Gone With the Wind: The Aftermath of the GREEN Movement
Wind turbines…an idea whose time has come…and gone? All over eastern Europe these huge three-bladed windmills stand as reminders of the potential of wind power to provide electrical energy to the regions. One researcher’s discovery was astounding…the turbines are not connected to any sort of grid! If they are not producing electrical energy, why are they there? The answer to that is that they are sops to soothe the “green growth” European bureaucrats who gave them money to install the eyesores instead of growing crops. Birds and bats of every type, around the world where the turbines are working, are being eliminated by having the blades smack them. One might think that birds and bats are not that important but they are, because they are part of a food chain. Bats and birds eat insects, and then larger birds or other predators might eat them…it’s part of a natural process.
In Vermont, as an example, an entirely different reason for not having turbines has come up…they will adversely affect real estate prices. Imagine looking out a window of your home and seeing one of these huge turbines down the road…not a very pretty sight I would imagine. What is the equivalent of a town council in Windham, Vermont, had this to say, “We are unwilling to subject any of our town’s property owners to the unknown short- and long-term effects of exposure to turbine noise, vibration, infrasound, and shadow flicker”. Because of the wide variations in wind speeds it was thought that electrical energy produced by the turbines might be intermittent and therefore not reliable.
In Pennsylvania in 2001 a large tract of land was set aside for a wind turbine farm. Recently that farm was re-visited and it didn’t appear that the turbines were moving. When the wind turbines break down, catch fire, rust out, or their blades disintegrate, they are abandoned by the thousands, ugly giants dotting the pristine landscape. They are seldom removed because the job would be too expensive. None of them have produced, by the time they were taken out of service, the amount of energy that was used to manufacture the giant turbine in the first place. And, the part that environmentalists do not like to talk about, is that all the steel, spare parts, transportation, assembly, maintenance, and slow wind down times were provided by fossil fuel-generated power. It does seem that the old reliable fossil fuel is still the king of energy. Yes, one day the supply of fossil fuel may run out, and we’ll be dependent on alternative energy sources, so we’ll work on everything and maybe one of them will pan out to be the best of the bunch. Until then, however, we have thousands of turbines dotting the landscapes around the world, mostly inoperative.
I’m a relatively simple person and I like to think in simple terms, so let me see if there’s a simple explanation for where we, and Europe are today. The United States has a huge debt and, at the moment, no way to pay it off, so let’s look at it in a family setting. Father makes one hundred dollars a week, take home pay. By the time he buys the necessities for the family there’s five dollars left over. He owes somebody some money and pays it off at five dollars a week, but there’s a modest interest on that debt so the entire five dollars does not go to paying off the loan…only about three dollars goes on the debt and the rest is interest. Do the math…do you think he will ever pay off that loan? The answer is no, he will not. Extrapolating that setting into our national debt you can see where we’re going, can’t you? The word you may be looking for is bankruptcy. When you owe more than you can pay, and the creditors want their money, they take what they can get, sell off the rest of it and call it quits. When you’re dealing with nations, the creditors just take over the debtor nation, period. How many of you can speak Chinese now? You might have to learn.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you live in a small town. The population has hovered right around the one thousand for a decade or so. You know just about everyone by their first name and the town has been going along nicely with some tourism and a little hometown industry. One morning you wake up and discover that something is different in town. There’s more people…people you don’t recognize. In your daily routine you eventually get to the diner in the middle of town, but today you cannot get a seat because they’re all filled…again with the strangers. For a moment you think that the added business will be good for your little town…until you discover that all the newcomers are from an entirely different culture, and that they are hell-bent on changing your town. They’ve already made demands on the diner’s menu, the local school’s curriculum, even the town council has heard the changes they want made…and they’re pretty adamant about it too. In fact, the strangers have issued a written ultimatum which states specifically what they want…and what they’re prepared to do to enforce that document. What are you going to do? What choices do you have? Think about that.
photo credit: harvesting wind via photopin (license); Erik Wilde