Yes, Wind Energy Has Its Own Carbon Footprint

Climate deniers and renewable energy skeptics frequently point out that wind and solar have their own carbon footprints, and that these numbers are either totally unknown or astronomically high.

The first part of this is true, to be sure.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, as people have been saying since the early 2oth Century, when saloons were offering customers free lunches, on the hope that they’d wash them down with a couple of beers at five cents each.

The second part of the claim is totally untrue.  There have been dozens of extremely detailed studies conducted on the subject, as presented in this article by the good people at Yale Climate Connections.  Natural gas carries a CO2-equivant number of about 30 times that of wind; coal is about 60 times, the combustion of which emits heavy metals and radioactive isotopes that are extremely toxic.