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