I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read this message of a Danish group opposed to the plan. Greens clear-cutting trees in a national park and evicting people, whoda thunk?. Seems like a case of “we had to destroy the village to save it“. Here’s the description of the park from the Danish National Parks website:
The west of Thy has been designated as the first Danish national park. The National Park, Thy stretches for an up to 12-kilometer-wide belt along the Jutland west coast from Agger Tange in the south to Hanstholm in the north. It is an enormous and unspoiled natural area totaling 244 km2 – almost the size of the Danish island of Langeland. In the National Park you can go between outstretched, wind-swept wilds and aromatic pine trees. You can also throw yourself into the sparkling waves of the North Sea or bike through cool dune plantations.
I’ve reposted the message from the opposition group below.
Dear environmentally aware citizen of the world! www.nationalttestcenter.dk
Copenhagen, December 2009
The Danish government plans to clear forests and destroy unique nature for the benefit of industry.
The Danish environment minister Troels Lund Poulsen decided, on behalf of the government, on 30th September 2009, that the clearing of 15 km2 of forest in the north west of Denmark will take place. A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region, near Østerild. This deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emission, the equivalent of the CO2 emission of 100,000 people per year.
The government will force the local population out of their homes. The reasoning behind this is said to be for the benefit of the Danish windmill industry, which will in turn create more Danish jobs. The regulations to finalise the evictions goes against Denmark’s constitution and is therefore clearly illegal.
In current plans, the area is categorised as a recreational area, where the set up of windmills is prohibited.
The region is one of Denmark’s most beautiful areas. With its rugged landscapes and grand views, as well as many rare species of animals, birds and plants, the area is representative of authentic Danish nature. There are very few areas of Denmark left, where one can experience darkness at night and complete silence.
The windmills, which are 250 meters tall, are planned to be along a 6 km linear south/north stretch. This will prevent birds in the international Ramsar-area, Vejlerne, which is situated to the east of the test centre, from flying west to the EU-habitat area Vullum Sø and to Thy National Park just south of Hanstholm.
The Danish government has not consulted properly about the plans. The Danish citizens had little time to put forward comments of the project. The hearing has only been 11 days long, with 9 of those being a national holiday.
The environment minister has decided that a report on this projects impact on nature and the wildlife will be completed by early December 2009. The consequence of this is that it is impossible to produce a well documented scientific report, to act as the foundation for a political decision.
The local population has formed an association, “Landforeningen for Bedre Miljø” (The Association for an Improved Environment) with the aim to inform about the environmental consequences for both the society and nature, if plans for the national test centre are followed through. So far, “Landsforeningen for Bedre Miljø“ has tried, in vain, to persuade the Danish government to produce a more thorough investigation of the project’s impacts on the surroundings.
The association is discontented with the planning process so far, because they have neglected ordinary, well-known, democratic principles, which Denmark otherwise uses every opportunity to talk about across the world.
If you, as an environmentally aware citizen of the world, thinks that questions ought to be asked concerning this unjust conduct towards our future generations inheritance of the nature, please spread the word about this planned national test centre.
###
Chris Horner of Pajamas Media has a summary of the issue:
President Obama was caught flatfooted by the embarrassing truth about Spain’s “green economy” after he instructed us — on eight separate occasions — to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain” as a model for a U.S. future. Spain, of course, is suffering an economic meltdown from enormous public debt incurred through programs like a mandated “green economy.”
But Obama also just implored Spain to drastically scale back or risk becoming Greece. A flip he immediately flopped, by pushing hard to enact the Kerry-Lieberman “path to insolvency” bill based on … Spain. (Cue Benny Hill theme.)
So, embarrassed — or perhaps shameless — Obama changed his pitch: “Think about what’s happening in countries like Denmark.”
Of course, the experience of Denmark — a country with a population half that of Manhattan’s, not exactly a useful energy model for our rather different economy and society — is no great shakes, either.
But it gets better.
In my new book — Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America — I describe the absurdity of the “free ice cream” theories of the “green economy” our statist friends now embrace as their latest raison d’etre for a controlled society. My mother-in-law — visiting from Denmark — is reading my book with a particular interest in its exposé of what her heavily taxed labor pays for in that country.
The book also prompted her to relay an amazing new anecdote to the case study referred to by the Danes as “the fairy tale of the windmills.”
In the northern region of Jutland called Thy, Denmark is forcing people off of their land (“Kelo” is apparently Danish for “Kelo”) and — wait for it — preparing to clear-cut fifteen square kilometers of forest, and eventually thirty, in order to put up more of the bird- and job-killing monstrosities.
These giant windmills are not even intended to fill an energy gap for the Danish economy. No, they are to be onshore experimental versions of massive new off-shore turbines — with the facility to be rented out to wind mavens like Siemens.
The argument they are forwarding for doing this is not just the typically risible claim that this is necessary for the environment. After all, “[the] deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of the CO2 emissions of 100,000 people per year.”
They are also forwarding the argument that this must occur in order to create Danish jobs.
Of course, “creating jobs,” to the extent such mandates can do this (as they are typically net job killers), appears much more necessary after the state first made it difficult for the private sector to do such things. Denmark enforced what methods, and what quantity of those methods, are acceptable for producing electricity. It always turns out that the acceptable ways are inefficient, intermittent, and expensive. Which sort of explains the need for mandates.
read the rest here:
Its even worse.
Each new turbine may actually be contributing to CO2 emissions. This is due to the inefficiency effect on base load coal and gas fired power stations.
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/hidden-fuel-costs-of-wind-generated-electricity/
I believe Denmark has higher proportional installed wind capacity than Holland and Germany, which are the countries examined in this study. Denmark is a special case since they do use Norwegian and Swedish hydropower as a buffer. Nonetheless Charles Opalek in his comment above confirms that Denmark’s CO2 emissions have risen, despite the increasing wind capacity.
So not only are the trees being felled but the result would likely be use of MORE coal and gas than if the turbines are never built. That goes for off-shore turbines also. I don’t think CO2 has much warming effect, but it is hypocritical to build wind turbines to save on CO2 when you know they will actually cause increased CO2 emissions. Then charge a very high price for the resulting expensive power.
Then there’s the poor birds.
Everyone should see this:
I think I’ll put a Vesta turbine right in my back yard!
Gareth Phillips says:
May 24, 2010 at 10:42 am
Gareth, Once you build the nukes there is NO POINT to building the wind farms.
As has been said, “liberalism is a mental disorder.”
It’s nice to have a solar panel for your cabin in the woods, but you’ll never get as much energy out of it as was used to construct it, and scaling it up doesn’t help. Geothermal has some regional possibilities, but with major limitations. We have three useful and economical sources of large-scale energy:
– Hydro
– Hydrocarbons
– Nuclear
The dozen others are just a big circle-jerk.
/dr.bill
—
bubbagyro writes of the efficiency of nuclear power.
I would draw to his attention a book published by the late Petr Beckmann (a genuinely cantankerous individual and at the same time one of the most pleasant correspondents I’d ever had occasion to swap letters with) in 1976, The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear, in which he examines the value of light-water fission powerplants and their fuel cycle from a public health perspective as well as considering the efficiency of this mode of power generation relative to the coal cycle, hydroelectric sources, and so forth.
Not surprisingly, the work does not suffer much by its date of publication. Dr. Beckmann was an eloquent and principled critic of “sham environmentalists” and in the days before the Web became available as a venue for sharing information and opinion, he operated a bulletin board system (BBS) in which I recall having for the first time encountered rigorous scientific considerations of the anthropogenic global warming blunder back in the late ’80s.
Much of his extemporanea on “the greenhouse effect” is archived online today, and reads as prescient. Were he alive today, I suspect that Dr. Beckmann would be high indeed on Algore’s “Enemies’ List.”
—
jorgekafkazar says:
May 24, 2010 at 2:58 pm
dave38 says: “…So, how much energy is used to make the cement for this platform? Lets call it Ec. And how much energy is used to make the windmill? Lets call it Ew. Then how much energy will this windmill actually produce over it’s lifetime? Call it Ep. so we have (Ec+Ew) -Ep. I suspect that the equation would show a very large positive number!”
And I suspect you’re wrong. Can you post actual numbers, or is this some sort of gedankenexperiment?
_____________________________________________________________________________
I think you need to check this out http://www.windpowerfraud.com/
“Wind turbines have an embarrassingly low and unsustainable Energy Returned On Energy Invested value of 0.29. The installation of wind power facilities will consume more than 3 times the energy they will ever produce.” Charles S. Opalek is a registered Professional Engineer BS in Mechanical Engineering
“REPLY: Look at the net gain/loss of CO2 for cutting down trees replacing with wind turbines. Then there’s the hypocrisy. If the same area was cleared for a nuclear power plant, the screaming from the greens would be deafening. Windfarm?, oh OK free pass on that. -A”
Agreed Anthony.
It’s gross madness and hypocrisy IMO: Since all the BS is about alleged CO2 AGW/CC and forests being an important carbon sink to save the Planet.
So it’s all Greenie and Political Al Gorish Tyrannical UN like BS the whole CO2 AGW/CC Movement and all their Greenie Save Gaia from unprecendent ‘Tommyrot’ Manmade Global Warming afterall. Just as we thought it was in the firstplace!
Hello Anthony,
Thanks for yet another interesting contribution!
However, you might want to make one correction. A careful reading of the opposition group letter seems to indicate that the windmills are not being constructed within the Thy National Park, but just to the east of it. They say that ” A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region” (which includes more than the national park), and that “the area is categorised as a recreational area” (not a national park). Further, they say “This will prevent birds in the international Ramsar-area, Vejlerne, which is situated to the east of the test centre, from flying west to the EU-habitat area Vullum Sø and to Thy National Park just south of Hanstholm.
Nevertheless, the windmills sound like they will do little to enhance the Danish environment.
Philip Foster says:
“…wind turbines cannot be left idle for too long or their blades get overstressed and can bend or break. Therefore they are powered up BY the Grid to rotate.”
I nearly fell off my chair. They have motors in them? So a slowly turning windmill may in fact be taking power out of the grid? Can anyone confirm this?
Curiousgeorge says:
May 24, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Let me take this opportunity to inform folks that, in the USA at least, we are not totally controlled by the Federal Government; provided the States and their citizens have the cojones to stand up and be counted. There are avenues which can be legally pursued by the States if the Federal burden becomes too onerous or in other areas in which the Federal Gov’t is neglecting it’s duties.
One such recourse is noted below.
http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscvie…
_________________________________________________________________________
George I come up with a 404 error for that URL. Can you re post it.
We in the USA do have a couple of other recourses such as the state tenth Amendment resolutions (state soverignty resolutions) and state Nullification:
“When a state ‘nullifies’ a federal law, it is proclaiming that the law in question is void and inoperative, or ‘non-effective,’ within the boundaries of that state; or, in other words, not a law as far as that state is concerned.” source
Another little known avenue is Jury Nullification. A jury has the right to look at a law and decide whether it should be enforced.
“The primary function of the independent juror is not, as many think to dispense punishment to fellow citizens accused of breaking various laws, but rather to protect fellow citizens from tyrannical abuse of power by the government. The Constitution guarantees you the right to trial by jury… Jurors can say no to government tyranny by refusing to convict.
….You, as a grand juror, stand as the first bulwark against government tyranny. While you must protect us all from dangerous people who harm others, you must always be aware the your first job is to protect harmless people from unfair, unjust and unreasonable government laws. When laws encroach on private individual rights, you cannot be required to enforce them by returning an indictment. When you refuse to indict harmless people, you help to protect us all, you included, from out-of-control government actions. As an independent grand jury, you also have the right to initiate your own investigations on evidence presented to you, and to indict anyone if you feel they are guilty of wrongdoing, including those government employees and elected officials who are not upholding an oath of public office….” Fully Informed Jury Association
The American jury actually has the power to veto bad laws. A juror has the power to judge both law and facts. “In 1804 Samuel Chase, Supreme Court Justice and signer of the Declaration of Independence, said The jury has the Right to judge both the law and the facts” http://www.fija.org/docs/JG_Jurors_Handbook.pdf
I am hoping we do not have to use any of these second lines of defense but US citizen should know them especially the information about grand juries “…to indict anyone if you feel they are guilty of wrongdoing, including those government employees and elected officials who are not upholding an oath of public office….”
The last ten years or so have been amazing. If the Greek playwrights thousands of years ago had written a tragicomedy about it, it would have been rejected as being too ironic and not credible.
George W Bush has an energy efficient home in Texas that runs on solar and geothermal, and is energy independent. Al Gore has mansions that are energy hogs. His mansions consume more power than 100 average homes. He flits around the world in private jets warning about carbon pollution while he makes billions trading paper carbon credits to his soft-headed sycophants.
George W warned people to evacuate Katrina. The pundits in essence said not to listen to him. Many died while the mayor of New Orleans had 1000 buses that could have evacuated all the threatened residents, but they stayed in place, waterlogged. The mayor was reelected.
Now Obama has allowed a leak to fester in the Gulf. His executive mandate, under the Clean Air and Water Acts, say that the President shall do everything to mitigate oil spills. His administration had no fire booms available, nor did he allow the spill to be burned off in the early days. He borrowed fire booms from Europe 8 days after the spill occurred. Too late, it has thinned and spread.
During all this time, the Congress had mandated freebees for the conversion of grain to ethanol, while Africa cries for the diverted grain, and millions starve. The Copenhagen meetings tried to rough-neck the developing countries to sign on to an accord which would strip them of the right to bring their countries forward through utilization of cheap energy. They rebelled, wisely.
All of this happened while we fools-on-the-hills watched, laughing and crying at the same time. What a comedy of errors! Now these bureaucrats want to squeeze more money through foolish wind and solar power, yet these are to date unproven, nay wasteful technologies?
This is more than an Oxford debate. This is the future of our children’s children. We have got to get this major issue right the first time.
Michael Cejnar,
Philip Foster is right. I regularly drive past the many hundreds of windmills in the Altamont Pass in Northern California. Most days are windy, but occasionally we drive through on a day when there is little or no wind. Nevertheless, there are always some windmills turning when the large majority are motionless.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs says:
May 24, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Sure. Sometimes the .gov search results will not open from a external link so just in case, you can repeat the search here: http://uscode.house.gov/search/criteria.shtml . Search for Title: 32 , Section: 109 in the appropriate search boxes.
There’s all kinds of interesting and useful info in the USC for those with the patience and grit to wade thru it. But when challenging the government, one best have all their ducks in a row and quacking in unison. And be prepared for a long, hard fight. Most people just don’t have the fortitude (or fortune ) to do it.
The original link: http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscview+t29t32+2231+0++%28%29%20%20AND%20%28%2832%29%20ADJ%20USC%29%3ACITE%20AND%20%28USC%20w%2F10%20%28109%29%29%3ACITE
===
Hate to break the news, Mike, but an electric generator is an electric motor. Spin it, electricity comes out. Pump electricity into it, it turns. So when you put, say, a 2.3 kW turbine up, it’s like a 60-ton 3,000 hp electric motor on top of a 300-foot steel tower. 7th grade Earth Science.
When initiating a new oil field, it is customary to have a ground-breaking ceremony. When starting a new air turbine project, everybody gathers to break wind.
Many commentators here seem to believe this is not happening in their back yard. It is. This is a letter I sent to a newspaper in upstate New York a year ago:
===
Editor
Watertown Daily Times
I grew up in rural Wisconsin.and spent my adolescent summers at my aunt’s place on the St. Lawrence. I know and love the people and lifestyle. Not terribly cosmopolitan, sometimes, but peaceful, close to the earth, and very, very human.
I returned home recently for a visit and discovered that huge swaths of rustic Wisconsin countryside had been vandalized by armies of monstrosities the size of the Statue of Liberty, with a Boeing 747 pinned to her nose. Now Wolfe Island, Ontario, has been desecrated the same way, and plans are afoot for Amherst Island and Cape Vincent. Ye Gods, has everyone completely lost their minds?
Their whooshing and low-frequency thub-thub-thub, audible at disturbing volumes for up to five miles in the mountains or over water, prevents people from sleeping, upsets livestock to the point that productivity decreases sharply while miscarriages rise, and drives away all wildlife (who do not have to worry about mortgages or property values) within a three-mile radius. No deer, bear, or even squirrels. Offshore turbines in Great Yarmouth, England, are causing baby seals to be born dead or to be abandoned by their overstressed mothers. The FAA-required strobe lights disfigure the clear night sky. Our beautiful Wolfe Island now most resembles a poster for a low-budget science fiction movie.
But, of course, low-budget they aren’t; the towers cost upwards of $2 million each to erect, and about $1 million each to take down and decommission. (When the various investors and fly-by-night energy companies have taken turns depreciating the things, will they take them down? Or will our grandchildren live in a landscape of rusting 300-foot hulks topped by broken fans, leaking chemicals into our land? Looking now like the B-movie aliens after they lose the war…)
Industrial-grade heavy-duty access roads have to be hacked through the forest. The smallest available industrial turbine is 1.5 MW, the equivalent of a two thousand horsepower electric motor, weighing on the order of 60 tons. The truck carrying it has to be able to get through. The nacelle containing the turbine is the size of a large bus; the armature must be turned regularly — even if there’s no wind — to keep it from sagging under its own weight, like the drivetrain on a battleship. Just to counter the CO2 from producing the tons upon tons of cement needed to anchor the towers, these things would have to operate near full capacity for over six years. They are not the cute little windmills behind the barn, or the picturesque features of the Dutch countryside. In operation, the tips of the fan blades are moving at more than 200 mph; I hope the terns (and the eagles, and the falcons) stay alert in the middle of the night.
Not to mention, of course, that each turbine contains well over 60 gallons of chemically-sophisticated motor oil to lubricate its complex gearbox and bearings. When — not if — it starts to leak into your streams, rivers, and pastures as these notoriously unreliable machines age, what effect will that have on your drinking water — and your fishing, since all the game for hunting has cleared out? What effect on your peace of mind will it have when a lightning strike disintegrates a blade — throwing ten tons of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and aluminum, white-hot, in huge fragments, for distances up to half a mile, while igniting the lubricating oil 300 feet above the woods? (This sort of event has occurred several times in Germany, with turbines substantially smaller than those planned for Cape Vincent [NY].) In the Wisconsin winter, the turbine blades regularly throw huge chunks of ice, weighing several hundred pounds, up to a thousand feet from the tower. Would upstate New York be so different?
But perhaps this is all worthwhile if we’re saving the planet? Nope. Wind power is so variable that backup fossil plants have to be kept fired up constantly anyway. No carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced. Denmark, the most turbine-ridden country in the world for more than a decade, has not been able to shut down a single power plant and, because its small electrical grid can’t absorb the fluctuations, has had to dump most of its hugely expensive wind wattage to the much larger grids of Sweden and Norway at (as we say) fire-sale prices. Denmark, Germany, and Spain — the leading European wind enthusiasts — have all put moratoria on any further wind installations, because of both public outcry and the budget drain of government subsidies. England, Scotland, and Wales are all in an uproar over the destruction of their countryside and coasts.
Moreover, after twenty years and $50 million of tax-supported research, the small coterie of UN scientist-bureaucrats trumpeting global warming have been totally unable to come up with any solid evidence that carbon dioxide is the cause of the warming (which has now apparently stopped, or at least paused for 30 years), much less that any additional warming will cause catastrophes.
All the evidence, from increasingly sophisticated satellites and deep-diving ocean buoys, is that climate fluctuates in response to natural cyclic changes in ocean currents and solar activity, and that the worldwide sea level has been rising at about eight inches a century for the last five thousand years or so, and is still doing so. So there is no reason to worry about CO2, a plant fertilizer, a necessary part of all life on this planet, in the first place. All this devastation of the landscape is for nothing. Less than nothing. Wind power is a fraud based on a fraud.
But the story is always the same. The wind promoter comes into a quiet rural area, stages several community presentations, pure Madison Avenue professionalism, promises jobs and a great boost to the local economy, chats up the local leadership, and paints rosy pictures of a prosperous environmentally-correct future in the industry of tomorrow. Landowners are wooed with talk of huge commission checks for the generated power.
If there’s any local resistance, the promoter buys the cooperation of said local leadership to paint it as NIMBY — he, of course, would not live within 50 miles of one of the things — and environmentally irresponsible (hah!). If this doesn’t work, he’ll buy a few county, state, or provincial politicians to simply deprive the local jurisdiction of any authority over turbine siting, as they did for example in Wisconsin. In Oregon, wilderness noise regulations prevented development of a wind installation, so of course in 2004 the wind promoters had their friends in Salem change them. In New York, Attorney General Cuomo’s investigations of wind developers’ bribery is continuing, and you now have an “Ethics Code”. Doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?
So the phalanx of giant towers goes up anyway. It’s always the same story — in Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wales, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Sweden, Missouri, Scotland, New York, Germany, Kansas, Hungary, Italy — the modus operandi never varies. The Internet is full of sad little websites put up by local community groups who opposed this vandalism of their countryside and their quality of life; they’ve posted their letters of opposition, their legal pleadings, and finally the horror-inspiring pictures of what happened to their woods and fields — and to their children, who often fall asleep at school because the turbine noise keeps them from sleeping at night. It is excruciating to see this over and over and over.
Jobs? The construction crews and engineers are brought in from outside — the leading turbine manufacturers are all European — and the long-term local jobs amount finally to one or two. The local economy? Politicians love to trumpet hundreds of millions in investment in the area. Now, If these hundreds of millions were to build a steel plant, or a giant amusement park, or a conventional nuclear power plant, it would indeed provide hundreds of long-term, high-paying jobs. Yes, these monsters will generate countless millions in tax breaks, taxpayer subsidies, and “carbon credits”. But not for the local people; they’ll be lucky to get two jobs and maybe a fancy maintenance truck. The money will all flow to the financiers (like Al Gore’s business partners in Goldman-Sachs) in New York City. The turbines produce essentially no useful power, and no local jobs, but very efficiently blow our money into fat cats’ coffers.
The huge turbine towers will earn their installation cost back in tax breaks and subsidies (subsidies and tax breaks at your expense) in less than three years. Then, of course, shell fly-by-night company A sells the turbines to shell fly-by-night company B, which then gets its years of boodle at taxpayer expense. And so on.
Until finally the turbines stop working. Again, they cost over a million per tower to decommission, and the wind magnates can afford much pricier law firms than landowners — as the landowners already know, having discussed the amazingly small size of their commission checks with the company. Does anyone seriously think these ugly monstrosities will be taken down and the land restored in twenty years?
Is this the legacy you wish to leave your grandchildren? The people of New York must fight against this nightmare takeover by the eco-industrial complex. You must fight to save your environment from, for God’s sake, the environmentalists. So future generations will not look around and say, “This must have once been so beautiful. I wish I could have seen it then. I wonder why they did it.”
Sincerely,
Craig Goodrich
Gareth Phillips says:
May 24, 2010 at 10:42 am
“If these trees were being cut down in Oregon to build new holiday homes, would posters be as concerned?”
Denmark is 16383.86 sq miles of land area.
Oregon is 98,386.
For many, many reasons- not least of which is thick forest everywhere- Oregon is nothing at all like Denmark.
Tell me- is it even possible to get lost in Denmark?
Tom_R says:
A fundamental economic law, known for centuries as the Law of Supply and Idiots, states clearly: There is never a shortage of idiots.
It would be nice to have a few useful facts rather than the eco-propaganda: “Deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of the CO2 emissions of 100,000 people per year.” Unfortunately, we aren’t told how many turbines will be installed or how many years they will provide power. If the turbines provide power for 4000 people for 25 years, the project would break even on CO2 emissions. Danes consume about 715 watts per capita of electricity (Wikipedia), so a “1 MW turbine” would provide power for 1400 people under optimum wind conditions and perhaps an average of 300-600 people under realistic conditions. So perhaps 10 turbines operating for 25 years could compensate for CO2 emissions from deforestation. However, the installation probably involves at least 100 turbines, so the CO2 emissions from deforestation are likely to be minor. On the other hand, we also need to add the CO2 emissions from manufacture and installation of the wind turbines and the emissions from any fossil fuel plants operating in inefficient standby mode that are needed provide power when the wind slows. (Back-up power in East Denmark comes from Swedish CO2-free hydroelectric power, but this isn’t the case for West Denmark.)
The US has developed a subsidized biofuel industry based on ethanol from corn that does little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions. We certainly don’t need to waste more money on expensive wind power that does the same.
When I hear a Socialist say that the Government will “Create Jobs” a want to puke.
Look to the DDR, and you will see how a 45 year lasting experiment on that worked out.
When “The Berlin Wall” fell, all socialists ran into hiding. Too much og the truth came out wide open. They just couldnt stand that the light fell on the great socialist experiment. Now it seems they silently crawled back….as GREEN.
I discussed this with an old socialist, and his conclusion was that even though socialism failed in the DDR, it was a neccessary experiment.
A neccessary experiment!
Now it seems this wind Park is considered as a neccessary experiment. I think I agree. It will be interesting to see how it works out. The problem is; Will we see the true numbers, or will the data be “fudged” ?
The broken notion in all “Jobs Bills” and “Jobs Programs” is the notion that what matters is “jobs”. That is a very broken notion.
You can have full employment at any time. Just have the government instruct every person that they are to take a teaspoon out to the nearest dirt. On odd days they dig a hole. One even days they fill it in. Then send them a government check.
One Small Problem:
You are consuming spoons and not making any new ones.
(You are also consuming your human capital for no net gain too).
It’s not a question of JOB creation, it’s a question of NET WEALTH creation.
If you are not creating NET INCREASE IN WEALTH then you are simply consuming your capital stock and producing NET INCREASE IN POVERTY.
It really is that simple.
Yet somehow that simple truth escapes our politicians (and most other lawyers too from what I can see, though there are some exceptions); and is strangely lacking from most of the population as well.
The simple fact is that we need to use about 95% of our total labor and capital stock just to keep things going as they are. We can get between 2% and 5% of real economic growth (increase in national wealth) during good times. If you pee away 4% or so of your wealth per year (be it on ‘jobs bills’ or ‘stimulus’ or ‘green plans’) you will end up sliding into ever increasing poverty.
And the current global governance pattern has us squandering closer to 20%…
Put more succinctly:
It’s not about “Guns or Butter” it’s about “Machine shops or Cattle Farms”.
(The classic paradigm for decision making in government expenditures is a problem called “guns or butter” meaning do you spend for defense or food consumption. My point is that missing from that metaphor is the means of production AND of increase of production. It really ought to be “Guns or Butter OR Machine Shops or Cattle Ranches”. The implication of “guns or butter” is that it just magically comes from taxes. What ought to be emphasized is that every government tax and spend on “Guns or Butter” cuts down on the private expenditure on “machines shops or cattle ranches” and results in a net reduction of potential increase in national wealth. Sadly, I think most politicians never get past the “guns or butter” metaphor and never get a clue about machine shops and ranches…)
So Denmark is indulging in a “jobs bill” and destroying real wealth in the process…
Quite apart from wind turbines being useless, noisy, a waste of money and what else, I just think they are an absolute eye sore, a visual insult. Mind you, I love windmills (I’m Dutch) but there are limits. Last year I went back to Holland. I rented a car and drove North, towards Den Helder and across de Afsluitdijk, an area I had not been for a while. It is a part of Holland where the landscape resembles that of paintings by the Old Masters: low horizons, wide green pastures, cows grazing under expansive skies, poplars bent in the wind, a windmill in the distance. But no more. They’ve put up those bloody wind turbines everywhere. What I saw brought tears to my eyes. They dominate and scar the landscape – just as a psychopath would slash a painting. Holland has been turned into Teletubby land. And I’m guessing the situation isn’t much better in other countries. And what for…..? How come there is no organised resistance from conservationists and other people who really care about nature, culture and the environment against these ghastly eco-contraptions?!?
.
Note:
Windmills grind corn.
Windelecs generate electricity.
.
I know only one word in Danish: bondfangere
Oh, and another song for your delectation: