species with little regard for balance. True production is growth without depletion, like plants fertilized by natural decay. Finite replenishment cycles have been replaced by the infinite allure of fiat money.
The old oil derricks on this CA beach are similar to modern wind turbines except for low-carbon hype. Millions of very large, noisy machines are sought by cleantech hypocrites.
To ostensibly stop all this depletion, the term “renewable energy” gets thrown around, but it’s mostly a new spin on business-as-usual. Man has greatly escalated urban sprawl with things like industrial wind power, discussed at length in other posts here. The main differences between today’s “renewable” and non-renewable sources are partial energy offsets and green slogans. With the exception of dependable, high-ERoI sources like hydroelectric and geothermal, little of the infrastructure is viable without finite fossil fuels and mined raw materials for construction, maintenance and replacement. Greenwashing has millions of naive people convinced that destroying nature to preserve society is reasonable, so hard questions about overpopulation and restraint are unanswered by public policy.
Thanks to an artificial money system, people are the only species that keeps depleting finite resources to make a living. Money is seen as a resource unto itself rather than contrived compensation, thus physical commodity limits are disrespected. Other species don’t need to invent financial schemes merely to stay alive. They (and us to some extent) used to live in balance until we disrupted ancient systems and replaced them with unnatural growth. The mandate to constantly create jobs and build something (“green” or otherwise) drives most modern enterprises. Deliberate job-creation accommodates a surplus of labor and overpopulation. Intrinsically necessary work wouldn’t have to be schemed up or funded with credit, and it wouldn’t create landscapes that resemble mold growth.
As of late 2019, Elon Musk wanted to launch up to 42,000 Starlink satellites, despite astronomers protesting just 60 (center). The net result is more machine overpopulation.
Famous entrepreneur Elon Musk claims to be a green visionary but he’s more about technological showboating than conservation or preservation. He promotes the expansion of “clean” electricity for battery-powered vehicles, which means more wind turbines and solar panels invading open space (see energy sprawl). He’s also using SpaceX to litter low Earth orbit with a constellation of Starlink satellites, despite strong protests from astronomers. Lack of global space regulation gives him (and others, like Amazon) a loophole to try this scheme. It’s the same “disruptive” M.O. used by amateur taxi and electric scooter outfits that clutter-up cities and discourage mass transit. Musk’s initial goal was about 12,000 satellites, then it became a staggering 42,000. He’s well aware of space junk but has rationalized it away by tweeting “We need to move telescopes to orbit anyway.” Allowing restless billionaires to taint what’s left of nature is just wrong. Internet access won’t benefit remote “primitive” tribes who are already sustainable and don’t need to be corrupted by high-tech. The Internet is good in moderation but it’s also causing unnatural social problems and spreading viral lies. There’s no moral mandate to have access everywhere on Earth.
It’s hard to admit that true sustainability looks a lot like ancient hunting and gathering where resources manage themselves naturally (given a small enough population). Understandably, few want to revert to that lifestyle, except with temporary gestures backed up by modern gear. There’s a lot of contextual denial among “back to nature” types. If everyone tried to hunt, fish or survive on backyard farms, we’d quickly learn that agribusiness and dense livestock are the only practical way to feed huge populations. Many bushcraft practitioners make a living from videos these days. The worst hypocrites travel the globe killing wildlife as professional hunters, or enjoy the crass sport of bass fishing with speedboats. Look at how many jobs are based on recreation that mimics true needs from pre-industrial times. Nature needs to survive our growing harshness, not the converse; at least to the point where we destroy its ability to support us. It’s become a contest to see which happens first, Peak Oil or major AGW impacts, both of which are ignored by utilitarian commerce.
Square-mile railroad logging parcels in Oregon symbolize human land-use. When species like bark beetles kill trees they’re a pest, but man-made damage is called “management.”
So-called victories for the environment tend to be islands in a sea of development, and have done relatively little to stop habitat fragmentation. People will save what they perceive as a special grove of trees while clear-cutting the rest, as long as most don’t see it on a regular basis. An ex-logger’s attempt to showcase such hypocrisy backfired when he felled a golden spruce to draw attention to all the clear-cuts surrounding it. A parallel reaction (addition vs. removal) occurs when wind turbines are protested in places like Cape Cod while allowed to ruin vast tracts of lesser-known scenery. On the wildlife front, if a trophy hunter kills an iconic lion, elephant or giraffe they’re vilified online, but countless other animals are shot with the same mentality. The rationalization is that hunting licenses support conservation, but it’s mainly for popular game species, not endangered animals in different habitats.
Man’s ability to develop and denude the planet went viral when fossil fuels made the work much easier. If you study the duties of environmental professionals, you realize they’re mostly cleaning up messes and shuffling population growth into different areas. They have no way to stop the source of the growth, and developers pay them for image-control. Urban planners plan for more destruction while calling it balance. Hands-on efforts like untangling animals from fishing lines or relocating endangered species make little difference as more people put pressure on nature. When root causes are addressed, it’s usually worded to not offend the human perpetrators. You can see why nothing really changes.
Some neo-environmentalists have taken fatalism too far, like terminally ill smokers who believe in reincarnation (examples: 1, 2, 3). They use the demented argument that we can never completely destroy nature (minus runaway nuclear war) therefore “the planet is fine” because nature will “recover” after we’re gone. The degree of recovery and “after we’re gone” date are kept vague to accommodate all future suffering they’ve rationalized as acceptable. Would today’s extinct or soon-to-be species get regenerated, Jurassic Park style, assuming there’s anyone left with such technology? Do they think quality of life now is meaningless to all the species lucky enough to have survived human impact so far? That includes us, you know! The whole narrative is arrogant anthropocentrism, i.e. forget the planet that allows us to live and rescue us from our sins in the absence of viable life-support.
Another twist on fatalism is asking “What are YOU doing about it?” whenever environmental topics come up. For example, a crusty rancher who denies global warming might brag about planting 100 trees, as if that proves he’s mitigating CO2 while you aren’t. It’s a tactic of those who view everything in terms of their own property, not the wider planet. Many people will never own enough land to personally restore it, but if they did they could plant 1,000 trees instead of building a rifle range. It’s all relative to personal leverage. The implication that you must single-handedly do something big or you should shut up about the environment is like saying don’t criticize murder unless you’re a cop who can prevent a few. Of course that’s an imperfect analogy because environmental damage is done by countless “good guys” per society’s standards.
Movies have widespread influence and apocalyptic themes are popular because people know something’s out of balance, but root causes are usually sidestepped. Most plots are sympathetic to human failings or go overboard with zombie plagues and alien invasions. Others use shock value by making overnight catastrophes out of slow-moving problems, e.g. “The Day After Tomorrow.” It ends up inspiring apathy because people see it as unrealistic. In the ecologically-aware 1970s, the film “Z.P.G.” tackled overpopulation but sympathized with people bucking efforts to stop it. A similar plot occurred in “Children of Men” where mass infertility could have been seen as a reprieve from environmental ruin. In the real world, economic recessions mandate conservation but are seen as negative. “They Live” tried to blame consumerism on aliens, with people as hapless victims. “WALL-E” was praised for its environmental message but the director said it was just a subplot. The viral-humans speech in “The Matrix” told the truth, yet a virtual reality cure was unacceptable. Human interest or anti-government themes tend to drown out pragmatic solutions. A society with gravitas about overshoot would face the topic head-on without endless tangents. “Soylent Green” was one of the few films that got to the point, and deserves a sequel. The “nobody cares” scene in “Silent Running” was also truthful. Many television documentaries present grim environmental warnings but usually stay polite to the perpetrators. Educating the public doesn’t help without personal accountability. Billions of complicit people will have to be offended at some point.
Even when they do worry, most people still ignore the 24/7 destruction of their only life source, preferring to dwell on personal matters. Denial is built into the human brain.
If people were seriously planning to save nature it would be echoed in the things they do and say every day, but most still talk about making money (from depletion) feeling good and staying entertained. Watch and listen to your neighbors and co-workers. They’re generally ego-driven, hedonistic and impatient, with nature as a mere backdrop for their scarce leisure time. They keep electing leaders with similar values, then blame them for societal ills. The relative few who make sacrifices for the environment (beyond token recycling) or live at a slower pace are seen as “not with the program.” The Internet provides some hope with an echo chamber of wise people fighting all this denial, but they’re vastly outnumbered. If you talk among average people about what’s really happening you’ll be called a doomer, or get blank stares as the subject is changed to something upbeat, especially at work where it’s understood that “we’re here to make money.”
One grain of hope is that religious leaders can convince people to worship nature over anthropocentric gods, and not be ridiculed as pagans. Endless sermons tell people to live for a higher purpose, but it usually comes back around to them at the center. Creation Care advocates and preachers like Michael Dowd are trying to shift the focus to nature, and Pope Francis seems partly enlightened, but we really need a mass behavior-shift miracle. Many “doomer” articles offer hope at the end but ecological epiphanies are unlikely. So far there’s no evidence that enough people care about their true source of life to protect it from profit-driven sprawl and banality. This doesn’t mean don’t try your best, but more damage can be caused by making hasty choices when you don’t see root causes.
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“The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behavior.” – Stephen Hawking
If you walk through almost any city you’ll see people idling their engines at zero MPG, often fooling with their smartphones or GPS devices. They seem oblivious to their surroundings and time itself. Sometimes it goes on for 30+ minutes, including situations where someone stands outside talking with the driver. Oil-wasters are easiest to spot at night when glowing screens and headlights give them away. Unsurprisingly, they waste bulbs like they waste oil, thinking “I’ll just buy more.” When the price of fuel is modest, idle-waste tracks with general apathy more than income. It’s a way of life in America; get inside, turn the key and don’t even think about where oil comes from as long as you can “afford the gas.” Gratuitous fuel squandering isn’t new but mobile entertainment has made it notably worse. The phenomenon peaks during extreme weather but it happens in all seasons and the apathy is obvious.
These wastrels could at least limit idling on hot and cold days by parking in the shade when possible, or blasting the heater before they park, letting residual heat linger inside. Also, a big 12-volt battery won’t get drained by charging a much smaller phone without the alternator. All it takes is some forethought and a general conservation ethic.
Who really cares about oil depletion or global warming? This is America! We have better things to do, like checking Twitter and keeping the interior above a lethal 55-degrees.
Unburned diesel fuel, T&A, and a good ol’ time at the expense of others. Ain’t that the American way? You betcha! Gluttonous and proud. We’re gettin’ ours!
Many large pickup trucks are bought as crass status symbols or ego-boosters (similar to pseudo-hunting pursuits). Diesel drivers are known for excessive idling despite modern engines requiring much shorter warm-ups and turbo cool-downs. A number of them are wannabe semi-truck drivers who like the sound and torque aspects. Truck-stop idling itself is a major source of waste, though APUs are helping. The worst diesel offenders “roll coal” on other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. They’re scumbags but they’re also more honest than passive idlers in terms of environmental consequences. Overall, more fuel is wasted in cities due to sheer numbers of people. Country air is cleaner for lack of population density, not because residents put more effort into it. They take that for granted when they defy emissions controls with ego-mods, including removing catalytic converters to fight the EPA’s “back-pressure conspiracy.” Some install pedal-response boosters like the Banks PedalMonster to override mild delays designed for better MPG. Rural air would be even cleaner if fuel pumps had vapor recovery nozzles and two-stroke engines were phased out on thrillcraft. Average folk do things the cheapest, laziest way they can get away with.
Another common waste of fuel occurs at car dealerships and rental companies. An agent will walk up to a vehicle, open the door and immediately turn on the engine while describing its features. Are they trying to entice you to test drive it? With rental cars they already know you’ll be taking it, so why squander fuel you’ll have to replace anyhow? Techniques from the old days of looser engine tolerances still encourage pointless idling. In most weather you shouldn’t have to idle more than 10-30 seconds for full oil pressure. Engineering manuals suggest warming up by driving as soon as possible at moderate speeds, which warms the drivetrain along with the engine so it isn’t shocked by acceleration. Some claim that stopping and restarting a warm engine causes wear but there’s always a sheen of oil protecting the metal (otherwise, hybrid engines would fail prematurely). Remote starters are often abused as pointless gadgets rather than a warm-up method for very cold days. Cold starts have higher metal-on-metal risk but oil remains trapped in the rings overnight. Vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances have excuses for idling (to power equipment) but it can still be reduced. Chronic speeding is also a major source of waste. Efficiency plummets in top gear at speeds much over 60 MPH, and even hybrid drivers join mobs of tailgaters (Jevons paradox). 80 MPH speed limits in several states force frugal drivers to speed to avoid tailgaters. Calculations vary, but Americans alone waste at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day.
The only thing that really makes average people conserve oil is a price increase, which they quickly forget if it falls again. Over-hyped reserves of oil-bearing shale and OPEC’s deliberate overproduction (to starve U.S. frackers) temporarily wiped the 2008 oil price spike from Americans’ memory, and they’ll be caught off guard when it returns. At the time of this posting, oil prices had crept back into the upper $60’s after being flat for many months. SUV and V8 sales had risen as prices dropped and placated the herd, but the world was burning upwards of 90 million barrels a day all the while. That’s oil we won’t get back (abiotic oil is a conspiracy theory). We’ll see how long this recent price increase holds, but anyone who claims oil is infinite doesn’t understand geological processes. Creationist fables are behind a lot of that thinking.
When the “official” Peak Oil finally hits, millions of people will be indignant at first. Being willfully ignorant of oil’s physical limits, they’ll try to blame scarcity on “lack of drilling,” even if rapacious EPA-haters are still in the White House. They refuse to see that the fracking of shale for oil and natural gas is not an actual increase in physical reserves. There’s less of it in the ground every second and it will cost more to extract as sources get tighter. The world can burn a billion barrels of oil in ten days, so don’t be impressed when some huckster hypes recent discoveries in the billions. Peak Oil deniers are invariably educated in finance, not geology. Pseudo-petroleum sources like kerogen are an ERoI fallacy, hyped into “trillions of barrels” by wild speculators. Also, renewable energy infrastructure like bloated wind turbines can’t exist without fossil fuels and “100% renewable energy” claims are deviously optimistic. Increased “production” of ancient, condensed resources just means people are getting desperate and using newer extraction methods. Horizontal drilling isn’t a major leap, just a refinement of old techniques, but it suits the “technology will save us” narrative. After a point, there’ll be no new tricks and nobody else to blame for the squandering of finite energy.
These graphs follow the law of diminishing returns, even if the curves aren’t fully predictable. The number of nations already past peak production debunks abiotic oil theory.
Peak Oil is inevitable. Renewable energy can’t match the scale of fossil fuels, nor can it be built without them. It’s also ruining landscapes that old energy didn’t disturb.
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“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” – Edward Abbey
At least spare the mountains, you soulless utilitarians! Ruined peaks in Japan, California, Hawaii & Austria show a small fraction of the desecration this fickle power source requires.
Industrial wind turbines are arguably the most misguided, bloated technology ever invented. Instead of saving the planet, utilitarian zombies are sTaving it with carbon-dependent sprawl, dishonest slogans and misleading capacity data. Wind energy’s acreage requirements dwarf equivalent output from modern nuclear & natural gas power plants (many wind factories would sputter without gas backup). Big Wind is a prime example of corporate greenwashing in plain sight. Physics-defying claims for “100% Renewable Energy” have made wind energy “too big to fail” while it keeps getting physically bigger. Its impacts on scenery and wildlife have irreversibly corrupted the definition of environmentalism and its supporters are in too deep to admit their mistakes.
Windschmerz, a newly coined word*, describes the sinking feeling of witnessing a huge industrial plague being spun as good for the environment despite its obvious negative impacts. A good companion word is klugly (kludgy + ugly). And disenchanted Germans compare turbine towers to unsightly asparagus, calling them Verspargelung der Landschaft.
Instead of constraining the human footprint with serious conservation, rooftop solar and fast-tracked nuclear (e.g. safer molten salt reactors), people decided to turn rural lands into industrial parks. If this urban mega-sprawl is the new environmentalism, nature has a slim chance of remaining intact anywhere the wind blows and transmission lines are feasible.
Wind turbines are so absurdly large that one can only view them with profound disappointment or concoct stories about their “beauty” to distract from the obvious blight. Mainstream environmental groups have done exactly that, along with sneaky obfuscation of noise and wildlife threats. Whatever happened to “small is beautiful” in environmental circles? The Sierra Club, NRDC, The Union of “Concerned” Scientists, and even Audubon have sold out to platitudes like “wind is a vital part of our energy mix” (despite its futility as a fossil fuel replacement) and “they can be carefully sited” (despite growing protests as unsullied views run out). Something is rotten in Windmark when self-proclaimed environmentalists chide people for lamenting the replacement of natural horizons with spiky machines.
The dictionary needs another new word: windvironmentalist (Noun: A sellout/shill for Big Wind companies, or naive youth who think 500-foot machines are only the size of Tinkertoys.)
Even though it’s the environmental equivalent of trying to prevent arson with vandalism, wind power has a momentum that’s hard to control because an Environmental-Industrial Complex has grown around it, propped up with slick cover stories. When thousands or millions of jobs depend on massive construction projects, moral objectivity gets lost in the stampede. Anything green about this hulking enterprise has been a farce since the 1990s. A whole government/industry PR machine is dedicated to pretending these giants are midgets.
Independent climate activists like Greta Thunberg are sending mixed messages on this issue. She sailed across the Atlantic as an apparent symbol of wind power, yet implores governments to “do something” as they obliterate nature with that very thing. She’s at least one of the few questioning “green growth” but it’s hard to find specifics.
Windschmerz is a variant of the German word weltschmerz (world pain or sadness) focused on a specific technology that’s destroying nature while claiming to save the planet. Germany has been a test-case for this misguided form of progress with its Energiewende mandate. They went all the way with their landscape holocaust, driven by a zeal reminiscent of an earlier one. Germany’s scenic legacy has effectively been exterminated, especially in northern regions. Just as with earlier extremism, they mostly sat by and let it happen. They’ve built over 30,000 wind turbines (density equivalent of 826,000 in America) with little net CO2-reduction, due to additional carbon sources needed to back up wind, and social factors like the Jevons paradox. Germany serves as a scale model (or omen) for energy sprawl nightmares like the Green New Deal.
This map is merely from 2011 and it resembles a viral plague. Some wise locals warned of its futility decades go but legendary German persistence & insanity won out.
Despite getting a quarter of their electricity from nuclear power at one point, Germany plans to close all their nuclear plants by 2022, spurred in part by overreaction to the Fukushima tsunami event. This seems insane, since Germany hasn’t had major accidents, and newer technologies like molten salt can make nuclear far safer. By shuttering nuclear capacity, Germany not only dooms its landscape with more “clean energy” blight, it must safely dispose of nuclear waste away from temporary power station sites. It makes no economic sense to do this while trying to reduce carbon, since wind and solar will always need backup. One gets the impression that German governance will always be driven by strange emotions, well-meaning and otherwise.
Even if remote areas are spared from the Big Wind invasion, millions of acres of “near wilderness” on the outskirts of cities could become wind factories. Such lands are under constant threat as UGB zoning laws are weakened for utilitarian purposes. The industry seems happy to keep trashing scenery and wildlife until these eyesores are too thick for even the most deludedGreens. It used to be conservatives who didn’t respect landscapes but liberals have been successfully brainwashed by these scenery-eaters. It happened on the sly without adequate warning, mainly in Europe at first. Machine overpopulation gets similar reactions to denials of human overpopulation. “Isn’t this how modern life is supposed to be?” But, like the frog in a pot of water analogy, the masses will someday wake up and ask “What the hell happened to all the scenery?”
Comparison of moderately large wind turbines to a cellular tower (disguised as a tree by public demand) and the Metaphor: Tree of Utah sculpture, often called a desert eyesore.
The desert is especially at risk because greentechies consider it “wasted space” that mu$t be used for utilitarian purposes. The animation below is part of the Alta Wind Energy Center east of Tehachapi, CA, which has held the record for biggest wind project in America. Another large area along I-10 north of Palm Springs has long been an ugly IWT experiment, blighting views of San Gorgonio mountain. Arid Texas landscapes are littered with vast wind turbine armies; no surprise, given their anti-environmental legacy. Texas shows that the nuts & bolts of wind power are hardly liberal anymore. One of the most inappropriate (“carefully sited”) locations is Spring Valley, roughly 8 miles northwest of Great Basin National Park, NV and half that distance to a major bat cave. There was a temporary shut down for bat-kills and biased workers can’t be trusted to track mortality.
The existence of eagle take permits shows that these “100% Renewables” icons are sanctioned to kill, despite industry attempts to deny the problem. Researchers are trying to trick eagles with sounds (on top of existing noise) to help them avoid wind turbines, but they ought to question the very existence of flyway gauntlets. Wind factories kill scenery along with wildlife and have been futile at reducing CO2. Their biggest pragmatic function is a construction industry gravy train. Big Wind claims that mitigation efforts will eventually work but the very premise of keeping birds and bats out of vast areas is implausible. The very existence of huge machines in flyways can discourage birds from using some routes, but that’s a Faustian benefit! Wind turbines are intruders, period. You have to either stop building them or accept that further carnage is inevitable and drop the “green” lie.
There are several ways people create unnatural landscapes:
Gouging or drilling, e.g. mining, blasting, roads and wells.
Removing plant cover with logging, farmland plowing, etc.
Building structures for cities, factories and energy production.
Wind energy projects do all of the above except for deep drilling, and they are now the tallest structures in rural areas, especially on mountaintops which amplify their long-range visibility. The starkness of their contrast to natural surroundings is not just about size. Nothing else on that scale catches the eye with rotation, plus the shadow-flicker it creates. Mandatory red lights also intrude on skies that never had them. Wind power advocates downplay those obvious impacts, and ride on the psychological notion that anything (appearing to) fight carbon must not be causing harm. It’s a very narrow definition of harm, convenient to the industry’s agenda of grabbing subsidies for new construction projects.
Here are structures that environmentalists have routinely protested:
BILLBOARDS (nowhere near the scale of industrial wind turbines)
ROADS (wind turbine access roads encourage other intrusions in wild areas)
HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS (aka urban sprawl)
SKI LIFTS (similar to wind energy’s impacts on mountains, but much smaller)
CELLULAR TOWERS (even 80-foot ones can spoil a view)
SMOKESTACKS (resemble wind towers sans blades and are less numerous)
TRANSMISSION LINES and TOWERS (commonly called PYLONS in Europe)
RADIO ANTENNAS (gray, skinnier, don’t stand out like wind turbines)
MOUNTAINTOP MINING (wind turbines just carve up mountains differently)
OIL DERRICKS and PLATFORMS (usually less visible at long range than wind towers)
DAMS (dam removal is considered progress but wind turbines dam the sky)
When developers tear up slopes for a new ski resort, environmentalists often resist, but much bigger wind turbines are rationalized as “beautiful clean energy for a green future!”
Lone smokestacks get demolished for aesthetic reasons, but guess what they look like when you add blades and plant thousands of them on fields, ridgelines and oceans?
Why are industrial wind turbines allowed to break so many old rules respecting nature? The worst wind pimps display no humility about their goals. They just want to build, build and build some more, like other rapacious enterprises. History is repeating itself in the context of petroleum replacing whale oil (literally saving the whales) while wind power now tries to replace oil by killing scenery, trees, birds, bats & insects. It’s a full-circle techno-fix blunder.
No matter how many airheads call them “beautiful,” wind turbines will always impact millions of people and animals in negative ways. The industry wants to expand what we see today by orders of magnitude if they can get away with it. Biologist E.O. Wilson’s plan for setting aside half of nature is already impossible. These machines are a colossal aesthetic blunder that doesn’t require number-crunching to analyze. All you need is eyes, ears and environmental awareness. They aren’t replacing older industrial scars like coal mines; they’re just adding to the total human impact. The moment wind turbines began expanding beyond their experimental beginnings and corporations got involved, it was inevitable that this would happen. The goal is to make them as tall as possible to catch elusive winds, which means they will never become less visible. It’s also a pipe dream that they can be made quiet or safe for flying animals. Most people in the industry must know this, which makes them doubly full of it.
One of the few contexts where wind turbines don’t look out of place, though these aren’t the largest models. Seen at ground level they still loom over most structures.
This wind project resembles coal mining mountaintop removal, yet some people only criticize the latter. They must see the similarities, so intact nature is not their true priority.
The 2018 Kilauea eruption generated publicity for “damaging” Hawaii even though it’s a natural force. Much more attention should be paid to relentless man-made destruction of tropical landscapes. The image below shows Maui’s Kaheawa Wind Power project occupying a significant piece of the island, with the smaller Auwahi project to the south (yellow ovals). The Kahuku project on Oahu was initially more ambitious but ran into problems, including a battery storage fire. Later, proposed 650-foot wind turbines in the same area prompted outcries over bat kills and further losses of scenery. Wind power sprawl on small land masses makes a clear case for their limits. The Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea is a similar case of construction overshoot, protested by those who still respect nature’s integrity. Another island in the crosshairs of Big Wind is Robbins Island, north of Tasmania. As usual, scenery and birds are under threat, and the project is opposed by people like former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, who successfully fought a dam on Tasmania’s Gordon River. The similarities between damming water and damming air should be evident but the latter gets preferential treatment now.
This shows the scale of just two Maui wind projects. A 5-mile access road was needed for Kaheawa (left & center panels, larger yellow oval). Auwahi is circled at the bottom.
Compounding the bleakness of this hypocritical sprawl, a sizable number of wind energy opponents are global warming deniers who think wind turbines were invented expressly to fight climate change and must be part of a Green/NWO cabal to infringe on their property rights. Equally thickheaded people might claim cancer is a hoax due to its association with unpleasant/ineffective chemotherapy. Donald Trump (environmental idiot savant on wind power) is a famous critic. Trump’s claim that wind turbines cause cancer was a gift to the industry, but they are a cancerous growth on the landscape. The “unbiased” FactCheck.org claimed “Trump Again Overblows Risks of Wind Power” but they lied about noise, birds and low-wind days vs. grid stability. UK writer James Delingpole is another example of someone who laments one type of environmental harm but ignores another. A promising book by an “ecologist,” called “The Wind Farm Scam” is tainted by climate denial and it’s common in other books like “Paradise Destroyed…” These people make reasonable points about the economic & environmental hypocrisy of wind sprawl, yet foolishly question the existence of gaseous atmosphere sprawl. Some otherwise clever sites like StopTheseThings are strewn with climate “skepticism” and get blacklisted on sites like SourceWatch as fossil fuel shills. Some critics, like Joanne Nova, market themselves as former “believers” in AGW, but have ditched the scientific method for conspiracist ideation. A similar anti-wind blogger seemed to flip-flop on whether AGW was real (before, after) with the common rural angle that people should do what they please until an obvious local offense occurs. Both sides of this debate try to vilify opponents instead of tackling intrinsic flaws in growth-based capitalism.
Ecomodernist Michael Shellenberger, nuclear power advocate and author of Apocalypse Never, is among a schizoid branch of environmentalists who see that wind (and solar) use too much open space, but refuse to admit that humans are overpopulated, just like their machines. He gets the sprawl problem but can’t bring himself to blame it directly on people. As a critic of Malthusian logic, Shellenberger thinks too much like an SJW (liberal roots) to understand that poor people aren’t fundamentally different than others in their desires. They’re pillaging nature by sheer numbers, if not personal consumption. Widespread wildlife decimation occurs in Asia and Africa via poaching, bushmeat, etc. All of this is happening alongside renewable energy sprawl, which further reduces wildlife habitat. Nuclear power is clearly needed for a smaller energy footprint, but if you’re claiming to be an environmentalist, it’s weird to dismiss the impact of people themselves.
Lesser-educated rural people are often caught in siting battles and add GOP ignorance to the wind debate. Some see corrupt officials like Scott Pruitt as righteous warriors against “unfair” EPA regulations while ignoring commonalities of all industrial developments. Even though their suffering is very real, they hurt their own cause with climate conspiracy theories. They should treat wind power as one of many rural threats, like deforestation (major component of wind projects), noise pollution from boom cars in rural drug ghettos, and homes sprawling into wild areas. It’s unclear how many rural anti-wind activists are OK with coal mining mountaintop removal but they should realize it’s all part of the pillaging continuum, regardless of whether it pays their bills (where wisdom ends and greed prevails). Their mindset of “us against city-slickers” distracts from everything the wind business has in common with fossil fuel, mining and logging interests.
Wind energy is the opposite of small-footprint thinking that real environmentalists should favor. It thrives on a single-action bias that fails to consider total environmental impact. It’s part of the same engineering mindset that destroys nature for money in the fossil fuel business. The standard ploy is that carbon is THE environmental demon and must be fought at any cost, though many wind farm workers are interchangeable with frackers. They are industrial mercenaries who do what they’re told and cash their checks. At least the old environmental villains weren’t overtly trying to fool people.
The next time you look at a horizon full of mutant pinwheels and windschmerz hits you, just let it happen. Then get angry and join the fight to stop them. We need more conscientious objectors to the industrial war on nature, beyond fossil fuels. It’s too late to help in many regions but some famous environmentalists have called for sanity. Germany has seen major resistance due to its high turbine density and VernunftKraft (translated) is one of the better known sites. Here are links to many other groups trying to do something locally and nationally. Hopefully, a few mainstream environmental groups will wise-up before these things metastasize. Small modular nuclear reactors could be the best hope for an alternative if the public can get over old fears.
“In some way or other, the human race has to learn how to leave the world alone.” – Alan Watts
These skeletal skyscrapers don’t belong in rural or wild places. They ominously loom over the countryside like nothing else ever invented.
Evil is a much better word than “beautiful” when you study the entirety of these machines. How can legit environmentalists support the scale of this mess? Anti wind power bumper sticker: MEAN ENERGY: NOT CLEAN, NOT GREEN (click for large version)
This page may be updated and reworded at random with new information. If you cite it, please post the link instead of a pasted snapshot. *The word “windschmerz” (with no spaces) may have been first used here, but nobody owns the definition.
“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.” – Aldo Leopold
This type of mountaintop removal is praised by many coal mine haters. Wind projects don’t remove as much rock but they add stark, unnatural structures. R.I.P. Mars Hill, Maine.
For this “green” experiment, 12 miles of Laurel Mountain, West Virginia were industrialized, including a battery storage gesture that tries to make wind seem non-transient.
Early explorers would have seen this as an enemy gauntlet, and modern gut reactions are similar. There should be a penalty for ruining unbroken vistas.
All night long, synchronized red FAA obstruction lights flash on and off like an alien airport. They disorient drivers and some locals must black-out their windows to sleep.
Unsettling numbers of environmentalists fail to see that wind turbines are enemies of nature posing as saviors. Fearing a fossil fuel catastrophe, they’ve hastily abandoned their land ethic if they ever had one. Wind energy in the abstract sense is clean and natural, but the physical manifestation of how people “harvest” wind is big and unnatural by necessity. Wind power zealots can’t admit that ruining the countryside with obscenely large towers is a continuum of the “build, build, build!” mentality that’s destroyed nature throughout history. It’s the towering, spinning version of “drill, baby, drill!” and supply-side ideology over conservation. Wind energy promoters push the fable that their emperor isn’t an ungainly giant who cuts down trees, blasts ridges, kills airborne animals and tortures ground-based ones with blight and noise. They claim to be environmentalists but they’re really ecomodernists gesturing against fossil fuels for new income streams. Their corporate lingo makes it obvious. Ancient respect for landscapes, including modest human additions, has been replaced with sterile slogans about “installed capacity” and “market share of renewables.” The presumption that nothing’s workable unless someone’s profiting guarantees that nature will shrink. Any talk of shrinking economies (the true solution) is shunned since modern systems thrive on growth and slogans of the moment like “clean energy.” Since genetic traits are hard-wired, the avarice may never stop until society crashes like a brakeless wind turbine.
The original point of environmentalism was buffering nature from all human intrusions and toxins, not just fighting a specific type of pollution. Wind cheerleaders have decided that giant, mechanical weeds are green because they “must” be green. Many would probably accept dirt bikes and ATVs crawling all over hills and dunes as long as they had electric motors. Today’s “sustainability” is much more about coddling civilization than protecting nature. Some younger people may not understand what “the environment” is beyond AGW warnings they’ve heard since childhood. To become well-rounded environmentalists they should study the history of physical landscape destruction, which began with agriculture, logging & mining but has entered a major new phase with wind power. Nature has a bleak future unless this industry is restrained. It’s a tragic case of blight for naught when you see how ineffectual wind turbines really are. An all-electric economy may never be possible without earthbound nuclear fusion in portable configurations. Armies of ugly wind towers are doing nothing for nature itself.
Landscape-change denial has become as bad as climate-change denial and it’s worse in a hypocritical sense. The Kochs and Pruitts of the world at least aren’t pretending to be green. Large industrial wind turbines are becoming the ugliest evidence of the Anthropocene, creating an unprecedented visual plague with over 350,000 already installed as of 2019. Benign depictions of wind turbines “dotting” the landscape should be changed to “stabbing” and “blighting.” Nothing else is as tall, widespread, stark and kinetic. As with climate change or cancer in the initial stages, honest discussions of wind power must include its future potential spread, not just what’s known today. The industry seeks to fill up every possible “wind resource zone” and there’s no precedent for machines of this size and quantity, especially in scenic areas. Their closest rivals are offshore oil rigs which are far less numerous, not seen from inland areas, and not designed for permanence. Some future schemes call for nearly 4 million wind turbines but backlash is already strong because people can no longer ignore their presence.
Below is a list of wind industry propaganda and rationalizations, with responses.
“We think wind turbines are beautiful.” Why should the alien aesthetics of a subsidy-chasing industry be accepted as the new normal? Natural scenery is integral to quality of life and should never be disrespected. They started building these mutant thistles without a real vote, knowing the impacts would be major. When you call something beautiful you must do it in the context of what it replaced, altered, devalued or ignored. Wind turbines at a distance may look slender and elegant compared to blocky oil rigs but it’s absurd to only mention that angle when there are so damned many, and their size, albedo and motion make them impossible to unsee. The axiom “everything in moderation” has never been truer. Rare wind turbines in urban settings can look interesting but most end up in rural or wild areas where they upset the historical sense of place and cause anger, sadness and depression. When a smug shill tells you to adapt and get over it, you realize what the industry is really about. Some turbine-lovers say power lines are ugly even though new transmission corridors are built for wind sites through remote lands. It’s impossible to avoid environmental hypocrisy in the wind business. Certain people have never respected nature’s grandeur without man-made “improvements.” It tends to be a Creationist or anthropocentric engineering mindset. Wind turbines are the biggest structures being forced onto landscapes by the same types who used to interrupt rivers (see below). Where’s the moral consistency? If wind factories are intrinsically attractive, why would anyone reject them anywhere? The cases of Crescent Peak, NV and Ocean City, MD prove that wind developers are indifferent to scenery, and often live thousands of miles from their projects. In the overrun UK, people are rightfully comparing them to War Of The Worlds tripods or marauding Triffids. In rural landscapes it goes against evolution to accept mechanical monsters as natural. This author’s gut reaction to “they’re beautiful” isn’t fit to print, but this picture will suffice.
“Would you rather live near a coal mine or wind farm?” This tactic has come to be known as whataboutism. It’s a misleading diversion, since far more people are dealing with visible wind turbines now, and coal mines are known damage. Mines also tend to be hidden at depth or obscured by ridges, whereas three-armed bandits are deliberately prominent. The effect is profoundly unnatural, with circular motion being a major component. They don’t sway like trees or break like waves, and their noise and red lights grate on nerves. Unlike fossil fuel development, wind projects aren’t limited by geology so they affect districts that never expected to see urban mega-sprawl. Zoning laws are relaxed because they’re “green” and few people predicted their eventual size. As of this writing, the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign is run by a woman who fought mountaintop removal but is OK with miles of giant spikes adorning similar Appalachian peaks. Even fracking is much less vertically intrusive and its sites can be restored (water is a separate issue; this isn’t a fossil fuel apologist site). The wind mob knows many people resent their unexpected invasions but they keep rationalizing the spread. Their money/subsidy motivations are covered in depth elsewhere.
“We’ve built silos, water towers and pylons in the countryside for decades. Wind turbines merely continue that tradition.” This is the mealy-mouthed, greenwashed equivalent of “the climate’s changed before, so why worry now?” Nobody who respects scenery can ignore what’s really happening. Who would pretend there aren’t exponential scale-increases in the wind power domain vs. older structures? There was no ability to build blades and cylindrical towers so large in the old days. Nothing with this uniquely visible combination of size, color and quantity was ever seen in rural areas. Even taller radio towers are less contrasty and fade better into the distance, with far fewer of them. You have to wonder if some wind-pushers have lousy scale interpretation. Are they blinded by perspective and see them like this? That’s doubtful. The most likely explanation is apathy about the loss of rural aesthetics, plus standard shill-spin.
“They will replace fossil fuels and help stop global warming.” This also fails the evidence test, since wind turbines merely stretch fossil fuels by using them to grab a less consistent form of energy (there are parallels to a hydrogen economy that needs energy to isolate it from water, gas or biomass). True wind power ERoI calculations can be complex, with mountaintop trees and other carbon sinks lost during construction. You can’t build or transport such absurdly large machines with electric power; you need heavy mining & smelting equipment and big diesel trucks to move them around. Due to wind’s intermittent nature, wind power can’t work on the grid without a backup energy source, often gas, coal or nuclear. In many cases it’s been shown that CO2 emissions have actually risen as backup plants are installed in new areas to accommodate fickle winds. Some historical wind patterns are already changing along with the climate and we could see many more idle turbines. If you think Germany’s ambitious Energiewende is an economic or popular success, watch this “wind turbine battle” video and research their CO2 balance sheet.
“We can carefully site wind turbines to minimize their impact.” Terms like “careful siting,” “proper siting” and “responsible siting” are farcical on a finite planet with finite zones of adequate wind and limited open space within those zones. In wind power’s 1970s infancy there were few protests because people saw it as a limited-scale experiment, but the monster escaped its cage and there are ever-fewer places left to build them after every new installation. In 2007, before the U.S. wind industry exploded, the National Academies Press published a detailed analysis of all the problems discussed here. Wind turbines back then were smaller in size & scope but it was clear that they were an “invasive species.” Now, too much land is already developed and wind power just adds to existing blight. Wind energy advocates think their giant machines can’t be ugly due to a righteous anti-carbon message but landscape blight didn’t vanish as an issue when global warming took center stage. Turbine apologists say that smokestacks are ugly but wind towers just add blades to the same general structure. The industry talks of making towers even bigger to work in lower wind areas, and concrete may become a means to that end, with a more smokestack-like appearance. Will they keep calling them beautiful? Some wind drones do admit that turbines blight landscapes, and they think offshore wind factories are the answer but it’s not cost effective to install them at distances where they’re invisible from shore. Many people see an unbroken ocean horizon as a basic right. Where else can you look to “infinity” without disruption? Ocean-based turbines also tend to be the largest models and harder to hide. See calculators for visibility at a distance, which the industry probably views as burdensome.
“Wind turbines occupy relatively little acreage.” Popular influencer Neil deGrasse Tyson repeated this deception in the 2014 Cosmos remake, along with the fable of “100% renewable energy.” He perpetuated the myth of wind tower-bases as the only intrusions among vast arrays of preternaturally large machines, like only noticing the bottom floors of skyscrapers. It’s the same rationalization the GOP uses for ANWR oil drilling, citing “only 2,000” affected acres that would actually sprawl over 1.5 million acres. A direct parallel is Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, which claims to need only about 2,000 acres of a 320,000-acre ranch but would actually sprawl over 229,000 acres (see map) and require hypocritical eagle-take permits. Most environmental groups understand the ANWR ruse, so who are they kidding? See the NRDC ANWR land-grab map vs. their wind energy platitudes. The Union of Concerned Scientists also tows that line, apparently unconcerned with scenery. Any industrial complex has a footprint of its total encompassed acreage, including access roads. The whole area becomes aesthetically tainted and cannot be classified as natural anymore. The greater separation of wind towers as heights increase just widens the sprawl zone. The industry also pretends home values aren’t affected when turbines are in the viewshed. A number of people have simply moved away, as they might with any lousy, permanent neighbor. Such large machines are difficult to remove for legal and financial reasons, even when decommissioned, e.g. Falmouth, MA. Those who claim turbines can be a bridge technology, later dismantled, are not facing facts. Their roads and cement bases may remain for centuries and energy put into building them is wasted now.
“Rich people just don’t want their view spoiled.” With this canard, the wind mob plays the common man sympathy card while trivializing the importance of scenery to quality of life. It’s also an admission that “wind turbines are beautiful” is a damned lie. When Donald Trump fought an offshore wind farm near his Aberdeen, Scotland golf course, it was used as dual proof of wealth and climate-denial conspiring against innocent wind machines. In truth, some very humble people live in or travel through scenic areas, and wildlife has no voice when homewreckers arrive. Wind companies often target cash-strapped farmers to bribe them for land-grabs. Some carbon-obsessives think tarnished scenery is our penance for fossil fuel use, but the subsidy-hungry industry pushes the same growthist agenda as the rest of the economy, using green sales pitches for a sense of urgency to ruin landscapes. Maine and Vermont are notable examples with remote mountains in the crosshairs. West Virginia has already been spoiled with eyesores like the Laurel Mountain project, with its additional battery storage blight. North Carolina set the rare precedent of banning all but the smallest mountaintop wind turbines in 2009, but it’s unclear how long it will last. The rural poor get caught in situations where a neighbor is paid to host turbines but one could be 10 feet from their property line and create nothing but noise. A number of wind executives are quite rich but how many would live near their own contraptions? T. Boone Pickens didn’t want turbines on his own land when pushing a Texas wind power scheme. He literally called them ugly. Just as with oil & gas, weak land use regulations in Texas have allowed the rapid spread of wind projects. The conflict between the King and Kenedy ranches was a good example.
“Cats, cars and windows kill more birds than wind turbines.” People who parrot that excuse show the same glibness toward life as they do scenery. Also, cars or store windows never claimed to be saving the world. More birds will obviously die as more turbines are built on this finite planet, so the “X kills more than Y” diversion becomes less true with every wind-sword placed in a flyway. There are no house-cats in many areas where wind turbines are installed, and the species of birds are often different, e.g. large raptors that rarely succumb to other animals. Birds tend to be mentioned first in mortality discussions but the plight of bats is worse. Read these articles. Bats can’t escape wind turbine blades via sonar and are actually drawn to them. Even when they avoid the blades, they die from pressure shocks as they pass by, and few other machines can duplicate that effect. Insects are also dying in great numbers, which affects food chains from the bottom up. Why would any “green” technology be causing death on a regular basis? A job description for a fatality monitoring technician near Minot, SD is frank about the problem. Even with growing evidence that wind turbines function as apex predators, the rationale is that AGW could eventually kill more wildlife, stacked on the assumption that wind energy will stop AGW, so let’s keep building more; a Faustian bargain at best. Given human greed, the most likely outcome is a warmer and uglier planet with more dead wildlife.
“People who complain about wind turbine noise are NIMBY liars.” This is a puerile denial of the obvious. You can’t claim that gigantic machines intercepting large volumes of air won’t affect the soundscape! Listen to the air-roar of a mere 20″ box fan, then ask yourself how something vastly larger with a driven generator can be quiet. Just two large turbines in Falmouth, MA angered enough people to get them shut down. The noise is complex in its manifestations and topography, yet fundamentally simple; friction and mechanical resonance creates sound. The industry uses the complex aspects to distract from the blatant ones, especially in opinion polls with cherry-picked residents. Infrasound causes some very unpleasant effects and can be hard to measure with standard equipment, but the audible noise is bad enough. It needn’t be super loud, either, just unnatural or jarring, like a dripping faucet that would barely register on a dB meter but can prevent sleep. The typical industry excuse is that they aren’t louder than a refrigerator but who hasn’t been kept awake by a refrigerator in the same room, e.g. a motel? A related, equally dishonest angle is “I usually see wind turbines at a distance and never hear them.” Do they think wind turbines have a magic motility that always makes them far away and quiet to a given observer? Why are setback distances from homes such a big issue?
“Some right-wing climate change deniers are against wind power, therefore that’s everyone’s motive.” This is an association fallacy or hasty generalization. Why assume that landscapes and quiet nights aren’t important to millions of Democrats and other random people? Wind turbines are very large machines built where nobody really expected them. Some things are offensive on a gut level no matter how much green propaganda is thrown around. Wind turbines are an example of something that can be done with applied engineering skills but ought not be, for moral reasons. They aren’t as dangerous as nuclear weapons (another case of hubris gone mad) but they are “blowing up” scenery in many ways. Small-footprint alternatives like rooftop solar should be getting the bulk of subsidies.
“Wind energy advocates are good environmentalists.” Only because they say so, as they wreck landscapes while yammering about how beautiful or majestic their machines are. Many green groups were adamant about protecting scenery until carbon-dread quashed so many old concerns (a monomaniacal reaction). How many who resent Trump’s attacks on national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante would be silent if those same lands were blighted by wind machines? Same goes for the NODAPL protesters of a barely visible pipeline (water issues aside in this context). We’ve reached a strange point where the visible environment is seen as inconsequential compared to air and water pollution, but the damage is all cumulative. Climate concerns don’t make scenery ruination any less of an issue. Corporate sellouts like The Nature Conservancy equate ruined hilltops with positive climate action, ignoring how futile the blight really is. People plant trees and grass in cities because we evolved in nature and don’t want it obliterated by buildings and machines. The industry’s growth is decades past the point where there’s any balance between the scale of wind energy and the need for pleasant scenery. German academics saw this coming in 1998 but landscape apathy prevailed and things are much worse now. Each new “farm” (aka factory) eats into more space that wasn’t tainted by huge machines, unnatural noise and light pollution. When you witness their detachment from nature, it’s clear that many wind engineers, truckers, crane operators and maintenance workers could easily segue into fossil fuel extraction.
An 88.4 meter blade is elaborately hauled in Denmark via fossil fuels, which also power the rest of the process. The EROI seems nil in terms of replacing oil, at least.
A lot of blasting, logging, road building, concrete and crane rigging is needed for each tower. All of it requires fossil fuels, as does initial manufacturing and maintenance.
Oceans should represent limitless horizons, not industrial growth. It’s impractical to hide all these giants from the mainland, so don’t be fooled by offshore wind panaceas.
Cutesy graphics rarely show the full scale of wind turbines and a “Green New Deal” logo depicts a broken vista as uplifting. Oil platforms are similarly spun as marine habitats.
Propagandists use photos of cherry-picked locations with few or no turbines, or false perspective to hide their scale. Why are they afraid of showing the true context?
Below is an example of wind industry propaganda and arrogance from wind-energy-the-facts.org, which echoes awea.org. The .org domain is also a ruse since wind power is clearly commercial.
“The effects of landscape and visual impact cannot be measured or calculated and mitigation measures are limited. However, experience gained recently suggests that opposition to wind farms is mainly encountered during the planning stage. After commissioning the acceptability is strong.” (source)
They start with the specious claim that blight “cannot be measured or calculated” in a technical sense, which ignores aesthetic gut reactions. There is no official ugly scale but ugly is still ugly! Ski lifts and office buildings (like LG’s 143-foot proposal on the Hudson River) have often been protested as environmental blight. Much smaller cellular towers can spoil views and are disguised as trees or shrunk to fit their surroundings. You can’t do that with wind turbines so they resort to propaganda. That first lie sets up the ruse that opposition to industrialized scenery is mostly temporary. They claim “after commissioning the acceptability is strong” but cite no objective polls. A more likely scenario is that people give up fighting and just try to cope, like Indians beaten down and trapped in reservations. At least that article admits that “mitigation measures are limited,” which is a dry way of stating that you can’t un-see or un-hear huge towers all over the place, so you either cope or move.
The wind business forces itself onto rural communities and expects them to adopt a Stockholm Syndrome mindset. Gag orders are placed on landowners as part of their turbine-hosting agreements (almost everyone has a price) and upbeat polls ask if people favor “renewable energy” without specifying its ugliest component. Articles and forums supporting wind power are constantly ignoring or downplaying its aesthetic damage to scenery and the animals it kills. A truly green business wouldn’t need so many cover stories. They’re filling the fields, mountains and oceans with colossal, noisy, flashing towers and acting like it’s easily ignored (see cognitive dissonance). Engineers are generally not stupid people, so they’re either lying to themselves or have chosen to disrespect nature.
Globally, there were over 350,000 of these eyesores as of 2019 and some wind zealots want to see up to 3.8 million. They’re far more interested in megawatts than rural scenery.
If these were suddenly looming above your town and spewing noise, would you call them magnificent or maleficent? If ancient hills could speak would they choose such defilement?
The wind power industry claims home values aren’t affected by horizons full of machines that hijack serenity. Just apply some common sense here! Many people simply move.
Propaganda and denial sites dismiss wind power’s downsides with “careful siting” lies and implausible schemes to discourage birds & bats from entering expanding gauntlets. They won’t explain why they find landscapes non-integral to the environment, except to insist that AGW dwarfs other concerns per feeble evidence that wind turbines can stop it. Here are random samples of attitudinal greenness:
awea.org (money clearly motivates them, just like their parent fossil fuel business)
wind-works.org (wind advocate since the 70s, pretends the scale hasn’t grown ugly)
You can’t reach hardened wind power advocates with aesthetic arguments. Many of them don’t intrinsically respect nature because they’re anthropocentric technophiles and neo-environmentalists. They probably spend far more time looking at computer screens than physical horizons. Maintenance of the technological world and its power grid is their top priority, with nature as a quaint distraction, or a backdrop for extreme sports. The height of wind turbines plays into the bungee-jumping, thrillseeker mindset and they get fascinated with the ability to build something that large. Ancient concern for nature is lost in their awe of Man’s hubris (not unique to wind turbines but they’re top dog now). Windnuts share many traits with the wingnut climate deniers they claim to despise; always pushing for more gigawatts and construction projects. Instead of protecting nature from people, now it’s about sustaining what people built with fossil fuels, using much weaker forms of energy that require vast acreage. If landscapes must be trashed for the “greener good,” they’re fine with it. Way to go, you soulless idiots! Pursuing a nature-wrecking technology in the name of environmentalism is dystopian irony at its worst. Wind power just escalates Man’s historical plundering of nature and the Manifest Destiny mindset. It squanders our last chance to downsize per countless warnings about carrying-capacity overshoot.
Wind turbine manufacturers compete to see who can build the biggest eyesores. Watch some of these videos where they take pride in looming as tall as possible over the countryside. Anything green is long forgotten in those brag-fests. It’s become a bloated excuse for manufacturing, mining, logging, blasting, road building, trucking and crane rigging jobs. That’s what it takes to get huge machines installed in the hundreds of thousands, eventually millions if madness prevails. Too bad they can’t try it on a different planet instead of experimenting on the public and wildlife. Maybe there’s a planet Enercon (emphasis on the con) or a planet Vestas with no natural vistas. There’s also something sinister about the word Iberdrola, like a disease that’s also a corporation. Not only are they in the wind business, they’re vested in a controversial hydroelectric dam in Brazil. Groups like Greenpeace oppose them for that but not for wind power blight. Where’s the moral consistency?
The USGS Wind Turbine Database is a good way to visualize the total sprawl of these “farms” and debunk minimal land use claims (points 5 & 6 above). You can drive for hours in some places and always see turbines. The industry wants to keep making them taller so they’ll work in lower wind areas. Scenery be damned is the general consensus. Be mindful of the 360-degree viewshed, not just their exact placement on the map. No other energy infrastructure has such far-flung visibility.
Map of U.S. wind projects, totaling over 57,000 turbines as of 2018 (source). They want to invade lower wind regions with even taller, uglier machines.
Nothing else looms on rural horizons like these glaring, spinning machines. Views are affected from many angles and distances. Farmers mainly tolerate them for revenue.
The environmental impact of water dams is rarely disputed but air dams are praised as progress. If giant wind machines had been built first, would people think the opposite?
People who oppose the damming of water yet support the mass-disruption of airspace are a hypocritical bunch. You can put large generators at ground level or small ones inside large towers in much greater numbers. A high percentage of existing dams merely hold back water and could be retrofitted to generate electricity, which should be considered instead of more wind projects. Water is 784 times denser than air and creates a lot more power per unit area. Water dams kill swimming animals and wind dams kill flying ones. They both disturb nature in big ways, so if you’re against damming rivers, why make excuses for damming the sky? At least hydro-power makes lakes, which are also formed by natural landslides and lava. Nothing in nature looks like wind machines jutting into the sky. Wind power is a hasty reaction to the fossil fuel dilemma, not our sole choice on this scale (see wind energy vs. oil’s density). The definition of the word clean contains “morally uncontaminated; pure; innocent,” which is the opposite of scenery fouled by wind turbines.
The anti-fracking movie, Promised Land, was originally going to be about wind turbines. They ought to do a sequel since the public is still largely duped by wind hype, thanks to media soft-pedaling. Both industries convert scenic, quiet places into energy factories and know it will disrupt lives, so they use slick propaganda. But fracking is much less visible at a distance than wind power and its lands can be restored, though water issues plague it.
It’s unlikely that famous conservationists & naturalists like Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Ansel Adams, Rachel Carson, Arne Næss, Edward Abbey, et al., would have welcomed this assault on landscapes. As an example, the John Muir Trust (a Scottish legacy charity) is against wind turbines in any sort of wilderness area but they’re fighting a tough battle. In America, Muir founded the Sierra Club, which has sold out to green-tech, dodging the evidence and calling for “appropriately sited” renewable energy projects. Do they think the planet has endless places to hide huge towers, with so many projects already resisted? Even iconic Loch Ness is threatened by wind energy now. It’s discouraging to see modern environmentalists buy into the weak benefits of a bloated, unreliable power source.
In case you think this is a rant with no hope, I’m all for rooftop & parking lot solar panels or putting them over train tracks and canals. They can be much greener than wind monsters if they don’t increase the human footprint, though that hasn’t proved pragmatic due to economics. Deep geothermal is another potentially good renewable source which could fix the problem of rare locations near the surface. Small wind turbines (under 50 feet tall) can meet modest power needs if people don’t depend on them 24/7. The most promising large-scale alternative is safer forms of nuclear power like SMRs, if old fears can be dropped. The whole centralized model of building “energy farms” and moving electricity over long transmission lines needs to end. Anything truly green should have a minimal footprint, like cargo ships assisted by rotor sails. Unless people practice restraint and use more birth control, our long-term existence on this planet isn’t assured by any technology. Fossil fuels built this whole mess and it’s hard to sustain without them. The whole notion that there “must be a solution” is countered by historical evidence of human greed and shortsightedness. The modern energy quagmire vs. the scale of growing wants & needs is unprecedented. Very large machines in the countryside are a new phase of urban sprawl that leaves many of us speechless. Ecocide, Phase 2 is a good term for it. If these were housing developments or freeways, most environmentalists would oppose them for destroying open space! In light of these inexplicable new values, some ecological thinkers have resigned themselves to the continued destruction of nature by old and new technologies. Wind power is actually an old technology, rebooted in the worst way.
It’s easy to find wind energy opposition groups and antidotes to industry propaganda. The media has done a poor job of reporting both sides of the wind energy story but the tide seems to be turning as these machines reach a critical mass. Hopefully there will be a global moratorium on further construction, at least on mountaintops, where wind turbines are the most disrespectful. Subsidies in various nations have already been cut back as the ruse reveals itself but there needs to be an “outrage clause” that stops them for nature’s sake alone. With all the talk of Climate Justice, why not mention Landscape Justice?
Scene from “Planet of the Wind Turbines.” Also see “Planet of the Humans” by Michael Moore, released on Earth Day, 2020. His clout could turn the tide on clean energy hype.
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False Progress 