Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

But to make that case you'd actually have to do the next step of assessing the relative scales of how much oil gets used in the creation of windmill components compared to an alternative case where the energy is generated with traditional fossil fuel infrastructure.

I feel like if we're going to bring up the fossil fuel inputs into the creation of critical components for windmills, the mandatory next sentence has to be an acknowledgment of the relative scales of consumption in both cases. Otherwise it's a throwaway line with no context and no clear upshot.

I'd also argue that they are awesome, quietly spinning giants in the distance. Although maybe that wears off if you constantly live near one.

Cell towers and oil wells are allowed to be built wherever by a landowner and are both eyesores, yet were built anyway.

The land use talking point is so old that I remember hearing it in high school nearly 20 years ago. And the answer now is the same as the answer then, which is that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Windmills actually don't physically occupy something like 99% of the space over which they are distributed, and they are located so as not to interfere with other forms of land use, on land that wouldn't otherwise be used for something.

With solar panels it's a little bit more nuanced because apparently there have been some cases where land has been cleared to make space for panels, which is bad. I would like to think however that's unrepresentative, and the same thing is true of solar panels that they're located in ways that don't interfere with other forms of land use.

Even if wind and solar were not renewable these would still be distinctive advantages they have on the land use question. But if you throw all those nuances away and purely look at something like energy generation per square meter, it makes it look like there's some sort of losing proposition you have to worry about with solar and wind, even though there really isn't.

I do think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument, because like so many other things in this thread, it's this dangling concern with an open unquantified implication for how significant it's supposed to be. That open-ended implication allows a skeptic to get away with implying that maybe it's a big problem without doing any of the work. In my opinion we are now far enough along into the renewable energy transition that this kind of rhetorical move should not be allowed, it should be considered poor form. You want to say it's a problem, that's fair and good, but how big of a problem? Are you at least interested in that kind of question or understand why it's important? What's the upshot? Is the idea that we abandon renewable energy altogether, do 5% less or something? Is it that we do exactly as much as before but we all just agree to be really careful? And why should I have to do your work for you of working through with the implication is supposed to be?

I think a lot of the problems with aesthetics are similar in that there are strategic ways to mitigate them, but perhaps more importantly I don't think that there are actually aesthetic problems here in the first place, and we seem to get along just fine without applying those standards to status quo infrastructure. But, here again, even if we agree that it's a problem, and did some sort of like economic analysis of the trade-off there, we would have to weigh that against the benefits of renewables writ large, are we looking at one penny of problem versus $1 of benefit? I suspect that that even would overstate the problem, but again, It's this unquantified open-ended implication that seems to be doing no work whatsoever to assess the relative scale of the problem and weigh it against the benefits brought by renewables.

This argument still baffles me - when we are talking about the US, things requiring a bit more space is laughable. There's SO MUCH UNUSED SPACE that no one cares about, there's offshore space and dual use space no one gives a damn about how is this even an argument. If it'd be orders of magnitude yea that'd be a problem but a few percent? Please.

But that is all fine and we can just build them elsewhere where this isn't an issue.

Also seeing rows of them along ridgelines feels very cool.

For anyone complaining about offshore wind (which is way the hell off in the distance) it may be worth considering that the alternative is those houses and beaches on the shore cease to exist in the future if we don't build the turbines.

You're proving GP's point. Roads on their own don't make noise, but if I go outside I can hear the road noise from cars going down a IH-35 which is a mile away. (It isn't even the only road I can hear noise from)

If there's an elevated standard that differentiates aesthetics of windmills from those other cases, then those other things are not subject to the same type of consideration after all.

yes, it does. So the far right can use the same semantic arguments (redefining words) as the far left. "wind energy pollutes", that's enough (for them).

I'm not taking that position, just showing how dirty politics becomes when you stop using logic and just go for the jugular with opponents instead of engage with them on a fair level. Again, the ones who engage fairly will die off - figuratively or literally. It's an arms race, or (whatever biologists call it when two bacteria evolve defenses and kill each other).

But only because those studies were done and numbers were produced.

It's important that we actually prove claims like this with facts.

Green energy sources like wind and solar don't remove emissions. They add less.

> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/

A motorcycle might have 300hp per ton. Passenger car 100hp/ton. Train maybe 20hp/ton. South Dakota-class battleship is 3hp/ton.

So yeah size isn't an impediment to electrification.

However regarding the study you linked, while it does show a downward trend in burned area, I am not sure how that relates to our "debate"? It clearly shows that the reduction of burned area each year is down mostly because of humans burning down fewer wooded areas intentionally (3.3.1). Meanwhile the area burned down because of the effects of climate change is actually up (3.3.2). Which does match up with the studies I linked to. However, the study you linked actually only covers up to 2007, which is soon close to 20 years ago. Meanwhile what I linked to covers until 2021. There has been a significant increase in global temperatures in that time (~0.5°C, which considering the limit from Paris is 1.5°C), as such it is very likely the impact of global warming has increased for the time periods after the ones covered in the study. And your study also shows no significant decrease in burned area each year in Europe, so it doesn't really say much about Germany. It also only covers burning. Most of the recent area reduction actually hasn't necessarily been through burning. Plenty of trees died because of drought and then either not having the necessary water to grow or failing to defend against harmful insects and similar.

Climate change won't necessarily burn your house down or make you drown in rising sea levels. Most people will probably be impacted by food shortages, diseases spreading, wars and other factors. As such I am a bit confused about why you linked that study. It seems to focus on a rather narrow factor of forest reduction. But it doesn't cover much of the recent times with the highest temperature increases (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...), doesn't disagree with any of my statements and only says the amount of reduction reduced. It doesn't say that forests actually started to increase (because they didn't).

Considering how upset you seemed about humans cutting trees down, I just don't follow what you are trying to argue about anymore? Did you just want to point out, that from 1940 until 2007 the area lost each year to fire reduced by around 30%, so clearly climate change is not that big of a problem, even though the study says the impact of climate change is increasing and in Germany we lost about 5% of the total forested area in 4 years in a later period not covered by your study and burning isn't the only reason for losing forests? It probably would help me, if you tied your argument into the previous discussion. From my perspective it seems to mostly just agree with what I said, in which case I don't understand, why I would have to be more open to debate, since there doesn't seem to be anything to debate?

I probably must have misunderstood you somewhere, so please enlighten me, if that is the case. Apart from that, have a nice day and sorry that I seem to not understand what you are trying to tell me!

There are areas where wind turbines have been put up near population of eagles (Smøla in Norway for instance) and the population is increasing. Even though we know some of them are killed by the wind turbine.

Giving them a good habitat and not hunting them or their prey to extinction is orders of magnitude more important than not building wind power (as long as we’re not incredibly stupid about where we put them). And avoiding global warming is an incredibly important part of preserving their habitats. Also.. have you seen what oil spills does to birds?

Which is why the National Audubon society is cautiously positive to wind power.

One potentially bad thing is that plastics degrade and leach into the environment over time.

Which is worse, the __________ caused by technology Z or the airborne carbon dioxide they prevent?

THE CARBON DIOXIDE IS WORSE, most of the time.

Can we at least start at a place of the carbon dioxide is worse and go from there? I'm not against listening to reason, I'm just against people looking for every reason not to change how we gain and consume our energy.

There is market for that I feel

Wind farms appear as ridiculous as they are. Yet... they keep getting built because there's government money to be made. There's government money to be made because they give the appearance of "doing something, anything" while in fact doing almost nothing. Follow the votes...