I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked as an environmental consultant — conducting impact assessments on projects like the Folkestone-to-London rail link — and I now teach ecology and conservation. Though I started out neutral on renewable energy, I’ve since seen the havoc wreaked on wildlife by wind power, hydro power, biofuels and tidal barrages. The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons. What few of them have in their heads, though, is the consolation of science.
My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.
h/t Ken (Kulak)
The watermelons who pushed the bird mills specialize in the big lie, and evey word thy utter is determined not by he truth, but by what will advance their jihad against middle class Western societies. Their means is acquiring iron control of the regulatory bureaucracies that have the last say over every economic activity. They will not give it up gently.
Dalton McGuinty passed a law to bypass environmental assessments at the beginning of his green insanity program. He should be put on trial for this.
Sure lets build more bird blenders to puree’ entire flocks of species; because they care about the planet so much. NOT!
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Some weapons-grade crazy from the greenies at that link. Buy guns and ammo, while you still can, seriously.
The watermelon leftist enviro-loons (but I repeat myself) remain 100% immune to facts, data and observed evidence of ANY kind. Their religious doctrine trumps all else in what passes for their “minds”.
Environ-Mentalists.
In rapture over “clean technologies” that fail over their entire lifecycle, to produce the energy used to manufacture their hardware.
More productive and less ecologically damaging to just burn the hydrocarbons, now wasted in their manufacture and erection..
Blind to the destruction their foolishness inflicts on people and wildlife.
But absolutely in love with their self image as a kind and caring saviour of the planet.
As this mob madness unwinds, buy ammo and popcorn.
Retribution is unavoidable, these a-holes have been relentless in their self-righteous belly aching, so foul in their abuse of any reasonable inquirers, that the glibbering climb down will be great fun.
Mercy? For these creeps, that is just a funny sounding word, like ethics, honesty and integrity.
As I have noted before, justice would require creative use of these idiotic constructs, to punish the con artists who profited from them.
The wind powered, auto-loading parasite weight-loss machine inspires me.
Having never used them for public benefit, the loss of their heads by these criminals, could be called removal of 20lbs of ugly fat.
A net benefit to civil society.
In my eyes.
around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day.
This is unverifiable nonsense. That number is extrapolated from nothing.
“This is unverifiable nonsense.” The professor has some knowledge of which he speaks, unlike the bomb throwers from the radical environmental movement who make specious claims when they are after some industry.
“up to 40” means 0-40. Pretty flexible.
That said, the environmental movement is directed by extremists with a secret collectivist political agenda and supported by corrupt political interests.
I am opposed to wind power because it is incredibly unreliable requiring back-up base load and therefore expensive and subsidized. If it were otherwise, the concern over bird-chopping would require siting considerations but not a deal-breaker.
Anyone parroting lines like “around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day” is not someone I want to be aligned with. Such an allegation requires the taxonomic classification of each species gone extinct and at present, the vast majority of the “estimated” numbers have not even been classified. taken at their word, the earth will be a dead planet devoid of all life in about 600 years.
“The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons…
Let me finish that sentence for ya, because few of writers have the balls to say it.
…or, they are greedy parasites who don’t give a damn about nature or the harm they are inflicting on other human beings.
One can go on and on how “green” activists’ views are wrong-headed and hypocritical. Eco-activism, environmentalism and the like have become a religion rather than a set of policies that can be reviewed at any time. Religious believers walk on by faith. What does one proceed with when his beliefs are bird-killing machines?
Not quite, Greg. Renewables never were subject to environmental assessment. What he did, which was in fact much worse, was remove any jurisdiction by the municipalities through zoning laws. It’s an action virtually without precedent in Canadian history.
Ok, I agree with him on wind and bio-fuels.
Hydro and Tidal? You’d have to convince me they are terrible things, but do they change things? Yes.
Can they, if badly designed/operated, cause bad effects? Yeah. BUT. How bad? Do they also do goo things…Yeah…
Are so bad I’d put flat moratoriums on them? No.
I’d put flat moratoriums on every aspect of the entire environmental movement until the Leftists are expunged from it.
Agreeing with any part of it means supporting Leftists extremists.
Hydro has some pretty drastic negative implications for fishery and for anyone getting their property flooded out which is really vandalism writ large. There is also fact that dam failures have killed lots of people. The Big Project mentality is one that has to go.
During the same month as TMI in 1979, a dam in Gujarat province in India ruptured. 15,000 people drowned in about 10 minutes. That’s just one of approximately 50 major dam ruptures over the past century.
If you consult the Paul Scherrer Institut energy system accident data base, you discover that over the course of the past century, hydraulic generation kills only slightly fewer people than coal in non-OECD nations per unit of energy generated. In OECD nations which tend to have concrete arch dams rather than earth-filled dams, hydraulic is much safer. Even here however, hydraulic is about as hazardous as natural gas use.
The most dangerous form of energy generation is from liquefied petroleum products, while the least dangerous for both OECD and non-OECD is nuclear.
Yeah, a dam ruptured in Gujarat. It was probably of Third World design, and Third World construction and maintenance standards.
Most of the deaths from major dam failures in the 20th centuries have occurred in the Third World. Hydro in the Western nations is an exceptionally safe, and cheap means of power production. The Big Creek Project built in California in the early 1900’s has an installed capacity of 1000 MW and provides irrigation and flood control for the Central Valley. Only environmentalists at war with society, or their uninformed followers want to bust dams.
Spinal Tap – You are not really saying that the death of fish outweighs the human benefit of cheap electric power are you? Btw you are a really big hypocrite if you write your posts courtesy of modern power plants, while pretending to be offended by their non-economic costs to the dear fishes. Kind of like ” vegans ” who sneak bacon once in awhile.
When ya hear about Hydro being bad for the environment, it is usually from onr o’ them loons, who want to take out the dams “so the rivers can flow free”. Flood control is an ignored benefit of Hydro Electric…..
Believe it er not these nits talk of the environmental damage caused by a lack of annual floods….Like High River had gaia ride to it’s rescue….
Yep it is no a religion…..it’s a “Frankfurt School” means of destroying western industrial society……political….
Your post is more than a little confused. The fact that western designed and built dams are highly safe has nothing to do with the fact that they still cause fatalities as I indicated. Even in Ontario, a routine water spill killed two people near Ottawa about 10 years ago. That’s two more than were killed by all the radiation from Fukushima. And that’s just one water-spill episode.
Yes, of course the greenies are insane for wanting all large dams removed. That has nothing to do with the fact that different energy sources all have different levels of actual hazard.
And cheap? All depends on the site. Yes, Niagara Falls Adam Beck is extremely cheap. A project like Renison in Northern Ontario is not. Lots of head but very little water. The cost of hydraulic energy is totally dependent upon the site. Some are extremely low cost, others are not. Practically all of the low cost sites have already been built; only the less attractive sites remain.
cgh –
Any human activity is of course associated with fatalities. But maximum safety is not the objective of pwer generation; lowest total cost per KWh is ( incl. human, non economic costs. ). Where consensual government and conventional power generation co exist, we must conclude that the continued permitting of plants is a recognition and acceptance of those risks by the public.
I would like to see the methodology before believing that nuclear plants are safer than established hydro plants. It is also not clear that fatalities associated with nuclear generation are intrinsically lower than those associated with hydro, or that the fatalities associated with non- nuclear generation can’t be reduced.
My hunch is that there is little difference between coal, nuke, gas and hydro regarding their intrinsic safety, and that they are all so low in fatalities that fatalities are essentially a meaningless statistic dredged up by the radical left, watermelon division to snow people into thinking that those means of generation are less safe than solar and the bird blenders. If we are unwilling to tolerate fatalities ” caused ” by conventional power generation, the way forward is clear: turn off the electricity.
cgh –
Any human activity is of course associated with fatalities. But maximum safety is not the objective of pwer generation; lowest total cost per KWh is ( incl. human, non economic costs. ). Where consensual government and conventional power generation co exist, we must conclude that the continued permitting of plants is a recognition and acceptance of those risks by the public.
I would like to see the methodology before believing that nuclear plants are safer than established hydro plants. It is also not clear that fatalities associated with nuclear generation are intrinsically lower than those associated with hydro, or that the fatalities associated with non- nuclear generation can’t be reduced.
My hunch is that there is little difference between coal, nuke, gas and hydro regarding their intrinsic safety, and that they are all so low in fatalities that fatalities are essentially a meaningless statistic dredged up by the radical left, watermelon division to snow people into thinking that those means of generation are less safe than solar and the bird blenders. If we are unwilling to tolerate fatalities ” caused ” by conventional power generation, the way forward is clear: turn off the electricity.
If sane people made the energy decisions, most of our electric power would come from thorium/deuterium nuclear, hydroelectric and tidal. Hydrocarbons would be mainly used for transportation and space heating. Solar would be used only in sunny desert locations like the middle east.
Sane people don’t make any of the major decisions that effect our energy systems, unfortunately it’s by people motivated by greed and special interests.
More insurmountable opportunities fup-duck by the counterproductive side of human nature.
I would like to see the methodology before believing that nuclear plants are safer than established hydro plants. It is also not clear that fatalities associated with nuclear generation are intrinsically lower than those associated with hydro, or that the fatalities associated with non- nuclear generation can’t be reduced.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal (elect, heat,cook –world avg)..100 (26% of wrld enrgy, 50% of elec)
Coal electricity – world avg elec….60 (26% of wrld energy, 50% of elec)
Coal (elect,heat,cook)– China…….170
Coal electricity- China………….90
Coal – USA………………………15
Oil………………………………….36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas………………………4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass………………….12
Peat……………………………….12
Solar (rooftop)………………..0.44 (0.2% of world energy for all solar)
Wind………………………….0.15 (1.6% of world energy)
Hydro…………………………0.10 (euro rate, 2.2% of wrld enrgy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao…..1.4 (ca 2500 TWh/yr &171k Banqiao dead)
Nuclear……………………….0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
N60 has given you the condensed results. Here’s the full study written in 1998.
PSI has maintained its ENSAD data base ever since, publishing the results periodically in updates.
http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/szkola/materials/S3/psi_materials/ENSAD98.pdf
Understand that PSI is acknowledged to be the world’s energy experts with respect to this area. When you go through the paper at the link, you will find the metholdology laid out. Hirschberg and Co. have rigorous criteria as to what constitutes a “severe energy accident”.
As you can see, there are dramatic differences among the various energy sources. In general terms, as implemented in the industrial nations, these numbers cannot be reduced significantly without disproportionate increases in costs. Safety vs. cost is a logarithmic function, with costs increasing disproportionately as safety improves (the next safety step costs far more per life saved than the previous one).
The real issue here is a policy problem. No government or other regulatory body has ever defined an absolute level of acceptable risk. In practical terms, this means that they respond only to the Perceived Risk by the public rather than the Actual Risk from the specific technology.
cgh – I particularly am interested in the scientific basis, if any, of those statistics. Regressions, for instance, in and of themselves are essentially meaningless. Are those stats based on regressions? What if any scientific basis exists for them? I’m afraid in this day and age, many ” authorities ” should not be trusted.
Read the report, scc. They are not regressions at all. They are a straight-forward addition of all the fatalities and injuries from all “severe energy accidents” since approximately 1900 divided by the total amount of energy that system has produced over that period. There’s no extrapolations here, strictly raw counting of actual fatalties, not statistical estimates. The report encloses a complete list of all the accident events in their data base. It’s hundreds of events long.
The method is simple. Say nuclear power produced 40 fatalties in 40 years of production. Over that same period, however long or short it was, it produced say 40 TWh. That would be thus 1 death/TWh. That’s how simple the PSI measurement is. These are real deaths, not statistical extrapolations from theoretical health effects.
Yes, I agree with you there’s a lot of rubbish out there in the world of energy statistics. Even IEA has become contaminated with a lot of speculation based on models. Not PSI. This is simply the history of what has occurred already. It does NOT include, for example, statistical and speculative deaths from air pollution from burning fossil fuels. It only includes immediate deaths from fossil fuels as a result of mining or transportation accidents, or in-plant accidents.
When it comes to energy system accidents, PSI is the gold standard from which most other agencies fall far short.
You will notice that the number of deaths in commercial solar
plants are not listed. This is due to the fact that people
fall from ladders while cleaning PV panels and mirrors.
The nuclear industry is the safest of all. Fewer people have
died in a nuclear accident (IE radiation poisoning) than have
died in Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile.
Hey Bigfoot, good call on hydroelectric power. It is far and
away the cheapest form of energy production. The fact that the
environmental left is attacking it, should tell you all you need
to know about their motives.
It is virtually the only form of energy that does not shift
emissions, create toxic byproducts or emissions, etc. While
Hydroelectric is a true ZERO emissions source of energy (Much
like nuclear,) it suffers from the fact that just about anywhere
a dam can be built, it already has.
And before the feces throwers begin screaming about spent fuel
rods, they need to gain an understanding of nuclear energy.