Ill Winds on the Climate Horizon
In 2007, I wrote a cover story for Audubon magazine about Wyoming’s imperiled sage grouse population. New research had shown that the iconic bird avoided using habitat in the vicinity of roads, gas wells and other related energy infrastructure. All the noise and traffic was a big turnoff. As the scientist who led one of the studies explained to me then,
This species needs big, undisturbed landscapes to breed, spread its nests, and hatch its chicks.
When I wrote my story in 2007, there were already palpable fears that the sage grouse was destined for the federal endangered species list, which would bring Wyoming’s lucrative gas industry to a screaming halt. But politicians and federal land managers diddled and no serious drilling restrictions were put in place.
In October, a more definitive, three-year sage grouse study was published in PLoS ONE, which reaffirmed everything I wrote about in 2007. This time around, though, the feds and Wyoming’s governor are taking action. But what’s notable is that the new measures will also affect the nascent wind industry. As reported in Scientific American,
The governor’s ruling has placed the future of a $600-million wind farm planned by Horizon Wind Energy in doubt.
Here’s the SciAm headline:
Wyoming’s environmental Hobson’s Choice: Killing wind energy or endangering birds?
Over dramatic perhaps, but it still captures the larger dilemma that I keep predicting will pit greens against greens.
There is a brewing conservationists versus wind proponents battle. Throw in the NIMBYists who want to protect their views and we got ourselves a recipe for an all out smackdown.
It seems that prediction sometimes shades into hope. Maybe it’s time for you to retool as a professional wrestling correspondent.
The effects of these wind farms are still unknown for a lot of areas. Proponents tout it as a big weapon for climate adaptation, but we’re still unsure of all the effects wind farms can have. The ECSP program at the Wilson Center has been looking into these less-explored impacts – just a few months ago they wrote about how wind farms have been heightening tension in communities in Mexico and the U.S. That article is here: http://newsecuritybeat.blogspot.com/2009/09/wind-farms-dirty-laundry-aired-in.html
Sajid,
Thanks for info and the link. This line from that post seems to affirm what I’ve been arguing:
“With the renewable energy footprint of the U.S. set to reach nearly 80,000 square miles of land by 2030, tensions over land-use issues look likely to rise.“
A century ago, essentially all the energy available in the US was “renewable” — in the form we now fashionably call “biomass”; back then it was called “firewood” and burned in Franklin stoves, which were much more efficient than fireplaces.
This had been going on for quite a while, with the result that in the US east of the Mississippi, forests were largely denuded. The whitetail deer population, a reasonable proxy for wildlife habitat, in the East was estimated at around a quarter of a million in toto.
Then a technological revolution (or rapid evolution) occurred, and oil and coal largely replaced firewood. The result is that the East is largely reforested, and the deer populations of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Alabama (the only states for which I have the stats off the top of my head) are around three million each.
Wind plants will fix that, of course — the low-frequency noise and flashing shadows drive off all medium and large mammals for a three-mile radius. Livestock is fenced in and can’t get away, so they live with the stress and show it in decreased dairy productivity and increased miscarriages.
The current “renewable” obsession of people who regard themselves as environmentalists is just crazy. But assuming that their terror of CO2 is legitimate, at this point the only feasible option is nuclear. The latest breeder technology is both safer and more efficient than the 40-year-old units that now provide around a quarter of US electricity, and designs are in the works for thorium-based reactors — thorium is both more plentiful than uranium and non-weaponizable.
I’d suggest — for environmentalists who genuinely care about the environment — that pushing for thorium-based nukes is the logical way to go. Wind and solar are hideously expensive, both in capital and real estate, for the piddling amount of unreliable power they actually produce.
Craig,
Jim Hansen makes the same argument for nuclear power.