Environmental Benefits of Wind

I’m part of a large email group that promotes the concept of “advanced nuclear.”  Most of these people are extremely well-informed, intelligent, and kind people.  Some, however, have a bizarre hatred  for renewables, like the guy who started this conversation:

Guy:  Raping nature to save nature.

Craig:  I have to say that you people keep my guessing.  There are so many smart people in this email group, and then I get this (linked below) baseless anti-intellectual hogcrap that even the idiots watching Fox News right now wouldn’t buy. I never cease to be amazed….

Guy: Just curious – do you take exception to the slant of the website, or the veracity of the article?

Craig: In brief, I object to both the “scientific” content of the article, and thereby, I suppose, to the political. The claim that the wind industry (currently 66 GW US, 370GW worldwide, experiencing ~15% CAGR) is having a net negative effect on the environment is completely incorrect; it contains the same level of truth as the notion that the Earth and Mars are on a collision course. As we speak, wind is offsetting about 5% of the U.S. power generation that would otherwise have been met with fossil fuels, and this figure is getting larger by the day.  The LCA (life cycle analysis) of wind has been studied up one side and down the other, as has the EROI (energy return on investment); the latter is somewhere between 15:1 and 30:1.  I urge you to Google this and read through a few of the numerous (tens of thousands of) scholarly articles on the subject.  It’s discussed in brief here.

Needless to say, there are certain environmental issues with wind, as there are with solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and wind is no exception.  If you Google “wind energy birds and bats” you’ll learn about one of these issues.  More here.

What about the politics?  It’s hard to know what inspires bullcrap like this, but, trust me, in my position as editor of a renewable energy website, I see all kinds of stupid garbage like this every day, written by liars, and aimed at the ignorant masses, people whose educational level and intellectual capacity don’t enable them to process it correctly.  Here’s a piece on Glenn Beck that I called “The War Against Energy Efficiency.”  Of course this is shameful, but it normally doesn’t irritate me, perhaps because it’s not picked up and repeated by well-educated people like you folks.

So, who wrote this, and why?  Obviously, the natural competitors of wind, especially the fossil fuel people, have a huge incentive to demonize wind, all with other forms of relatively clean energy.  Can I prove the motive of the author of the article?  Of course not.  I would call your attention, however, to the enormous amount of money that is spent every year in an attempt to convince people that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is a hoax, that renewable energy is a job killer, that we should trust the fossil fuel companies to report honestly on the damage done to human health and the rest of the environment, etc.  Perhaps most egregious here, in terms of translating the will of the fossil fuel empire in a stream of pure lies, is the Heartland Institute.