in the April 2008 issue of Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth writes about the storm brewing in Lewis about a massive, 181 turbine wind farm. here are some highlights from the article.
The battle of Lewis [a contested site of a 181 turbine wind farm] is not the easily-told story of greens versus anti-green reactionaries. It is more complex, and more interesting, than that.
The question that hovers above it all is currently echoing around the world, and will only grow louder: in the fight against climate change, will the environment have to be destroyed to save the environment? Can the ends justify the means?
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The amount of maize needed to fill the tank of a Range Rover with ethanol fuel would feed a person for a whole year. Fill your tank every two weeks for a year and you have taken enough food out of circulation to feed a hungry village.
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Ironically, it now seems that biofuels don't even do what they were intended to: new research has revealed that, once the 'carbon cost' of clearing land for biofuels is taken into account, virtually every biofuel crop actually produces more emissions than the fuel it replaces.
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The lesson to be learned from all this is a sobering one. Renewable energy technologies as we currently know them are incapable of providing anything like the amount of power we have come to expect from fossil fuels. Even if technologies improve, which they will undoubtedly do, they will not do so fast or cheaply enough to prevent the growing conflicts over land that the spread of large-scale renewables is already provoking.interesting and highly relevant stuff, even if he may be a little more polemics than research.
...
[G]reen technologies can have a distinctly un-green downside. And green technologies – any technologies – on this sort of ['mega project'] scale are going to be undemocratic, top-down, unaccountable and, potentially, very destructive indeed.
Scale, in the end, is all.
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2 comments:
Thanks for sharing, Kris.
He brings up all really relevant points, although he's behind on the biofuels debate.
A key difference between wind and biofuels is that biofuels are subject to issues of maximum sustainable yield, which is a way to measure appropriate usage rates of a resource.
His main point that we can't expect as much out of renewables as out of fossil fuels is bang on. Renewables are really only possible with a major reduction in demand.
Oh, hey. Just found the actual article. Yeah, totally relevant to that CFP I replied to!
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