I'm being a bit pedantic here, but they are too, so let's consider: They argue that wooden blades are less energy intensive to produce, which is technically tr

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but they are too, so let's consider: They argue that wooden blades are less energy intensive to produce, which is technically true if you discount the amount of energy to grow the wood in the first place. What we're actually talking about is additional energy cost over the initial sunk costs of the wood (which don't really matter to us). This part is mostly trivia, but it ties into another point: What are we actually worried about here? We're worried about unbalancing our ecosystem, and additional energy expenditure is assumed to not be supplied by renewable energy sources (which is generally true today). So our fundamental concern is the release of greenhouse gases (due to burning of fossil fuels in order generate energy for production). The calculation then becomes: What is the cost in greenhouse gases of cutting down trees to produce turbines? Trees are carbon absorbents and carbon sinks, after all. What is the cost in greenhouse gases of feeding the people who expend their vital energy to produce the wooden turbines? How does that cost compare to production using robots? How does that cost compare to production using synthetic materials? Does that calculation change enough to matter as the source of energy moves more towards renewables? What I'm getting at is: Where is the actual CO2 bottleneck in production? We should be optimizing the bottlenecks first.