Trump Again Overblows Risks of Wind Power

[Rhiannon12866]

In an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Indiana, President Donald Trump made three unsubstantiated claims about wind turbines, which he calls “windmills”:

Trump suggested that a single turbine can be responsible for “thousands” of bird deaths. Birds are killed by turbines, but the real death toll from a single turbine is orders of magnitude lower than this. A 2013 study estimated an average of just over five bird deaths per turbine per year.

He repeatedly referred to “problems” when the wind doesn’t blow. It’s true that lack of wind prevents turbines from generating energy, but these pauses do not create problems that power grid operators can’t handle.

Trump also stated that living near turbines is noisy, enough to make someone “go crazy after a couple of years.” Studies indicate that people living near turbines are rarely exposed to average sound levels beyond 45 decibels, which is akin to the hum of a refrigerator. There is no direct evidence that the sound is detrimental to physical or mental health, although it may be annoying to some people.

While each of these claims start with a kernel of truth, Trump’s words misrepresent scientists’ and engineers’ current understanding of wind power and its limitations. We’ll tackle each statement individually, but first, here are his full comments on wind power from his rally:

Trump, Aug. 30: Clean power, right? They want to have windmills all over the place, right? When the wind doesn’t blow, what do we do? Uh, we got problems. When there’s thousands of birds laying at the base of the windmill, what do we do? Isn’t that amazing? The environmentalists, “We like windmills.” Oh, really? What about the thousands of birds they’re killing? Try going to the bottom of a windmill someday. It’s not a pretty picture. But, really, when the wind doesn’t blow, you got problems. If your house is staring at a windmill, not good. When you hear that noise going round and round and round, and you’re living with it, and then you go crazy after a couple of years, not good. And the environmentalists say, oh, isn’t it wonderful?


Much more: https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/trump-again-overblows-risks-of-wind-power/

[RainCaster]

1. Bird deaths concern? By a bird brain?

What a bag o wind

[Rhiannon12866]

3. He prefers to promote coal and the resulting black lung disease that kills miners

Though his bizarre remarks (what else is new??) sound like he has a phobia about "windmills..."

[msongs]

2. seems like big turbines turn slower, making less noise and killing fewer birds nt

[hunter]

6. That's an optical illusion. The tips of the largest wind turbines travel 180 mph.

Yep, that will kill a bird or bat, no problem, even if it doesn't actually hit them.

https://gizmodo.com/5930272/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-are-so-long-their-tips-spin-at-180-mph

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

4. Trump got pissed in Scotland when he couldn't stop them from putting up wind turbines in the ocean

offshore from his seaside golf course. He said they were going to ruin the view. The Scots said, "Fuck you, Yank!"

[Rhiannon12866]

5. That was the first thing I thought of, too

He developed a resentment against wind turbines because he couldn't get his own way...

[hunter]

7. Hybrid gas/wind energy systems are better than coal...

... but that doesn't necessarily make them desirable.

Even if we quit coal for natural gas and install wind turbines we're not saving the world.

If coal and oil don't kill us, natural gas will, and there's plenty of natural gas available to destroy what's left of the natural environment as we know it.

Quitting fossil fuels won't be easy.

In some places people might chose nuclear power to support their high energy industrial consumer lifestyles. In other places people might choose a low energy solar and wind powered society that would look nothing like the consumer economy many affluent people now enjoy.

Or we can delude ourselves and build wind turbines that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels to some degree, but not enough to avoid global warming catastrophe, especially as billions of new consumers are incorporated into this world's high energy industrial economy.

I'm not going to be an enthusiastic supporter of giant wind projects just because Trump doesn't like them.

The environmental impacts of these projects are not negligible.

[NNadir]

8. This a clear and crude example of the association fallacy.

The red herring here is to try to distract from an argument that the wind industry is useless, by pointing to a critic of the industry being an intolerable fool for reasons having nothing to do with wind power.

It's very simple to demonstrate how weak this kind of thinking is.

I might announce that anyone who has driven in a Volkswagen bug is anti-Semitic.

Volkswagen bug owners were not anti-Semitic because Aldolf Hitler directed the Nazi Ferdinand Porche to design the Volkswagen bug, and the fact that its designer was a Nazi does not mean that the car did not get great gas mileage compared to other cars in its time.

Similarly, if Trump announces that the ocean is filled with water, this does not mean it is filled with glycerol.

If he announces that rain is good for crops, this does not mean that we should demand droughts.

The wind industry sucks with or without comment from Trump.

In fact, wind turbines produce an insignificant amount of energy, for a tremendous environmental cost not merely limited to wild life.

Personally, while I do worry about rare endangered birds being trashed by this useless and unsustainable technology - in particular the California Condor and the more critically the Whooping Crane - the class of animals most likely to be rendered extinct are bats, since the sound signature of wind turbines has extreme consequences on species relying on echolocation, of which order Chiroptera are the most prominent examples.

I offered a full length open sourced link to a monograph touching on this point in this space: Bats in the Anthropocene.

Of course, I'd be insane to think anyone might read this book, especially chapter 9, because many self declared ersatz "environmentalists" have actually abandoned giving a shit about wildlife and wild spaces to endorse the Tesla car and schemes to turn wild spaces into industrial parks for producing small and trivial amounts of land intense electricity that they intend to waste through the thermodynamic nightmare of charging batteries, and of course because "denial" is not just a river in Egypt.

It seems pretty crass and tactless for a generation of people who don't think very clearly to endorse the wind industry at the expense of all future generation's biodiversity all because they have the stupid idea that wind powered electric cars will save the day and to announce that it's OK to do this because of something Donald Trump says.

The wind industry hasn't been effective at fighting climate change, it isn't effective at fighting climate change and it won't be effective at fighting climate change. We are now experiencing the fastest growth in atmospheric CO2 seen in my lifetime, and I'm not young. We blew a trillion bucks on the wind scam in the last ten years alone, with no result.

Nothing that Donald Trump does or doesn't say has any bearing on that undeniable fact.

The wind industry is nothing more than lipstick on the gas pig.

My willingness to repeat these facts does not make me a Trump supporter, any more than the willingness of some people to trash the environment for consumer crap like the Tesla car necessarily makes them Trump supporters.

Trump is merely too stupid to recognize that the wind industry is simply a marketing bauble for the fossil fuel industry he so loves.