Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.

One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.

Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?

I recently had a dumb argument with actually a bunch of folks on Nextdoor who claimed unironically that coal power plants were more eco friendly than wind and solar farms.

I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.

These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.

I have a lake home in Central MN. There are shit tons of wind turbines near my home.

The recent moves by the feds to limit wind makes no sense. If a farmer wants to lease some small plots of likely unusable planting property to a company that generates electricity via wind who the fuck cares? While the feds can stop land use options as they see fit, the way it’s worded makes it seem as if it’s not a good thing for farmers to use their land as they see fit—something that’s likely intentional.

The oil companies do.

There are some German guidelines for building offshore windmills - how noise should be reduced - and whales should be distracted and that ramming shouldn't be too loud. Most likely this doesn't come from nothing. So 100+ whales could be true, but I think all this is related to noise from construction.

https://bwo-offshorewind.de/category/offshore-windenergie/na...

Weird: My YouTube feed is suddenly (as of last night) full of “Landman” shorts and I was trying to work out wtf it even is? This makes a lot more sense now, thanks.

Conservatives did something kind of incredible.

I'm in the PNW so I'll use timber and logging as my example but one can find similar stories in coal and oil.

Conservatives used environmental causes as a means to distract workers. What do I mean? Back in the 70s and 80s loggers were looking to unionize and get more pay. So what happened? The spotted owl, land rights, environmentalists, etc. Now we have campaigns like Timber Unity which resulted in more gates on lands, less loggers in general(automation) and lower pay/benefits for those workers.

Now, rural Americans fly banners of campaigns that have stripped them of money. They eagerly proclaim their timber unity while they lose their jobs, acting as if they're battling this environmentalist boogieman.

While the low paid workers hit their chests and declare unity against environmentalists, their employers lower their pay, cut benefits, etc while blaming an owl.

It's mind boggling how hoodwinked they let them selves be. You can see this repeated in other industries that use environmentalists as scapegoats.

Landman is objectively a bad show. I gave it about 5-6 episodes before giving up. It's so far from Yellowstone, it might as well be in Australia.

So that's what they meant with "promises made, promises kept", etc...

Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are.

They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.

Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.

[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...

That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.

True, but there is also its own brand of politicization of wind power going on, driven mostly by conservatives and the Bavarian CSU.

Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife.

And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...

Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.

Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.

It's worse than that, its culture war driven in a lot of cases. Doesn't matter if it's anywhere close to their back yard.

Yeah, but those people still have roads, large buildings and factories in their backyard.

Price of houses dropping is a good thing, anyway, makes it easier to get one.

What happens if you chop it down like a tree, assuming there's nothing underneath?

One thing to keep in mind with the Danish figure is that they to be correct import 37.6% but have enough thermal capacity to run the entire country at peak demand without renewables or imports.

What they do is essentially being the energy trading market for Northern Europe. Buying the cheapest available from UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

As storage gets built out they will be able to arbitrage this positions and their better, likely allowing them to start phasing out thermal capacity as long as the stability of the grid is ensured through empirical evidence.

Attempting to fit nuclear power with its extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX in our zero marginal cost renewable and near zero marginal cost storage future is a near impossible task.

Maybe some, when its within sight. Otherwise it tends to make good money, which is always much welcome.

Yeah, thought of pharma afterwards. But defense is most definitely on the list, even though the astroturfing looks more like manufacturing consent.

This is important. There's a difference between charitable donations that are actually for the public interest vs. shadow lobbying by oil companies.

> Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.

Well, if they were entirely sincere in their concern for the view, the birds, and the noise, only one of those concerns would apply to offshore drilling.

Considering "preventing industrialization" to be an end in itself is something different, usually associated with being pro-wind-power.

Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.

e.g.

- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.

- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.

I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.

Or just dumping heavy metals into the water table or various other industrial waste.

The Instagram one is entirely a single image so people will find it easier to share via social media.

> Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.

Seems like a myopic strawman to me. The main eco-activism that I remember for the last couple of decades has been for reduced fossil-fuel use. This is now being translated into policy in Europe especially, which has massively increased the market for renewables that the "industrial capitalists" can take advantage of.

Industrial capitalists irrevocably destroy large tracts of public and private land. Eco-activists lobby to at least have them cover the clean-up bill, if not incurr punitive fines. This goes back to 1969 when the EPA was set up when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire due to pollution from industrial waste. Some other highlights of "Creating value for shareholders"

Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. BP paid over $20 billion in fines and compensation.

Love Canal: Occidental Petroleum dumped toxic waste into the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, resulting in pollution causing birth defects. $130 million in settlements.

Exxon Valdez oil spill: Alaska’s Prince William Sound contaminated with 11 million gallons of crude oil. Exxon paid over $1 billion in cleanup and compensation.

DuPont Chemical leak: DuPont contaminated the drinking water of over 300,000 people. $670 million in settlements.

Hinkley Groundwater Contamination: PG&E contaminated groundwater with chromium-6 in California. $333 million in settlements.

Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests. $25 billion in settlements.

Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Ash Spill: A retention pond breached, releasing over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge into the surrounding area. Cleanup cost over $1 billion.

>Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels.

Wow, those cheap solar panels were done entirely by the private sector? Without decades of government-backed research on how to make solar panels viable to mass-produce?

Without eco-activists lobbying for government-funded research on solar panels, there would be no mass production, because nobody is paying $100k/kW.

And making cheap LEDs doesn't necessarily reduce energy use, thanks to the rebound effect - we've known this since Lord Jevon noted that James Watt's new ultra-efficient steam engine increased demand for coal instead of reducing it, because it made steam engines cheaper to run. If you look at car headlights, you'll find that instead of using LEDs to reduce power use, car-makers instead used them to crank up the lumens as far as humanly possible. They only save power on paper, when underwritten by implicit environmental optimism.

Note that I'm not opposed to "creating value for shareholders"; they made cheap solar panels possible. I'm saying that powerful economic forces require far more precise alignment than you'd think for them to be useful, and they are almost never conveniently placed in the right spot by chance.

I haven't come across any "eco activists" who solely push for straw bans etc and nothing else. It's pretty obvious that the way forward is to not use so much stuff. LEDs and solar panels are nice but don't encourage using less stuff. "Creating value for shareholders" encourages using more stuff. But you're probably right, "economic forces" look like they win, now and forever.

> Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels. Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.

Cheap solar panels were subsidized by governments to get the costs down. I know eco-activists that are pro-nuclear.

More generally: a lot of these things were done to reduce costs and due to price pressures. There is currently no mechanism to put a price on climate change that is directly noticeable by the general consumer. (Only 'indirect' costs due to climate inaction, like higher insurance premiums due to more extreme weather events.)

Perhaps if the O&G folks and others would stop trying "create value for shareholders" of the fossil fuel companies we could use The Market™ to properly price in climate change instead of subsidizing climate-damaging actions and subsidizing the operations of these companies.

You can learn about a scene without thinking they're competent.

It doesn't really prove war for oil, war tends to mess up production and also we have a huge amount of domestic production. But that depends on what exactly the claims are.

"Free energy" doesn't exist so that just goes back to them barking up the wrong tree. It's taking a real villain and blaming them for nonsense instead of something they actually do.

> how would you know if the conspiracy theory scene has already addressed oil industry corruption?

Because it hasn't. The "free energy" stuff is way off the mark and pales in comparison to absolute kookery of weather machines being responsible for things climate change is actually doing.

They don't have a solid grasp of reality and it shows in how they're unaware about the specific things the oil industry is doing. Much of their rhetoric is big oil propaganda being repeated anyway.

War for oil isn't a conspiracy - it's such obvious public knowledge that there are memes about it. Yes, the country that is a major oil producer and in the currency of which most if not all oil transactions are done uses its military might to preserve the status quo - that's hardly a secret.

>The War-for-Oil conspiracy theories are proven correct.

Almost all of the post-Iraq oil contracts went for Chinese companies. The US made very little of it.

These batteries last a few minutes when they are fully charged. In the winter it's not unusual to have close to zero wind power for a few days and it could come after a few weeks of lower output, so they aren't fully charged.

You'll notice in your article they are almost always talking about power instead of energy because energy is the problem.

We still need about 100 - 1000x improvements to rely on batteries without reliable power plants, depending on how much the generation capacity is overbuilt.

It's not out of date. BESS has different utility in different weather areas. Germany would need the equivalent of 20-30y of global bess deployments to ditch fossils, not considering realistic power transfer or weather forecast. That's why even their pro ren Fraunhofer ISE recommended gas expansion

The oil stays cheap. It’s everything else that gets expensive.

Finland at 24% and increasing steadily.

The argument was about the cost, UK having highest prices on the continent (depending how you count subsidies for others) but 20% seems too low anyway. Normal plants are still fine at 60% cf

Not necessarily disagreeing, but Denmark's grid is integrated with europe. If the rest of europe catches up with Denmark in wind power, that will definitely be a challenge, since wind speeds are correlated across the continent. Not unsolvable, but it's an issue for sure.

I would love to obtain a handbook on how to convince moronic far-right leaning neighbors to change or at least soften their stance. I usually just tell them to fuck off, which apparently is not that much effective.

Cute that you think there will be an election. Why do you think have all controlling and independent agencies that are part of the election process or cybersecurity been removed in the first week via executive orders?

Also write them a very stern letter, That'll show'em.

The only way to stop those people is boots-on-the-ground political, social, and cultural activism. No, writing mean tweets and just taking part to that fancy "guess your next leader" powerball variant you do once every four years is not remotely enough.

> Oil money should be funding renewables

not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.

You can argue both sides right? It makes business sense for oil money to do that.

However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.

I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.

You can actually do both. This way you have full control - invest where you control the market and sabotage where you don't.

Shell at one point started doing that in the UK, they installed a number of offshore wind turbines. Then they sold them and doubled down on oil.

What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.

The whole point for them is ownership and while you can in effect own oil fields and these companies do, you don't own the wind -- the oil companies weren't smart enough/ early enough to persuade major governments to say oh, actually the wind belongs to BP and Exon.

So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.

This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.

Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.

Because short-term profits outweigh everything probably.

Well, Russia itself is oil founded (huge part of the budget)

Unrelated but gas stoves are really better imo.

Heats faster, doesn’t crack etc.