Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electromagnetic | Hacker News Reader

electromagnetic

I loved Avatar, but I've noticed a strong theme from Hollywood for over a decade now of environmentalism. It's either the subtext, subplot in the 90's movies, and now it's become the main context and plot of major movies in the 00's and I'm getting the strong feeling I'm going to be beaten to death with it in the 10's.

I think one of the reasons I've gone from liking the Harry Potter film series to outright loving it is because environmentalism isn't even a sub-subtext in the story. The plot is that humans are doing incredible damage to humans, not that humanities inactions are inevitably going to hurt us by some bullshit catastrophe like 2012 or the day after tomorrow.

This bullshit enviro-paganism has driven me to the point of not giving the slightest damn anymore. If you tell me we've got a program error from monday to friday, but you offer no solution to fix it except to spell check the code (recycling) then I'll tell you to fuck off by the next monday. If you offered a major rewrite I'd buy in. Double-down on Fusion research, go all nuclear with new power plants (it's the only practical and realistic way, if you deny it you're ignorant of the massive wastes inherent in solar and wind systems and the fact that many of these systems rely on the existing coal and gas infrastructure to support it in low-wind or cloudy periods).

We're being told we've changed the world disastrously through our inactions, then we should be showing the world we can change it through our actions. Sequester carbon, go nucelar, build a frigging IR reflector in space, build cloud machines.

I find it more disturbing that environmentalists are flat out ignoring the disastrous effects caused by wind turbines, killing bird and especially bat populations and promoting demineralization of farm land (note this is the preliminary step in desertification). Not to mention that there's already been noticeable wind-speed decreases in areas of heavy wind turbine usage. I think interfering with the wind patterns is going to fuck up the planet far more than a little CO2 as you'll actually be creating high and low pressure regions permanently.

Lots of factual errors here.

Solar and wind can make very large impacts on electricity generation - see the Desertec website for lots more information: http://www.desertec.org/

Research has shown that geographically distributed renewable generation can be used as reliable base-load, although I can't find the reference at the moment.

The CO2 payback times for various technologies are shown here: http://www.envirowiki.info/CO2_payback , although this does miss out other payback times that are relevant.

Winds and pressure regions around the world are primarily caused by temperature contrasts between the poles and the equator, and between land and sea (due to water having a much larger thermal inertia than land). Huge numbers of wind turbines will not effect this in any way.

Modern wind turbines kill very few birds, orders of magnitude less than cars and window collisions (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/common_misconce.php). Older wind tubines have faster rotational speeds which kill more birds than modern turbines.

Bats, again, are not effected too much by modern wind turbines as the blades are are sufficiently high above the ground that bats will never come into contact with them, as bats rarely fly at high altitudes (see PDF linked from http://naturalengland.etraderstores.com/NaturalEnglandShop/T...).

Please, don't rant unless you know the facts.

Do windmills kill “huge numbers” of birds? Wind farms recently got adverse publicity from Norway, where the wind turbines on Smola, a set of islands off the north-west coast, killed 9 white-tailed eagles in 10 months. I share the concern of BirdLife International for the welfare of rare birds. But I think, as always, it’s important to do the numbers. It’s been estimated that 30 000 birds per year are killed by wind turbines in Denmark, where windmills generate 9% of the electricity. Horror! Ban windmills! We also learn, moreover, that traffic kills one million birds per year in Denmark. Thirty-times-greater horror! Thirty-times-greater incentive to ban cars! And in Britain, 55 million birds per year are killed by cats.

--David MacKay, "Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air".

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_63...

So what you're saying is that it's OK to kill birds as long as you're 'saving the planet'? Because that's how it reads to me. I'm shocked that environmentalists support wind power with the large ecological footprint it has. Plus you have to build baseload power to back it up, so it's not like you are stopping the construction of fossil fuel plants.

It just seems like a gigantic waste of resources to me.

That's a rather provocative interpretation of what I posted. I was merely pointing out that the birds thing is a relatively small issue, and if you really care that much about them you'll have to sacrifice much of the modern lifestyle.

For what it's worth, the book I quoted from (link in my previous comment) is (in my interpretation) fairly skeptical of wind power. I highly recommend it: It looks at the issues in a balanced manner, with extensive figures and calculations, and without resorting to sensationalist language like "it's OK to kill birds", or putting sarcastic quotes around "saving the planet" to imply naïvety of anyone who dares to disagree.

No, he's saying that, on a cost-benefit basis, killing a few extra birds to generate electricity is probably no worse a tradeoff than killing tons of extra birds in exchange for the privilege of owning housecats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com