Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to conserving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and kept in mind climate activist, utilized to think so.

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Script:.

Do we need to damage the environment to save it?

I co-founded a motion that was the precursor to the Green New Deal. If we might send out a guy to the moon, we reasoned, certainly we could conserve our own world. All we had to do was harness the power of the wind and the sun and get rid of fossil fuels.

Well, it turned out to be extremely hard– virtually impossible. The standard laws of physics and chemistry proved to be extremely persistent. As I did more and more research study, something else began to trouble me: the possibility that pushing the planet towards wind and solar energy would in fact trigger more harm to the environment than excellent. There’s no better example of this than what wind and solar power do to birds..

Industrial wind turbines– those giant generators of wind power– are the best new risk to bald and golden eagles. But the eagles are hardly the only ones threatened. Condors, owls, hawks and falcons all fall victim to the turbines’ mighty blades..

Big Wind– and believe me, there’s a Big Wind industry now, similar to there’s Big Oil and Big Pharma– claims that home felines eliminate more birds than wind turbines. That’s real. Whereas felines eliminate little, typical birds like sparrows, wind turbines kill big, threatened-with-extinction and slow-to-reproduce types like bald eagles and condors.

Indeed, commercial wind farms are eliminating fields for birds. The more turbines you installed, the more birds you’re going to massacre..

The Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds reports that wind farms built off the coast of Britain could be the “final nail in the coffin” for endangered sea birds. The Center for Biological Diversity calls the Altamont Pass wind farm in California “a population sink for golden eagles as well as burrowing owls.”.

When it comes to solar farms, they produce an entirely different set of issues, although they likewise are really hazardous for birds. In California, according to a federal report, enormous solar selections produce warm up to 900 degrees. When birds fly into those selections, they merely burn up.

Developing a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of enormous commercial facility. In order to build the Ivanpah solar farm in California near the Nevada border, designers employed biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows.

Solar farms also require millions and millions of gallons of water to clean the mirrors and to generate power. Since a lot of solar farms are integrated in the desert, we’re discussing a valuable resource already in short supply. “When push comes to push, water could end up being the real throttle on renewable [solar] energy,” according to Michael Webber, teacher of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin..

There’s the concern of what to do with solar panels that use out. The panels consist of lead and other hazardous chemicals that can’t be removed without breaking up the whole panel. Because it’s far cheaper for solar makers to just purchase the raw materials than recycle old panels, those old panels end up in land fills– or, as the New York Times discovered in a 2019 examination, disposed in bad African nations.

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source

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? As I did more and more research, something else started to difficulty me: the possibility that pushing the world towards wind and solar energy would in fact trigger more damage to the environment than good. Industrial wind turbines– those giant generators of wind power– are the biggest brand-new threat to bald and golden eagles. Big Wind– and think me, there’s a Big Wind market now, simply like there’s Big Oil and Big Pharma– claims that home cats kill more birds than wind turbines. The Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds reports that wind farms constructed off the coast of Britain might be the “final nail in the casket” for threatened sea birds.