By Respect Silence: Blight for Naught: Wind Turbines and the Rationalized Desecration of Nature

Someone named Respect Silence posted a comment with a link to an essay he/she wrote on the environmental damage caused by wind turbines.

As I read this wise and well written essay I saw a recurring theme of reality denial and so thought it appropriate to repost.

https://evilnoisypeople.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/windturbineslandscapes/

Being an engineer this quote resonated with me:

Engineers are generally not stupid people, so they’re either lying to themselves or have chosen to disrespect nature.

I once “lied to myself” on all matters concerning the environment. I now understand my old behavior to be inherited reality denial, which is a subconscious form of lying.

Here are a few more noteworthy extracts, however I recommend you read the entire essay.

Reason and restraint were once central to ecological thinking and one wonders if younger environmentalists really understand what “the environment” is, beyond AGW.

Unsettling numbers of environmentalists fail to see that wind turbines are enemies of nature posing as saviors. Ruining the countryside with obscenely large towers is a continuum of the “build, build, build!” mentality that’s destroyed nature throughout history. It’s the towering, spinning version of “drill, baby, drill!” and supply-side ideology. Wind energy promoters are desperate to believe that their emperor isn’t an ungainly giant who cuts down trees, blasts ridges, kills airborne animals and tortures ground-based ones with blight and noise. They claim to be environmentalists but they’re mainly about non-fossil energy and new income streams. The presumption that nothing is workable unless someone’s profiting is a big part of the problem. Austerity and conservation are anti-revenue concepts that don’t sit well with a greedy populace.

Windnuts share many traits with the wingnut climate deniers they claim to despise; always pushing for more gigawatts and construction projects. Instead of protecting nature from people, now it’s about sustaining what people built with fossil fuels, using much weaker forms of energy that require vast acreage. If landscapes must be trashed for the “greener good,” they’re fine with it. Way to go, you soulless idiots! Pursuing a nature-wrecking technology in the name of environmentalism is dystopian irony at its worst. Wind power just escalates Man’s historical plundering of nature and the Manifest Destiny mindset. It squanders our last chance to conserve and downsize per countless warnings about carrying-capacity overload.

True green = small footprint. But unless people practice restraint and use more birth control, our long-term existence on this planet won’t be guaranteed by any technology. Fossil fuels built this whole mess and it will be hard to sustain without them. The whole notion that there “must be a solution” is countered by historical evidence of human greed and shortsightedness.

End note: This author isn’t a global warming denier but wind power should not be a linchpin of climate strategy. It’s taking us in the opposite direction of conservation, restraint and humility. We need a degrowth/steady-state plan vs. the same unsustainable growth rebranded as green. Nature’s been telling us to downsize and a wise species would pay attention.