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Renewable Energy Wrecks Environment
From Science Daily
Renewable Energy Wrecks Environment, According To Researcher
Science Daily —
Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of
the Rockefeller University in New York. Writing in Inderscience's
International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology,
Ausubel explains that building enough wind farms, damming enough
rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will
wreck the environment.
Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable
source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter
of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by
renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. "Nuclear energy
is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear
has astronomical advantages over its competitors."
On this basis, he argues that technologies succeed when economies of
scale form part of their evolution. No economies of scale benefit
renewables. More renewable kilowatts require more land in a constant or
even worsening ratio, because land good for wind, hydropower, biomass,
or solar power may get used first.
A consideration of each so-called renewable in turn, paints a grim
picture of the environmental impact of renewables. Hypothetically
flooding the entire province of Ontario, Canada, about 900,000 square
km, with its entire 680,000 billion liters of rainfall, and storing it
behind a 60 meter dam would only generate 80% of the total power output
of Canada's 25 nuclear power stations, he explains. Put another way,
each square kilometer of dammed land would provide the electricity for
just 12 Canadians.
Biomass energy is also horribly inefficient and destructive of nature.
To power a large proportion of the USA, vast areas would need to be
shaved or harvested annually. To obtain the same electricity from
biomass as from a single nuclear power plant would require 2500 square
kilometers of prime Iowa land. "Increased use of biomass fuel in any
form is criminal," remarks Ausubel. "Humans must spare land for nature.
Every automobile would require a pasture of 1-2 hectares."
Turning to wind Ausubel points out that while wind farms are between
three to ten times more compact than a biomass farm, a 770 square
kilometer area is needed to produce as much energy as one 1000 Megawatt
electric (MWe) nuclear plant. To meet 2005 US electricity demand and
assuming round-the-clock wind at the right speed, an area the size of
Texas, approximately 780,000 square kilometers, would need to be
covered with structures to extract, store, and transport the energy.
One hundred windy square meters, a good size for a Manhattan apartment,
could power an electric lamp or two, but not the laundry equipment,
microwave oven, plasma TV, and computer. New York City would require
every square meter of Connecticut to become a wind farm to fully power
all its electrical equipment and gadgets.
Solar power also comes in for criticism. A photovoltaic solar cell
plant would require painting black about than 150 square kilometers
plus land for storage and retrieval to equal a 1000 MWe nuclear plant.
Moreover, every form of renewable energy involves vast infrastructure,
such as concrete, steel, and access roads. "As a Green, one of my
credos is 'no new structures' but renewables all involve ten times or
more stuff per kilowatt as natural gas or nuclear," Ausubel says.
While the full footprint of uranium mining might add a few hundred
square kilometers and there are considerations of waste storage, safety
and security, the dense heart of the atom offers far the smallest
footprint in nature of any energy source. Benefiting from economies of
scale, nuclear energy could multiply its power output and even shrink
the energy system, in the same way that computers have become both more
powerful and smaller.
"Renewables may be renewable but they are not green," asserts Ausubel",
If we want to minimize new structures and the rape of nature, nuclear
energy is the best option."
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Inderscience Publishers.
Copyright © 1995-2007 ScienceDaily LLC — All rights reserved — Contact: editor@removeme.sciencedaily.com
FEARS For Golden Eagles
The Scotsman Press & Journal, 13 Jun 07
FEARS FOR GOLDEN EAGLES AT SITE OF PROPOSED WINDFARM
A controversial application for a 14 turbine windfarm in a scenic area of Argyll frequented by young golden eagles will be debated by planners this summer.
A proposal by npower renewables to erect a windfarm at Allt Dearg, on moorland south of Lochgilphead overlooking Loch Fyne, was lodged with Argyll and Bute Council a year ago.
A host of objections on various grounds came in, including visual impact and the potential adverse impact of the windfarm on golden eagles and other local rare bird species. Richard Kerr, Argyll and Bute Council's planning team leader in Mid Argyll, said: "We have said to the applicants all along that it is not a suitable site for a windfarm. "We will be advised by the RSPB and Scottish Natural Heritage what the ornithological situation is. "It's a very significant development, with quite a wide impact, because anybody travelling south from Lochgilphead towards Kintyre and looking back from Cowal would be able to see it.
Green Tyranny?
Opinion
Sun 10 Jun 2007 A convenient untruth: how Green tyranny turns up the heat
GERALD
WARNER 'THERE is very important climatic change going on right now, and it's not merely something of academic interest. It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth - like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way." Wow! Scary, or what?
Well, actually, not very. That apocalyptic warning was conveyed in an article in Fortune magazine in 1974, on the alarming phenomenon of global cooling and an imminent new Ice Age. The American Institute of Physics awarded the magazine a Science Writing Award. By last year, Fortune's doomsday scenario had discernibly altered to: "The media agrees with the majority of scientists: global warming is here. Now, what to do about it?"
So much for expert and media opinion on climate change. If, however, you are tempted to mock these naked emperors, have a care. Scepticism may soon incur severe penalties. David Roberts, an American climate militant, recently wrote of global warming sceptics, "we should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate Nuremberg". Mark Lynas, another Green propagandist, mused: "I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial."
To listen for two minutes to a global warming zealot is to appreciate how open-minded Osama bin Laden is. The derogatory term 'climate change denier' is part of a massive propaganda exercise to demonise those who dissent from an imposed orthodoxy. The leftist think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has advised supporters, "at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective... The 'facts' need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken."
In classic totalitarian style, indoctrination of children is a priority. Last March, pupils at Prestonpans Infant and Nursery School, East Lothian, earned plaudits by objecting to a fund-raising balloon race, on the grounds that balloons might harm dolphins and turtles. They insisted a ban on balloon races be written into the school's 'green constitution'. A promising beginning: with further education, these Young Pioneers may eventually be trained to denounce their parents for eco-crimes.
Suppression of dissent is made necessary by the inconsistencies between the Greens' propaganda and observed reality. Their claim that the polar ice-caps are melting and sea levels rising was contradicted even by the recent fourth report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which unobtrusively reduced its 2001 prediction of sea level rises by 52.7%, to preserve a minimal scientific credibility. As for the Arctic ice-cap, shrinkage has been observed - it happens seasonally - but its depth increased as it bunched up close to the Canadian land-mass. At the opposite pole, despite much-hyped film of the Larsen ice shelf fragmenting, the ice mass has increased by 8%. Temperatures in East Antarctica have fallen, which is what one would expect if the sun is the principal agent in climate change.
Al Gore, the Greens' answer to Sergei Eisenstein, has made an ironically entitled film, An Inconvenient Truth, denouncing man-made global warming. It proved an own-goal when the core ice samples featured in it demonstrated that increased CO2 emissions have historically followed 800 years after periods of warming, rather than preceding them. The UN's team of tame scientists is often invoked as definitively authoritative. They are chosen for their compliance with the climate agenda. In this instance, the normal scientific discipline is reversed: the conclusion is preordained and the men in white coats are expected to construct the evidence - a convenient untruth.
The CO2 hysteria is absurd, considering the minute contribution made by human beings. Of course the climate is changing - it always has done, hence the thriving vineyards of Northumberland in the 12th century and the Thames frozen three feet deep in the 19th - but human activity is largely irrelevant. The world's climate is controlled by solar activity, by variations in the earth's rotation and orbit, by external factors in space and, terrestrially, by clouds and volcanic activity. If the Canutes of the IPCC imagine they can control those elements, they are even more infatuated than they appear.
This is not a scientific but a political issue. Fear is the instrument used by governments to increase their power over citizens: the 'War on Terror' is an example. The grand peur orchestrated over climate change affords governments an opportunity to impose unimaginable restrictions on their populations. The UN - the most ambitious criminal enterprise in history - is the instrument of supra-national authority that will rubber-stamp the new tyranny. That assembly of dictators, genocides and thieves cut its teeth on scams such as the Oil for Food programme in Iraq. Now it is casting its net wider.
There is a bad time coming. Life in the developed world will be made a misery with compulsory recycling, statutory imposition of mercury-based light bulbs that damage the eyesight, escalating eco-taxes and myriad regulations that will reduce us to environmental servitude. The Scottish landscape is being raped by hideous, non-productive (but highly profitable) wind turbines. The amoral concept of 'carbon trading' will freeze economic advance in the developing world, as governments trade their populations' access to technology for hard cash destined to repose in Swiss banks. Crooks, both institutional and individual, will make billions.
Dr Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptikal Environmentalist, claimed that, if the Kyoto programme is implemented, "millions of lives will be lost that could otherwise be saved and the eventual impact of climate change on the Third World will be much worse as countries will be less equipped to adapt". The real 'bastards' who will kill millions are the Greens. Nuremberg trials, anyone?
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