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One thing I hear frequently against wind energy is "but what about the birds?" Usually this is said by someone who politically doesn't care about wildlife. 1.
by tasty_freeze 5y ago
One thing I hear frequently against wind energy is "but what about the birds?" Usually this is said by someone who politically doesn't care about wildlife.
1. effort is put into abating the issue to some degree.
2. billions of birds are killed due to human activity. Number one is house cats, but impacts with windows and cars is orders of magnitude more than due to wind turbines.
3. wind power displaces gas and coal power. the effects of pollution (particulates, mercury, etc) is far worse than wind turbines for birds. not only that but it is better for anything that breathes oxygen, including humans.
So if the "what about the birds" crowd actually cared about birds, they'd push for wind power over coal. But it isn't about the birds; it is a pretext for keeping the status quo.
- andromeduck 5y agoWind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue it like in Germany, California, New York, etc.
- pfdietz 5y agoThis is not true. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2020.png https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
- andromeduck 5y agohttps://www.nber.org/papers/w26598 https://www.nber.org/papers/w26598
- pfdietz 5y agoThat paper is comparing what happened to what would have happened without the nuclear phase out. That is, coal would have gone down MORE if nuclear had not been phased out. It does not support your claim that nuclear was replaced by coal. As the graph I gave you shows, coal use there declined over this decade, even as nuclear has also declined.
- LaMarseillaise 5y agoIt is absolutely true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encina_Power_Station#Retirement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encina_Power_Station#Retiremen... I lived there. I believed the 'environmentalists' when they said that SONGS would be replaced by renewables. I am not falling for it again.
- pfdietz 5y agoHe made a universal statement. You presenting an example where it might be true doesn't save his statement, when I can present an example where it is wrong.
- LaMarseillaise 5y agoUniversal statement? The above commenter specified California. I provided an example confirming that statement for California. Not to mention, the comment is practically a truism aside from the locations mentioned: "Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue [sic] it..." If a nuclear plant were shut down and replaced entirely with wind, then that necessarily means that coal and gas are not displaced.
- pfdietz 5y agoI see you edited out the part that shows you are wrong. "Wind only displaces gas and coal when governments aren't shutting down nuclear to persue it like in Germany, California, New York, etc." Notice that word "Germany"?
- gcheong 5y agoThe kind of bird is important. Many more songbirds are taken by cats it’s true but their numbers aren’t in danger. Wind turbines impact mainly larger birds such as raptors that don’t reproduce as quickly. The problem is such that a wind farm might be allowed a single kill before fines or being shut down and some places are trying to develop early warning systems to shut down a turbine if a bird is detected. Seems a long way around to go just for a single type of renewable when you could most likely solve most problems with nuclear.
- stewbrew 5y agoWild life would totally benefit from nuclear power. This is often overlooked by environmentalists. Look at Tschernobyl. It's like hitting the reset button and removing humans (a bug, not a feature) from the equation.
- nine_k 5y agoNuclear has two problems: high cost due to lack of scale, and bad publicity. The crazy people which produced the Chernobyl disaster not only directly killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands, they turned the whole idea of nuclear power generation into a hobgoblin. The "nuclear waste" is still mostly fuel, it can be processed and burned further. But this involves, among other things, producing and extracting plutonium (which itself is a fine nuclear fuel), and thus some suspicion of producing more nuclear weapons.
- nmz 5y ago
- tejohnso 5y agoAnother thing I heard about wind energy recently was that the friction of the blades significantly warms the air, so if deployed at scale, the total effect on atmospheric warming would not be as beneficial as hoped. Not sure how valid it is, but I thought it was interesting and hadn't heard it before.
- 63 5y agoI'm by no means an expert here, but wouldn't the energy that is expressed as heat in that friction just be the energy that's already in the air? Wouldn't it just be expressed as heat and friction anyway as air moves past other objects and other air? It doesn't make sense that turbines would be putting more energy into the system than they're taking out.
- kergonath 5y agoThat would be another kind of perpetual motion/unlimited energy production device.
- Arnavion 5y agoIn an ideal frictionless encounter between air particle and turbine blade, the particle loses some kinetic energy and the blade gains the same kinetic energy. In a real encounter with friction, some of the KE is lost to heat. The initial source of the particle's KE was heat from the Sun causing weather. So the net energy is constant, the local temperature is higher because the blade has heated up at the cost of the air particle's motion, but overall temperature is the same because more heat from the sun will be needed to restore the air particle's motion that was lost to friction. It all balances out in the end. The fact that the total energy is the same doesn't necessarily mean it's okay. Hypothetically if wind turbines set up a gradient so that the first few meters of atmosphere become hotter and the rest of the atmosphere becomes colder, total energy is conserved, but it's not a desirable outcome. But I don't know if humans can build enough wind turbines to make that possible; the Earth is very big and the atmosphere has a lot of mass.
- colechristensen 5y agoThat is not even remotely valid, the easiest way to think about it is through energy conservation: the atmosphere would have to be significantly heating itself from energy it already had.
- angelzen 5y agoThis is sadly a general trend. Take some numbers out of context. The numbers appear large because they are a small fraction of really really large population. Publish on social media and induce outrage. Clicks and clout follow. For example: covid deaths, which are 1-3% of total deaths from all causes for young people and up to 10-15% for older generations. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoWhy do these fossil fuels billionaires seem like such morons? They have so much money they could invest in renewables and then "own" the next couple of hundred years of energy at least. Instead, they use money to fight against inevitable change. Am I missing something?
- jmnicolas 5y agoBecause fossil fuels are much more convenient, reliable and efficient. If there is no wind and or no sun you have no power, so now you have to invest in expensive batteries to bridge meteorologic conditions. Compare an EV and a petrol one. If you want to go from Lisbon to Vladivostok, this will be a breeze with a petrol car and a headache with an EV (I'm not sure it's even possible, good luck charging it fast in the deepest parts of Russia).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI'm not saying to end all fossil fuels, we obviously need them, but you can use your profits to fund the next sources of energy rather than fight change. Fusion and nuclear count too imo. Those work rain or shine.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago>> Usually this is said by someone who politically doesn't care about wildlife Whether someone cares about wildlife does not affect whether a logical argument is true or not.
- Gibbon1 5y agoIt's a good indication of manipulative and bad faith arguments.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoBad faith arguments are just logically valid arguments with which you happen to disagree.
- Gibbon1 5y agoYou should not conflate someone arguing in bad faith with someone is arguing in good faith. Their whole agenda is to distract you from the problem you are trying to solve.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoThere is no problem that I am trying to solve. Maybe that's your thing?
- rufus_foreman 5y ago>> Usually this is said by someone who That's a logical fallacy. You already lost me.