Tilting at Windmills
To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.
But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is "an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies." Far from being clean and green, "corporate wind is yet another extraction industry relying on false promises," a "poster child for irresponsible development."
Such attacks -- those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone -- are not atypical. Similar language turns up on http://www.windwatch.org/ , on http://www.windstop.org/ , and on a dozen other anti-wind sites, most started by local groups opposed to a particular project. Their recent, rapid proliferation is not an accident: After languishing for years on the eco-fringe, wind energy has suddenly become mainstream. High oil prices, natural gas shortages, better technology, fear of global warming, state renewable-energy mandates and, yes, tax breaks have finally made wind farms commercially viable as well as clean. Traditional utility companies want to build them -- and thus the traditional environmental movement (which supports wind energy) has produced a handful of untraditional splinter groups that are trying to stop them.
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The groups do have some arguments, ranging from the aesthetic -- if you are bothered by the sight of wind turbines on a mountaintop, which I am not (or, anyway, not when compared with the sight of a strip mine) -- to the economic. They are right to note that wind will not soon replace coal or gas, that wind isn't always as effective as supporters claim, and that some people are going to make a lot of money out of it (though some people make a lot of money out of coal, and indeed Nantucket summer homes as well).
If the systems are as effective as claimed by the companies putting them up, how exactly are they making a lot of money with them? The same environmental organizations use the same tactics arguing against drilling in ANWR, saying that the oil companies are greedy and then claiming that there isn't enough oil there to be profitable anyway, and against nuclear, solar and any other way we attempt to replace energy sources. If the greedy oil companies want to drill there, chances are good that there's oil there. Greedy people aren't noted for squandering their money. The alleged environmental movement uses this tactic to appeal to those on both sides of the issue.
They aren't fighting for a better environment, they are fighting capitalism. They use the junk science of global warming hype as the main weapon and convince people that if something isn't done the world is going to end. The vast majority of those recruited by the 'environmental' movement have good intentions and a poor understanding of the facts, a very dangerous combination.
Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore readily admits that his former movement has been hijacked by the political left, that's the reason it's his former movement.
Cross-posted from the Bullwinkle Blog.