- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they’re being built::The clock is ticking toward a deadline to meet renewable-energy standards. But USA TODAY’s analysis finds local governments banning wind turbines, solar plants.
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What’s this from?
Good Omens
“But a wave of disinformation in 2023, falsely claiming offshore wind projects killed whales, resulted in a sharp decline in public support for offshore wind.”
I can’t believe people fell for that.
I can. There is a reason why only two new nuclear reactors have been built since 1972 in the nation that figured the technology out first. It takes almost nothing to scare people out of being smart
I mean… it’s quite different for nuclear there has been some big international incidents and it’s something that hurted people directly plus invisible stuff that can kill you usually is terrifying. Knowing that a similar technology is used for bombs that cause terrible destruction didn’t help either.
So even though it can be done with no risks… Is quite understandable people being afraid of it.
Like the whale thing is nothing in comparison.
Everything you just said can apply to coal. There are monthly incidents involving coal mines and plants. It puts out plenty of stuff that is invisible and can kill you. Plus hydrocarbons are the lifeblood of all warfare almost as much as gunpowder.
Go spend a few years of your life building scrubbers for coal and low grade diesel then get back to me about how nuclear is dangerous. Bunch of rednecks with screwdrivers and drunk ex-Sovits with wrenchs. I have seen them do some scary stuff. At least with a nuclear plant you can’t wipe your butt without ten PEs signing off on it.
The total death toll and the number of people suffering health issues (past and present) due to coal are orders of magnitude larger than those due to nuclear power (not to even mention the damage to the environment!). The problem is that people respond more to one-time big disasters than to numbers over time. Something like Chornobyl is terrifying and a big deal, so people remember it. They don’t remember every Tom, Dick and Harry that’s died over the years due to black lung or accidents or other stuff from coal.
You can even see this attitude in other ways too. It seems like a lot of Americans are still suffering mass trauma from 9/11 and accept the most horrific Patriot Act-type shit because of it. But in the end, it was less than 3000 people who died in the attack (and don’t get me wrong, it was terrible!), but waaaaaaay more people die (and have died) from lack of (access to) healthcare, and it seems that still barely anyone is actually trying to fix that. Or a mass shooting that kills 11 people, that’s a big deal, right? But the fact that over a million Americans died due to Covid didn’t really register as a disaster for a lot of people.
Nuclear power is such a no-brainer to me, but it sounds ‘scary’ and lots of people don’t understand it, which makes it even more scary. Plus, of course the fossil fuel industry propaganda and lobbying, and the memory of people who know other people who used to work in coal towns and had pretty decent lives. Or the “what about nuclear waste!”-crap that always comes up. Yes, nuclear waste is a thing, but let’s put it next to all the damaging crap that coal mines produce, accumulated. It’s way worse.
Anyway. It’s hard to fight all that, even when rationally, statistically, nuclear power should be a no-brainer. Edit: and there is no political will either, it seems. Whether it’s because they love their fossil fuel bribes or because they’re too scared to lose some voters… they’ll never do good things just to do good.
Edit: just to be clear, it’s definitely not a USA-exclusive problem. I currently live in Germany and their weird relationship to nuclear power is also batshit. All based on fear and bullshit.
Stastics vs tragedies There is also something to bite sized evils vs large unbearable ones
My dad was absolutely one of them… He mentioned it out of nowhere and I couldn’t refute it because I had never encountered that lunacy before then…
He already wanted to hate wind then and this is just his justification. I once encountered someone telling me that wind turbines cause global warming. I told them the only part generating heat was the copper in the motor and that’s the same in every power generation. Turn out Faux News misrepresented a study that showed the turbulence caused by wind turbines brought warm air to the ground level.
Except physically speaking, that warmth from the motor is still just from the energy the wind has… energy that would get transformed to heat from friction eventually anyway. It’s just that this way we get useful work for our own purposes in the form of electricity.
I live in one of the most progressive cities in the US and have had the same issue here. We have no driveway and park on the street but regulations say we cant use the grass strip (the area between the srreet and the curb) to install a charging station for an ev in front of our house. For 5 years we tried to get permission to do this without luck and have given up on ever getting an EV. I dont get how there is any hope for electric vehicles if there arent any working solutions for the millions of people in the United States who dont have a driveway or garage.
Its time to grab a beer kick back and watch as the planet is destroyed by slow moving bearacratic regulation.
OMG this is the dumbest thing… In NY the town of Florida banned a windmill on waste property, then in racquet lake where they get all sorts of outages they stopped a battery from being installed because they might catch fire. These were BYD LFP batteries, and they were referencing LG chem batteries catching fire in Arizona as the reason.
I live in wny the windmills fucking suck. You spend your life savings buying property in the country with gorgeous scenery and views and bam farmer under the thumb of the state gets conned into putting windmills up and your peaceful piece of property is now staring at some dystopian looking shithole landacape. I dont do the conspiracy theories but i totally get voting to not allow windmills in an area you own property in.
All you have to do is sell power cheaper then them from a source that is also clean or decrease the usage and bam less demand for windmills
These things look beautiful though
Right? I can get “it’s not the view I signed up for” or something, but my dude you do not own the view. You want to own the view it costs a hell of a lot more
Are you kidding me? I opened the article in order to find reasons for banning but after like reading 10min, I gave up, it is such a repetitive article with so many useless words… Has someone a TLDR?
Former President Donald Trump often denigrates wind and solar power in his speeches. In December in New Hampshire, he said, falsely, that wind farms only last 10 years, that they kill “all the birds,” that solar energy isn’t powerful enough to run factories and that wind is 42 times more expensive than natural gas.
(…)
“It’s going to change our lifestyle and the landscape and everything around here,” he said.
(…)
The opposition sometimes leads to surprising arguments about property rights, in which some landowners invoke concepts like a claim to a “viewshed” – views they want free of wind turbines or solar panels. These opponents clash with others who champion a different view of private property rights, saying landowners should be free to build what they want.
Ok. I want to be free of sky scrapers. Ban them. Remind me again why my opinion about this doesn’t matter.
I wanna make energy without fucking anything up.
“Yeah no, stop that right now. It’s illegal.”
Who the fuck does this? What’s going through their head to make them think there’s any justification? How is there multiple idiots collaborating well enough to get in the way!?
Some are NIMBYs. Most, however, are alt-right reality-hostile whackadoodles who see any “renewable” energy generation as a liberal plot to destroy America.
These people actively think that renewables will harm America.
How do I know this? We have the same crazies up here in Canada. Some of them, despite having been born here, routinely confuse the two countries, spouting US legislation - like the constitutions and amendments - in “defense” of their “freedoms” being “infringed upon” by things like wind turbines.
Republicans retain power by sabotage
Windmill cancer.
I had my conservative professor uncle tell me we can’t use windmills because “they use up all the wind.”
imagine having to explain to your elders that wind isn’t some finite resource.
Wind is finite, and there has actually been research done to estimate the impact slower winds would have (a few degrees iirc), it’s just that this is massively offset by the pros of using wind.
Seriously? What Facebook University source did you get that from?
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…but like, so do fossil fuels, you just don’t immediately see it. It’s lead to so much contamination and death you’ll never directly witness and is actively destroying everything vs “oh no, that pretty hill!”.
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Coal and nat gas also kill birds. Well basically any system that exhausts huge steam vats into the air just absolutely blast some birds.
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Are you totally self sufficient? I thought a lot of the social programs are supported by the sales of natural gas.
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Well it does kill birds.
No they don’t, birds neither like the noise or turbulence so they avoid them. Skyscrapers kill birds. This is decades-old and disproven FUD I hope you at least get money for peddling fossil fuel lobby talking points.
And “oh no that pretty hill” will be ruined for all eternity, including future generations.
Oh no! The Hill!
What about the fucking rest of nature and the planet. Is that hill even high enough to still be above water in 100 years. Is it going to get eroded away by massive rainfall.
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We already produce more than enough energy for ourselves.
My state is also producing more than enough for ourselves. Being just as flat as Denmark (and bordering it) we send you tons of that energy to pump into hydrostorage to then export again. It’s practially all windpower.
As to imports: if you don’t want to send us energy we’ll have to stop sending you steel and chemical products. Also Germany is a net exporter of electricity, I don’t like it either much of it is coal. Notable importer: France, with all their nuclear plants they have to shut down in the summer to not turn their rivers into bouillabaisse.
dead birds
Wind mills do kill birds, but all you have to do to prevent it is paint one of the turbines black so it doesn’t blend into the sky when it is turning, allowing birds to avoid them. But unfortunately thay costs money and smooth brain fossil fuel stans would rather just poison the wind rather than harness it.
The currently existing design of wind turbines is incredibly stupid anyway, I have no idea how we landed on that design. It’s one of the least effective designs possible for it’s use case. We should be using spiral turbines.
The current three blade design of utility-scale turbines achieves about 80% of the Betz limit, are relatively efficient in materials for their output, and the blades’ pitch can be adjusted to control their speed in varying conditions (eg. during storms). I wouldn’t call their design “incredibly stupid”.
That looks like it would be hard to manufacture and transport at the size requirements that traditional blades are made. It’s already a massive pita to transport the traditional blades. I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually, but that’s probably the current reasoning.
Yooo that looks sick as hell! Why aren’t we using that?
Can you imagine how heavy one of those would be at full scale?
