Chapter 5

 

The Wind Lie

 

 

I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.1

—Warren Buffet

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons and wires.2

—Paul Kingsnorth

 

 

You’re walking up Spring Valley in eastern-central Nevada, but not seeming to make much progress. This is a big place, and you’re a small person. Sagebrush and bitterbrush stretch for miles on either side, to where mountains don’t so much loom as are solidly present. Thick forests of single-leaf piñon pine and western juniper blanket the mountains’ torsos before thinning toward their rocky shoulders and snow-clung heads. The sun is high, and the sunlight warms you, but when you pass into the shade of a cloud your skin chills immediately. It’s springtime in the high desert.

The Western Shoshone and Goshute, who call themselves Newe, have lived here for thousands of years. This valley—one of the lushest in the region—was and is important to them. They ate pine nuts and rabbits and the seeds of grasses. Then, 150 years ago, the first settlers came with their shovels and picks, their dynamite and cattle. They found silver and gold in the mountains, and before long explosions destroyed the complex and delicate desert soundscape. The resultant ore needed to be smelted, and so the forests came down. All across Nevada, mountains for 50 miles in every direction from mining camps were stripped of every tree. Observers in the 1870s described “the terrible destruction of forest which follows ... every new discovery of the precious metals.”3

As mines have devastated uplands, so cows have devastated valleys. The ground here used to be thickly speckled with native bunchgrass, wildflowers, and forbs. Even though the brush you walk through is beautiful, the ground between the shrubs is dusty; cattle have killed the natural soil crusts, so essential to life in this dry place.

You cross a wash; cows have mangled it. The ground around it is especially trampled and eroded. A hundred years ago it might have carried water for months every year, but no longer. Now it’s only wet when spring thunderstorms bring a flood of silty water down the alluvial fan from the mountain.

That the forests of piñon pine and juniper have returned speaks to the resilience of these forests—and to the hard work of forest-tending piñon jays and packrats.

Now the forests face new threats: clearcutting, herbicide sprays, “mastication,” and chaining—all, in standard Orwellian fashion, described as “restoration.”4 And their most recent threats: sustainability and renewable energy.

You walk over a small hillock and see the northern expanse of the valley. You leave off cursing miners and ranchers and begin cursing environmentalists. The valley floor is littered with wind turbines: 66 of them, each 425 feet tall, each with a set of three fiberglass blades sweeping a 330-foot radius.5 Access roads lead to the base of each turbine, spreading across the valley, further fragmenting the battered landscape and delivering seeds of weedy invasive plants like cheatgrass to freshly disturbed soil.

Directly adjacent to and east of the turbines, a grove of juniper trees grows on the valley floor. This is a sacred place to the Newe, who call it the Swamp Cedars or Shoshone Cedars. It has been a gathering place for generations. It also has a terrible history; two major massacres were committed here by whites, one in 1863 and another in 1897. The first left over 350 Newe dead, making it one of the worst massacres of American Indians.

This valley has seen too many atrocities, and wind turbines are merely the latest. And as with most atrocities, the “good-hearted” public supports this project. Despite all evidence, people simply refuse to see the harm caused by wind turbines.

If solar power has captured the imagination of the mainstream environmental movement, wind power has captured its wallet. Serious proponents of “renewable” energy rely heavily on wind power in their energy transition plans.

The Economist says, “Wind power is widely seen as the source of renewable energy with the best chance of competing with fossil-fuel power stations in the near term.”6

Every mainstream environmentalist praises wind energy. Kumi Naidoo says it is a critical part of “an energy revolution on the scale [of] the industrial revolution ... [to] maximize all the renewable energy potential.”7 (And we all know how well the industrial revolution went for the planet, right?) According to environmentalist Lester Brown, “Our civilization needs to embrace renewable energy on a scale and at a pace we’ve never seen before”; he calls for the building of “roughly 300,000 wind turbines per year over the next decade.”8

Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has become one of the highest-profile “renewable” energy boosters, primarily because he created detailed plans that purport to show how to transition global energy usage to 100 percent “renewable” energy by 2030. And, yes, he means energy, not just electricity, which means he’s including transportation, heating, and so on. In his vision, wind power will provide a full half of global industrial energy needs, far more than any other source.

To make this possible, Jacobson calls for building 3.8 million 5 MW wind turbines by 2030.9

Yes, you read those numbers correctly. If Spring Valley was devastated by 66 of these machines, how many valleys would he destroy with his plan? Well, that would be 58,575.

In an article entitled “Windmills Are Things of Beauty,” environmentalist David Suzuki acknowledges that there are grassroots activists who oppose wind energy facilities. He calls their efforts “hypocritical and counterproductive.” He believes “windmills are beautiful” and states that if one day he looks out from the porch of his vacation cabin—valued at over $1 million, and one of at least four homes he owns—with a view of wilderness and sees “a row of windmills spinning in the distance, I won’t curse them. I will praise them. It will mean we’re finally getting somewhere.”10

It’s pretty easy for Suzuki to praise and not curse wind turbines, since it’s only the view from his vacation home that’s being destroyed. For the nonhumans, it’s a little harder as it’s their actual homes—as in where they live—being destroyed to serve the industrial economy.

Most people—even most wind-energy proponents—don’t know what wind turbines are made of, because the materials used in these machines aren’t usually part of the conversation about renewable energy. But an accounting of these materials is critical.

Wind turbines consist of four main parts: tower, blades, nacelle (the bulbous bit on top of the tower), and foundation.

The tower holds the spinning blades aloft. Winds tend to be faster and more consistent the farther they are above the ground, which is one reason turbines are getting larger. Another reason is that as the length of a turbine’s blades increases, the area swept, and thus the power that can be generated, increases as the square of the length. The largest wind turbine design in operation as of 2019, the Vestas V164 10 MW turbine, stands 722 feet tall—about 70 percent as tall as the Empire State Building—with each 263-foot-long blade weighing 38 tons. Even larger wind turbines are currently undergoing testing. A 12 MW offshore prototype from General Electric is more than 850 feet tall, and its 350-foot long blades “represent one of the largest single machine components ever built.11

The nacelle is the control center of the wind turbine, containing a gearbox that translates energy to a workable rotational speed and a generator that transforms this mechanical energy into electricity.

Because they’re top-heavy and installed in windy areas, turbines need an especially sturdy foundation. On land, foundations are made of steel-reinforced concrete. In shallow areas offshore, wind turbines are built on foundations sunk into the sea floor. In deeper waters, turbines are built on floating platforms anchored to the sea floor with cables.

By mass, the main materials used in wind turbines are steel and concrete. Most of the steel is in the tower and the nacelle, and in the foundation in the form of structural reinforcements, often rebar. Concrete is generally used only in the foundation, but some wind turbines use concrete towers reinforced with steel instead of traditional steel towers.

Blades are manufactured from wood and composite materials like fiberglass and carbon fiber, which are energy-intensive plastics made from petrochemicals. As one analysis notes, “Resins [used in wind turbine blades] begin with ethylene derived from light hydrocarbons, most commonly the products of naphtha cracking, liquefied petroleum gas, or the ethane in natural gas.... To get 2.5 TW of installed wind power by 2030, we would need an aggregate rotor mass of about 23 million metric tons, incorporating the equivalent of about 90 million metric tons of crude oil.”12

Nacelles contain large amounts of copper and rare earth metals like neodymium (used for powerful magnets to increase reliability and performance).

And of course, industrial wind-energy-harvesting facilities don’t exist in a vacuum; they require substations, transmission lines, control facilities, vehicles to haul maintenance teams, and so on.

We call them harvesting facilities because they don’t, as common usage suggests, generate energy. They harvest it from the wind, just like solar-harvesting facilities harvest it from the sun, dams harvest it from rivers, and so on. This is crucial, because if you generate something, it wasn’t there before. If you harvest something, that thing being harvested already exists, and once harvested, is no longer available to others. This is as true of wind and sunlight as it is of trees, fish, water, and at this point the entire earth. As we shall see, removing energy from the wind changes climate.

The average 5 MW wind turbine is between 300 and 400 feet tall, with rotor blades more than 200 feet long, bringing the total height to 600 feet or more. That’s about 50 stories. In a 5 MW turbine, the tower alone weighs around 400 tons, the nacelle 300 tons, and the rotor blades 54 tons. The foundation is even more massive: on land, several thousand tons. Offshore foundations can range from 500 tons to more than 8,000 tons, depending on the depth of the water and the type of sediment or bedrock.13 All these numbers are rising in the quest for greater energy production.

Let’s do the math. Mark Jacobson calls for 3.8 million 5 MW turbines by 2030. That’s 19 million MW. First, let’s subtract the 2017 installed capacity of 540,000 MW, taking us down to a little under 18.5 MW: That reduces the number of new 5 MW wind turbines needed in his plan to about 3.7 million new turbines.

To build that many new wind turbines would require more than 1.4 billion tons of steel for towers, another billion tons of steel and 1.9 million tons of copper for the nacelles, 133 million tons of composite fiber materials for rotor blades, and around 2.6 billion tons of concrete and steel for foundations (assuming a conservative average of 2,000 tons of material per turbine). In comparison, construction of Hoover Dam used 211,500 tons of concrete and 22,500 tons of steel. The scale of this project, then, is the equivalent of building perhaps 60,000 Hoover Dams in 12 years, more than 13 Hoover Dams per day.

Just what the world needs, right?

The everyday operation of wind turbines requires fossil fuels for lubrication. ExxonMobil is one of the major providers; they have a line of fossil-fuel based lubricants solely for use in wind turbines.14 The average 5 MW turbine contains several hundred gallons of oil and hydraulic fluid; the transformer at the base of each turbine may contain another 500 gallons. Let’s take a rough average, 700 gallons, and multiply it by the 3.8 million turbines Mark Jacobson and other bright greens want to build, and you get 2.6 billion gallons. These lubricants don’t last forever: like oil in a car, they get gunked up and have to be replaced—on average every nine to 16 months. They also sometimes spill or leak. A worldwide fleet of 3.8 million wind turbines—or any number, for that matter—requires a steady supply of lubricants to keep them humming. This fleet would leak and spill an oily flood of these chemicals.15

The most critical ingredient in wind turbines is steel. According to the World Steel Association, the trade group that represents most of the world’s large steel companies, “every part of a wind turbine depends on iron and steel.”16 And it’s not just essential for the turbines themselves, either. Steel is required for other phases in the generation of wind power, from the mining machines that extract the ore that will become the steel in wind turbines to the massive ships carrying turbine components around the world to the cranes that lift and install these turbines.

And it’s not just critical to wind power, either. Steel is one of the most important global commodities, essential to many parts of industrial civilization. Buildings, ships, cars and trucks, appliances, infrastructure, machinery, and weapons all require abundant, cheap steel.

Steel is made of iron alloyed with a smaller portion of at least one other element, most often carbon but sometimes manganese, chromium, nickel, or tungsten. About 2 billion tons of steel was produced in 2018, with more than half coming from China. Other major producers include Japan, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Brazil.17

Mark Jacobson’s plan, revered by so many mainstream environmentalists, would require about 120 percent of the steel produced in 2018 across the entire world.

Increased mining: that can’t be the plan that’s going to save the earth, can it? That’s just more of the same plan that’s already killing the earth.

Just for the United States, Jacobson’s plan would require “335,000 onshore wind turbines; 154,000 offshore wind turbines; 75 million residential photovoltaic systems; 275,000 commercial photovoltaic systems; 46,000 utility-scale photovoltaic facilities; 3,600 concentrated solar-power facilities with onsite heat storage; and an extensive array of underground thermal storage facilities.”

His plan would require a 15-fold increase in hydroelectric capacity (i.e., dams), and would daily require these dams to release about 100 times the flow of the Mississippi River.

And this plan is supported by environmentalists?

Here are a few more insane assumptions of Jacobson’s plan. He assumes an energy storage capacity more than twice the current generating capacity of all U.S. power plants combined. He assumes underground thermal-energy storage capacity more than 125,000 times that of the current largest facility of this sort. He assumes the United States will have enough hydrogen-storage facilities to cover an entire month of U.S. electricity usage. He assumes that power equivalent to twice the entire U.S. supply will be used to isolate and prepare this hydrogen. He assumes that 6 percent of the land mass of the United States will be devoted to wind (presumably with much of the rest underwater from dams). He assumes that factories can run when solar and wind can’t provide their power.18

Iron ore is the main raw precursor to steel and is mined around the world. Five of the 10 largest iron ore mines are in Brazil. Because iron ore mining is big business, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually just in Brazil, the government does all it can to streamline mining permits, sidestep environmental regulations, and mute community opposition.

The world’s largest iron-ore mine is the Carajás mine, located in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. More accurately, the mine is located in what used to be the Amazon rainforest. Now, it’s located in the center of a wasteland, a clearcut, an industrial chasm. Every year, more than 2,400 square miles of forest around Carajás are cut down, mostly to make charcoal used for smelting iron ore.19 Yes, you read that number correctly. And yes, that’s annually. The latest $17 billion mine expansion project has already destroyed mile after mile of rainforest, and threatens a unique part of the Amazon, a savanna around two lakes, home to more than 40 endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

Toxic “tailings” sludge from these mining operations is impounded behind huge earthen dams, two of which have failed in recent years. A 2015 collapse near Mariana, Brazil destroyed two villages, killed 19 people, polluted water supplies for 400,000, and released more than 43 million cubic meters of toxic waste into 400 miles of rivers of streams and the Atlantic Ocean. According to a United Nations report, “Entire fish populations—at least 11 tons—were killed immediately when the slurry buried them or clogged their gills.” The same report describes that “the force of the mudflow destroyed 1,469 hectares (3,630 acres) of riparian forest.”20

The report uses the term “eliminating all aquatic life” to describe what has happened to more than 400 miles of river. The Mariana tailings dam failure has been called the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history.

The second major failure at a Vale iron-ore mine hit Brumadinho, Brazil, in January 2019. This time, the mudflow killed 270 people and released 12 million cubic meters of toxic sludge—destroying all life in another river, the Paraopeba. In the aftermath, Vale safety inspectors “failed to guarantee the safety” of 18 other Vale dams and dikes in Brazil.21 As one researcher put it in the aftermath, “In Brazil and [the state of] Minas, it is the ore above everything and everyone.”22

Iron ore mines in the Amazon basin have displaced tens of thousands of indigenous people, decimated newly contacted tribes through the spread of infectious diseases, and flooded remote areas with thousands of workers. A 2011 report from the International Federation for Human Rights attributes “incessant air pollution” to the iron ore mines. Forced labor and child slavery have been documented by the Brazilian government. Mines become the locus of networks of roads that cut into the jungle, leading to poaching and illegal logging in protected areas.

People in the region contend with cancers, birth defects, and lung diseases caused by pollution from processing facilities, factories, and constant traffic of industrial trucks and trains. In some towns, a fully loaded train passes every 20 minutes, day and night. “[The town of Piquiá de Baixo is] a place where practically the whole population is likely to get health problems and lung diseases,” says local teacher Joselma Alves de Oliveira.23

Resistance has been widespread, with tribal people, students, and forest lovers blockading railways and holding public protests, but with little success.24 Local business elites and politicians, many of whom have been powerful since the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, protect the mining operations with the help of police and paramilitary forces.

“In thirty years, iron exploitation [has left] deforested areas, slave labor, migration, and has torn apart the identification of the communities with their territories,” says community organizer Padre Dario Bossi, who has been fighting iron ore mines for decades. “It has also left land conflicts, pollution, urban disorganization, and violence due to the intense exodus of people in search of work, the most affected being indigenous or African.”25

Like all industrial projects, iron ore mines in the Amazon are not only a locus of roads but also sexual exploitation. Trafficking, sexual assault, prostitution, and other atrocities against women and children follow every mine. As Sheila Jeffreys writes in her book The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade, “[Mining industries] open up new areas for new forms of colonial exploitation [and] they set up prostitution industries to service the workers. These industries have a profound effect on local cultures and relations between men and women.”26

Wherever it takes place, and with whatever regulations in place, iron ore mining and steel production are environmental and social disasters.

Cliffs Natural Resources, for example, is a mining company based in the United States. Two of their operations, the Tilden and Empire mines (both in Marquette County, Michigan) extract 20 percent of the iron ore in the U.S. (Cliffs also operates coal mines, and if you think this is an unnatural fit, you should know that coal is required for steel production.)

And what have their iron ore mines left behind? Toxic tailings ponds, selenium and mercury contamination, warnings against eating local fish, massive air pollution, acid rain that is particularly harmful to wild rice (a staple food for local indigenous people), and more than 100 square miles of devastated land.

The fuel use of these mines is stunning: The colossal diesel dump trucks used in the industry have 1,200-gallon tanks, which are filled twice a day. A few dozen of these trucks may be operating at any time.27

Regulations haven’t made much of a difference. The mine at Keewatin, near the Tilden and Empire mines, opened in 2009 and was cited each of its first three years for air- and water-quality violations. A railway serving another nearby iron ore mine in Minnesota was cited multiple times for violating rules around hazardous waste and air quality. The Wisconsin Resources Protection Council calls iron ore mines “chronic polluters,” and states that “all modern U.S. taconite [a type of iron ore] mines have violations and fines totaling more than $2.1 million; with [fines for] cleanups the total is over $10.5 million.”28

These fines are trivial for companies with revenues in the billions. Regulations haven’t been effective in cleaning up iron ore mines in the United States. But that shouldn’t be surprising. After 20 years at the EPA, William Sanjour described the environmental regulatory system as “stupid, corrupt, ineffective, [and] inefficient.”29 Thomas Linzey, co-founder of the Community Legal Environmental Defense fund, explains well why the entire system of environmental regulations is foolish: it permits harm to continue. “Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade,” he says, “they sought to abolish it.” He explains that the very concept of regulating industrial harms comes from industry and not concerned people, who would in most cases rather ban harmful activities altogether.

Most steel is made by alloying iron ore with coke as a source of carbon. Coke, also known as coking coal or metallurgical coal, is created from low-sulfur bituminous coal through a process called destructive distillation in which the feedstock coal is heated in the absence of air, breaking down large, volatile molecules that could interfere with steel production. Sometimes other gases or solvents are added to the reaction chamber to help with the process. Byproducts include coal gas (used as an industrial fuel), ammoniacal liquor (used in fertilizers), and coal tar (used to manufacture dyes, insecticides, artificial yarns, and other products).

The amount of coal used in steel production is not small—it’s about 12 percent of global anthracite, the highest grade of coal.30

The production of steel and metallurgical coke is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after fossil fuels and electrical generation, with a large gap to fourth.

Could steel be made without coal? There have been experiments to see if it’s possible. The University of New South Wales in Australia developed a method that uses car tires instead of coal (of course, car tires are mainly made of synthetic rubber, which is derived from fossil fuels). Another process, called the Hisarna method, uses coal directly rather than requiring coke, which reduces the coal demand by 20 percent. The only hope of making steel without coal lies, at this time, with a process called molten oxide electrolysis. Originally developed as a theoretical process to produce oxygen on the moon, molten oxide electrolysis takes place in a vat of molten iron oxide kept at more than 2900ºF, and is sealed using a special alloy of chromium and iron.31

None of this is sustainable. Nor does this process address any of the other issues with steel production, such as direct land destruction from mining, heavy equipment use, impacts on forests and indigenous communities, sexual exploitation, and so on.

Need another reason to be against mining? Just look at this headline: “U.S. Mines Pollute Up to 27 Billion Gallons of Water Annually.”32

Wind turbines also require copper. Lots of it. Copper makes up about 35 percent of the mass in a wind turbine’s generator, and is also used in wiring, power cables, transformer coils, and lightning-protection systems. The Copper Development Association, the main trade group, calls copper “an indispensable ingredient for wind energy.”33 Each 5 MW wind turbine has more than 1,000 pounds of copper inside, which means Mark Jacobson’s plan would require, at minimum, 3.8 billion pounds of copper, or almost 2 million tons. That’s not counting the copper in transmission lines, wiring, substations, electric transit, electronics, vehicles, and so on. One conservative estimate shows that about one-third of one year’s global copper production would be required for the energy transition called for by Jacobson and the rest of the bright greens.34

Copper, like most minerals, is strip mined in vast open-pit mines. One of the largest in the world is the Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine in the Oquirrh Mountain Range just outside Salt Lake City. You can see the mine from space. It’s a pit that’s 2.5 miles wide, dug more than half a mile into the root of the mountains. It looks like what it is: a mountaintop-removal mine.

Here’s how it works. Explosives break up the rock, which is loaded onto two-story dump trucks and dropped on a five-mile conveyor belt leading to a facility where the rock is ground to dust by rotating crusher drums made of hardened steel. This dust is added to a slurry of water and chemicals like methyl isobutyl carbinol, potassium or sodium ethyl xanthate (which has sickened many workers and is “especially toxic to aquatic life”), or various dithiophosphates and dithiocarbamates. This process, called “flotation,” separates the valuable minerals.

Next, the wet sediment slurry is sent through a 17-mile pipeline to a smelter facility in the town of Magna, Utah, where it’s dried and injected into a superheated furnace. This heat oxidizes iron and sulfur, which can be removed. The sulfur becomes sulfur dioxide gas, which is captured and used to produce sulfuric acid, a valuable industrial material that facilitates resource extraction and pollution around the world. The copper sulfide material left behind is about 70 percent pure copper, which has to be processed again to reach the desired 99.99 percent purity.35

The harms of the Kennecott Mine include acid rain from smelter emissions, asbestos-related illness in workers, emissions of arsenic and mercury, and the spillage of more than 200 million gallons of highly contaminated process water (which has seeped into the nearby Jordan River and contaminated groundwater along a 72-mile plume). Kennecott has filled a tailings pond with more than a billion tons of toxic material, and worked with corrupt state regulators to hide the risk of dam failure which would have killed people in Magna, directly below it.36 The mining company plans to expand this tailings pond, destroying an additional 700 acres of wetlands (the tailings pond is directly adjacent to the Great Salt Lake, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most significant migratory bird habitats). The mine is also releasing acid mine drainage; causing severe dust pollution leading to health issues for nearby residents; and unleashing toxins like copper sulphate and selenium, which at one point killed more than 30 percent of the fish in the Jordan River.

Between 2000 and 2011, there were 18 documented spills and leaks related to the mine, which in total released more than 8 million gallons of contaminated water/tailings and more than 260,000 tons of concentrate and metals. In 2008, the Fish and Wildlife Service sued Kennecott for release of selenium, copper, arsenic, zinc, lead, and cadmium. In many states, the largest single source of pollution is a petrochemical facility or oil refinery. Not so in Utah. The Bingham Canyon mine produces 10 times as much pollution as the Chevron Oil refinery a few miles away. These are just a few of the documented harms caused by the mine.37

The Kennecott Mine produces around 300,000 tons of copper per year. It would need to be operated continuously for more than six years to supply the copper needed for Mark Jacobson’s wind turbines. That’s in addition to the other copper needed for the “green economy.”

Let’s step away from this industrial nightmare and turn toward the land. The Oquirrh Mountains rise to almost 10,000 feet above the south end of Great Salt Lake. This is where the Great Basin meets the Colorado Plateau. The intersection of these two great ecosystems leads to an astounding variety of habitats, from exposed alpine tundra to sagebrush and rabbitbrush steppe. Springs nourish aspen and maple forests on cool north-facing slopes. Juniper and piñon pine live on western and southern slopes. Hardy, salt-tolerant wetland plants survive both wet and dry years and thrive near the lakeshore. Mountain lions, mule deer, butterflies, bald eagles, elk, waterfowls, red-backed voles, shrews, black bears, mice, American coots, blackbirds, great blue herons, yellow warblers, hummingbirds, hawks, western grebes, hermit thrushes, minks, ospreys, ruffled grouses, lark buntings, hairy woodpeckers, kingfishers, Bonneville cutthroat troutfish, redside shiners, speckled daces, Utah chubs, three species of sucker fish (including the endangered June sucker), and many more call this place home. In the spring and fall, migratory birds visit the area in (for now) still strong numbers.

Wolves and grizzly bears used to live in the Oquirrh mountains before they were deliberately exterminated. In the winter of 1848, Mormon colonists undertook a “varmint hunt” and killed as many as 15,000 predators in one month, including bears, wolverines, wildcats, wolves, foxes, minks, eagles, ravens, owls, and other birds.38 The last Utah grizzly was killed in 1923, and wolves were exterminated by the early 1930s.

The mountains removed at the Kennecott Mine site had watched over countless generations of these creatures. Now the mountains themselves are being blasted into dust, then toxified. The creatures who’ve survived are now refugees on their own land. None of them, for example, can visit the tailings pond, where noisemakers and nets are required to prevent birds from landing on the contaminated surface.

On hillsides and in poisoned ponds around the smelter, only the hardiest creatures survive. With every bite, they ingest carcinogens and mutagens they will pass down to their offspring.

This is copper production, and it’s a nightmare. And it’s required for wind power.

According to the Kennecott smelter website, “Environmental stewardship is at the heart of Rio Tinto Kennecott’s commitment to sustainable development.... Whenever possible, we prevent, or otherwise minimize, mitigate or remediate any potentially harmful effects of our operations on the environment.”39 But their operations are the harm. There’s no kinder, gentler way to blow up mountains and apply an ocean of toxins to the rubble. This is what green energy is made from: the dust of shattered mountains, lakes of acid, and the agony of our winged and scaled kin.

Rare-earth minerals are critical components of wind turbines. Even more than other metals, rare earths are produced only through severe and grotesque environmental harm. Dan Harris writes, on his blog about legal issues in China, that “the rare earth neodymium is required for the batteries used in the engines of most current electric vehicles and in the generators of most wind power turbines.... As a result, the rare earth mining regions in Inner Mongolia are classified as some of the most polluted regions in the world.... The resulting poverty and health problems for the workers are well known.”40

Projections show that wind turbines will likely play a major role in the growth in use of rare-earth minerals worldwide—and could even exhaust supplies completely. One study noted that “demand growth for these metals appears to be ... significant.... This is especially relevant because rare earths are considered critical [for wind turbines].”41

For a 2011 National Geographic article called “Can China Go Green?” Bill McKibben visited Baotou. Not once in his article, which contains more than 3,000 words, did he mention that the devastating pollution in the area—toxified soil and groundwater, illness in every family, water where no fish or algae can survive, a complete absence of wildlife—was created in part to make wind turbines, solar panels, and hybrid and electric cars.42

You know how we said demand for rare earths metals could exhaust them? Well, there’s “good” news. In an article entitled, “Renewables’ deep-sea mining conundrum,” we find that “British scientists exploring an underwater mountain in the Atlantic Ocean have discovered a treasure trove of rare minerals.” One of the minerals, Tellurium, “is used in a type of advanced solar panel, so the discovery raises a difficult question about whether the push for renewable energy may encourage mining of the seabed. The rocks also contain what are called rare earth elements that are used in wind turbines and electronics.”

The article states that “if the entire deposit could be extracted and used to make solar panels, it could meet 65 percent of the U.K.’s electricity demand.”

The scientist who made the discovery said, “If we need green energy supplies, then we need the raw materials to make the devices that produce the energy so, yes, the raw materials have to come from somewhere. We either dig them up from the ground and make a very large hole or dig them from the seabed and make a comparatively smaller hole. It’s a dilemma for society—nothing we do comes without a cost.”

The cost of ocean mining would be “killing marine life wherever digging machines are deployed and potentially devastating a far wider area. One major concern is the effect of plumes of dust, stirred up by excavation of the ocean floor, spreading for long distances and smothering all life wherever it settles.”43 One biologist said that recovery from mining would take thousands or millions of years.44

That’s worth it, though, right? Especially since the costs will be paid not by us, but by creatures at the bottom of the ocean, unknown and unnoticed, who will suffocate in silence while we carry on.

By the way, that’s not a dilemma. It’s only a dilemma when you have to choose between costs you have to pay. When you choose to inflict these costs on others, the word you’re looking for is exploitation.

If the materials necessary for wind energy don’t stir your soul, perhaps the impacts of installation will. It might seem like each 5 MW wind turbine has a relatively small direct footprint in that perhaps two acres are required. But to make turbines efficient, the surrounding land is also cleared of trees that can “interfere” with the wind. To prevent regrowth, herbicide treatments are sprayed for as long as the facility is operating.45

Industrial wind energy harvesting facilities also need wide, straight access roads. For example, the 84 MW Mount Lucas wind energy harvesting facility in Ireland required 12 miles of new access roads for its 28 turbines.

The lands near large wind-energy-harvesting facilities are usually closed to humans. This is particularly true for areas near the blades themselves. Sometimes the blades fly off and careen hundreds of yards. And as a visit to any industrial wind-energy-harvesting facility will show you, the land around turbines can be considered wildlife habitat only in the most meaningless and degraded sense. When it’s not cultivated for monocrops or grazed for livestock, it’s a maze of compacted access roads, crumbling soils, and slash piles. And it’s loud. Decibel levels of 33 to 43 have been recorded a mile away from turbines. That’s loud enough to interfere with not just animal communication but with their “health and survival.”46 Spring will be silent except for the deafening drone of machines, and environmentalists are leading the charge.

Under Mark Jacobson’s plan, about 2.5 percent of the land mass of California would be dedicated to industrial wind-energy-generation facilities. That is more than 4,000 square miles, an area of new industrialization four times the size of Yosemite National Park.

That’s just in California. Other wildlands would be similarly devastated.

If we ignore the harm from mines and ignore the harm from the land clearance for wind-energy-harvesting facilities, won’t the energy still be green? Won’t the wind turbines just go on spinning merrily, harvesting clean energy and no problems whatsoever?

Well, no. One problem is that wind turbines kill birds and bats. A lot of birds and bats. They’re killed in at least two ways. The first is direct collisions. Although when looked at from afar wind turbines seem to spin slowly, the tips of the rotor blades can move up to 200 mph. Birds and bats aren’t used to anything moving this fast, and so creatures are struck out of the air. Many are killed instantly, but others are maimed, their beaks, wings, and/or legs shattered or shorn off.

But there’s more. Because wind turbine blades displace so much air as they spin, they create a pressure drop in the air behind them so drastic it pulps the eardrums and cardiovascular systems of bats passing nearby. In other words, their eardrums, lungs, and hearts explode. Technically, this is called barotrauma, but more accurately, it should be called an atrocity. If you have a beating heart in your chest, you should feel the bats’ pain.

In a 2015 report, The American Bird Conservancy estimated that more than 80,000 wind turbines have been (or are already planned to be) put up in “critical habitat corridors” for protected bird species. These often are, from an economic perspective, the best place to put up turbines. And in any conflict between the world and the economy, we know which one always takes precedence.

In another report, the Conservancy estimates that up to 573,000 birds were killed by turbines in 2012, and projects 1.4 million bird deaths per year if the U.S. expands wind-energy-generation facilities to produce 20 percent of the electricity demand.47

Now, let’s go back to Jacobson’s plan and examine a range of estimates of the effects on birds. Let’s start with a 2012 study published in the Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, stating that wind turbines kill about 0.27 birds per GWh of energy harvested (and we’re not cherry picking; this study has often been cited by defenders of wind power).48 As we’ve already noted, Jacobson calls for 19 million MW (19,000 GW, or 19 Terawatts) of wind turbines to be built. The average wind-harvesting facility has a capacity factor of about 31 percent (they never harvest as much power as they’re rated for, since the wind doesn’t blow all the time), which means these wind turbines would on average be generating 19,000 GW times .31 equals 5,900 GW. If they harvest this for one hour, they’ve harvested 5,900 GW-hours (remember, that’s the conversion from power—GW—to energy—GW-hours). Since wind turbines kill .27 birds per GW-hour, these turbines would kill 5,900 times .27 equals almost 1,600 birds per hour, a little over 25 birds per minute, or nearly one every two seconds. Sixteen hundred birds per hour times 24 hours per day equals more than 38,000 per day or 267,000 per week. It equals about 14 million bird deaths per year.49

The numbers could be much higher. Because scavengers like coyotes often carry off dead animals soon after they’re killed, studies often underestimate the number of bird and bat kills at wind turbines. Estimates of bird kills also don’t include fatalities from birds colliding with power lines and towers associated with wind turbines, which could add millions.50 Nor do they account for habitat destruction caused by wind-energy-harvesting facilities, roads, and transmission lines, and how this affects food gathering and childrearing for birds (as well as other species).

It also does not include bird deaths due to mining materials necessary for wind-energy-generation facilities.

But all these birds are just as dead.

According to Save the Eagles International, studies documenting direct bird and bat kills (e.g., those smacked to death by wind turbines, not those whose habitat is destroyed by mines) underestimate deaths by as much as 90 percent, since most carcasses are catapulted outside the area searched in studies—typically a small radius around each turbine.51

Here’s another estimate of how many birds Jacobson’s plan would kill. Recall that the American Bird Conservancy projects 1.4 million annual bird kills if 20 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by wind. In 2014, the U.S. generated about four trillion kilowatt-hours from all sources.52 Twenty percent of that number is 800 billion kilowatt-hours, or 800 Terawatt-hours, or 800,000 GWh. Dividing the number of bird deaths (1,400,000) by the number of GWh (800,000) reveals the number of bird deaths per GWh ≈ 1.75 bird kills per GWh (much higher than the estimate from the Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences). Now, recall that Jacobson’s plan calls for 19,000 GW of global-wind capacity (with a capacity factor of 31 percent) which means about 58.2 million GWh of wind energy harvested each year. That much wind energy harvested—58.2 million GWh—would lead to 1.75 bird kills/GWh x 58.2 million GWh equals more than 100 million birds per year, or more than three per second.

If the numbers don’t horrify you, maybe the specifics will. In 2013, birdwatchers in the U.K. rushed to the Hebrides Islands to view a rare bird called the white-throated needletail sighted in the area. Needletails are swift, darting insectivores who snatch raindrops from the sky to quench their thirst. This species had not been seen in Britain for 22 years. Then, in front of their eyes, the bird was struck and killed by the blades of a wind turbine.53 Another video from 2015 shows a dozen partridges at the base of a wind turbine, some dead and some maimed with broken bones. It’s hard to watch; the birds are obviously in pain.54 There aren’t the only videos showing what wind turbines do to birds. If you want to spend an afternoon crying, search YouTube for “wind turbine bird.”

In Scotland, a proposed industrial wind energy harvesting facility off the coast at Fife Ness and Angus poses a major threat to gannet populations. Nearby islands have the largest known colonies of gannets, with an estimated 70,000 breeding pairs visiting each year, each raising a single chick per year, those chicks not reaching sexual maturity for five years. A 2015 study found that 1,800 of the birds could be struck and killed by the proposed turbines each year, 12 times more than previously estimated.55

Another species harmed by wind turbines is the endangered greater sage grouse, a large and unusually beautiful bird who lives in the sagebrush country between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades. It’s estimated that sage grouse populations have gone down by 98 percent since 1988, mostly because of overgrazing, coal and uranium mining, and oil and gas drilling. And before 1988, the species had already been hit hard.56 Now wind-energy-harvesting facilities, going up all over the valleys and rolling hills of this intermountain region (sometimes called “the sagebrush sea”), are a growing threat. “Nest success and brood survival was a lot lower in the habitats closer to turbines,” says Chad Laboe, a biologist working with the birds in Wyoming. These birds need open space. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, any development within six miles of a lek (breeding area) hurts their children’s chances for survival.57

Large species with slower breeding rates are disproportionately killed by turbines, since they tend to fly higher and in windier areas. A 2004 study from the Altamont Pass Wind Farm in California (nicknamed the “Cuisinart for birds”) estimated that this facility alone killed 116 golden eagles, 300 red-tailed hawks, 333 American kestrels, 380 burrowing owls, 2,526 rock doves, 217 northern flickers, 2,557 western meadowlarks, 10 great horned owls, 49 barn owls, 48 ravens, 24 ferruginous hawks, and 215 mountain bluebirds (this is not a complete list of kill documented in this study: the full list would take a page).58

In December 2013, the federal government exempted the wind industry from federal protections of bald and golden eagles. For the next 30 years, wind turbines can legally kill federally protected bald and golden eagles with no penalty.59

Remember, this is a technology promoted by the modern environmental movement.

Remember, also, that these bird kills are occurring on top of ongoing population collapses. A March 2018 study found that bird numbers across France had declined by a third in the past 15 years. The population of birds across Europe has gone down more than 50 percent in the past 30 to 40 years.60 Those numbers aren’t unique to Europe. North America lost more than a billion birds in the last 40 years.61 Major population declines are being observed across the world.62

Bat deaths from wind turbines in the United States alone were conservatively estimated at 600,000 in 2012.63 Wind energy harvested 140,822 GWh in the U.S. that year. As always, let’s do the math: 600,000 bat deaths divided by 140,822 GWh equals a little over four bats killed per GWh. Since Jacobson’s plan calls for 58.2 million GWh per year, this would mean almost 250 million bat kills a year, about 4.75 million a week, almost 680,000 per day, more than 28,000 per hour, more than 400 per minute, more than 7 per second.

Wind turbines kill more bats than any other human industry or activity.64 This has generated some backlash, and in response, the American Wind Energy Association published guidelines in 2015 that feather turbine blades during periods of low wind speed. They claimed this would reduce the killing of bats by 30 percent or more. The plan has been criticized as completely insufficient by biologists, who say that even with this plan (which is completely voluntary for each facility to implement), wind energy will cause a crash in global bat populations.65

Industry has responded, predictably, with another technology. Unable to prevent bat deaths, their latest response is to simply get rid of the bats using an ultrasound deterrent system that produces sound between 20 and 50 kilohertz, blocking bats ability to echolocate, orient, and forage. The bats “respond by choosing to leave the area.”66

Can you imagine if we played piercing sirens in your home day and night, and described your having to flee as “choosing to leave the area”?

This is, of course, a typical bright green response. Rather than do what is best for the bats (in other words, dismantle existing wind turbines and stop building any more), the wind industry is moving towards simply excluding the bats, as if they were the problem. Out of sight, out of mind. Never mind the fact that those bats may be starving, or have less success with mating, or have lower long-term survival without the habitat from which they have now been excluded.

This is no different from “wildlife” agencies shooting sea lions that congregate below dams on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers in a so-called effort to protect endangered salmon, or shooting wolves in a so-called effort to protect endangered Selkirk Caribou. Remove the dam, and the salmon will thrive. Stop the logging and close the roads, and the caribou will multiply. Shut down the wind turbines, and bats will survive.

Or maybe not. According to biologist Paul Cryan of the U.S. Geological Survey, “Bats are long-lived and very slow reproducers. Their populations rely on very high adult survival rates. That means their populations recover from big losses very slowly.”67

The wind installation with which we started this chapter, the Spring Valley wind-energy-harvesting facility, is located four miles from the largest bat roost in the Great Basin, the Rose Guano Cave, which is home to a million Brazilian free-tailed bats during their fall migration.

A study by Bat Conservation International “that looked at hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) fatalities at wind energy facilities revealed the population of this species may plunge by a staggering 90 percent over the next 50 years—even if no new turbines are built.” The study “used conservative figures of bat fatalities: 128,000 hoary bat fatalities annually in the U.S. and Canada, and assumed no new wind turbines are to come online in the future. They found, with the highest possible population estimate of 10 million hoary bats, the species could still experience a 50 percent decline over the next 50 years. With more conservative and likely population estimates, around 2.5 million individuals reproducing at a more realistic rate, that impact could deepen to a 90 percent decline within the next five decades.”68

Wind-energy boosters usually respond to any discussion of bird and bat kills by pointing out that fossil fuels, cars, cats, and flying into buildings kill far more birds than do wind turbines. Art Sasse of the American Wind Energy Association, for example, writes: “Those who truly care about the fate of birds and wildlife know that climate change is by far their greatest threat.”69 David Suzuki plays this same game, saying that the risk to birds is “low” and “negligible” compared to the risk to birds from skyscrapers (which of course is an argument to get rid of skyscrapers, but Suzuki doesn’t seem to see that part of it). It’s even worse than this, though. Suzuki puts the word “negligible” in quotes, and he cites a blog post by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). If the RSPB says that windmills cause “negligible” harm to birds, he suggests, it must be true. But Suzuki fails to mention that the very blog post to which he’s linking is a response to accusations that the RSBP is “in the pocket of the wind industry.” Why would those accusations come up? Well, it might be because the RSBP actively “partners” with the big wind energy company Ecotricity. RSBP helps Ecotricity site new industrial wind-energy-harvesting facilities (including over the objection of local environmentalists), and Ecotricity gives RSBP £60 for every new customer Ecotricity signs up. It works for everyone, except of course the birds and those who love them. No wonder the RSBP says bird kills by wind turbines are “negligible.”70

It’s more than a little ironic that environmentalists now routinely use a classic technique of industrialists and developers to dismiss or deride descriptions of harm caused by the industrial sectors they represent. How many times have we heard this argument? “It could be worse,” says the developer. “This mall will preserve some open space that would otherwise be destroyed.” “Don’t worry about this industrial pesticide application,” says the factory farm operator. “The river gets much more pollution from other sources.” “If you don’t let us clearcut,” says the timber company spokesperson, “we’ll subdivide for ranchettes.” Dam owners blame timber companies for extirpated salmon runs, and timber company flaks blame dams. It works out great for those whose primary concern is corporate profits: nobody takes responsibility, nothing gets done. How’s it working out for salmon or, in this case, birds? Not so well.

This argument is what’s called a double bind: You’re presented with two options, both of which are bad—in this case, bird and bat kills from global warming, and those from wind turbines—and told that choosing the lesser of the two evils is the “best choice.”

Some double binds are real. During World War II, people who were rounded up and sent to concentration camps often faced such a choice: get shot or get into the cattle cars. Other double binds are false. This is one of the latter. There is an unspoken premise of the argument in favor of wind turbines: that harvesting energy is more important than birds and bats. That some sacrifices (billions of sacrifices, in this case) are justifiable to provide industrial humans with energy. This is, of course, the usual human supremacist assumption.

The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. That’s what we must do.

Domestic cats, cars and trucks, fossil fuels, introduced invasive species, and destruction of habitat are killing birds and bats. There’s no argument about this, which is why some of us have worked for decades to dismantle car culture and the fossil fuel economy, to fight invasive species and destruction of habitat. This is why some of us devote our lives to restoring habitat. But the wind industry is another blow to bird and bat species already hammered by pesticides, poisoning, overhunting, habitat destruction, and global warming. The arguments against even discussing bird and bat kills from wind turbines reveal once again that most people have more allegiance to machines than they do to our winged kin.

Another predictable response to bird and bat kills is to talk about bladeless wind turbines, which don’t spin and therefore don’t kill as many nonhumans. Unlike conventional wind turbines, bladeless turbines work on a vertical axis, harnessing vorticity (the spinning motion in the wind) to create oscillation or vibration in turbine “blades.”

But there’s a reason that traditional spinning-blade turbines make up nearly 100 percent of turbine installations. The energy harvested by a wind turbine is proportional to the area swept. For traditional wind turbines, it’s relatively easier to make them taller and (crucially) increase the length of the blades to increase energy harvested. But bladeless turbines quickly run into fundamental engineering problems when they try to scale up. Larger designs tend to disrupt the airflow patterns that make them work, so beyond a certain size, you get a negative feedback loop. “When the cylinder gets very big and wind gets very high,” says Sheila Widnall, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at MIT, “you won’t be able to get as much energy out of it as you want to because the oscillation is fundamentally turbulent.”

Further, Widnall also claims that large bladeless designs will be as loud as freight trains.71

Is it possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been? As a child, I (Lierre) longed for the forest with an ache that’s never stopped. The concrete, the houses, the cars were an open wound on the world, and I wanted them gone. It was a huge, inchoate hunger for things I had never known: ancient trees, dark shade, and animal secrets—all of it wild. On and on, for miles, for years. Forever.

It’s universally noted that children are drawn to wild places. Even when they’re offered playgrounds, and even when they help design the playground—castles, mazes, swings—they will find the spots where adults don’t go, the abandoned ditches, the tiny edges no one owns and where wildness survives. In my school playground, there was one brave, single-file line of pine trees and shrubs at the very bottom of the field where my best friend and I returned. You couldn’t even call it a scrap of wilderness; it was just a thin unraveling thread that we needed to lead us home. It couldn’t, but we never stopped asking.

And I guess I’m still asking. The forest, sturdy with old-growth and swelling with species, will not return in my lifetime. My grief is my own, and it is also not the point. Full restoration will take longer than a human lifespan, but the world could be repaired. It could. But first the destruction has to stop.

Here’s the question: Are we the people who love the forest? Or are we the people who demand the right to destroy the last traces of the wild? Right now, a huge swathe of Clashindarroch Forest in Scotland is under threat.

Environmentalists laid the groundwork for this catastrophe by demanding wind and solar for decades, and now Swedish energy giant Vattenfall is offering to meet those demands. A quarter of the forest will be felled for wind turbines and their attendant infrastructure, right through the last refugium of the Scottish wildcat.72 The remaining wildcats number 35. There are no missing zeroes in that number: 35 are all that remain. That’s more a whisper than a number, the stripped skeleton of a species. They are the only wild felines left on the island of Great Britain and they will be lost to willful extinction in the service of wind.

This destruction is not unusual. Since 2000, Scotland has cut down almost 14 million trees over more than 17,000 acres—more than 26 square miles—to serve wind-energy harvesting.73

So, are we the people who love the forest? Or are we happy to trade in everyone who makes up a forest—trees, birds, wildcats, and all—for giant machines that will flash like 30 pieces of silver in the sun?

Our justified panic to address global warming has made us susceptible to seductive technological promises. In the face of concerted, sophisticated marketing techniques and the nearly complete cooptation of the big green groups, many people have come to believe the lies.

But some communities are resisting.

In Nantucket, Massachusetts, for example, an offshore wind project has been indefinitely stalled because of local opposition based on potential harm to the surrounding ocean and seafloor, increased boat traffic, and the possibility of oil spills. “It is beyond comprehension that a massive offshore industrial project of such magnitude; 130 wind turbines, 417 feet tall, in 15-foot waves, with spinning blades as wide as football fields, covering 24 square miles, in often foggy, noisy conditions, would be safe for any biologically sensitive location,” says opponent Christine Morabito. “Nor can I imagine a parallel universe where we would accept this level of environmental risk, were it posed by an oil company.”74

The thing is, some of these wind projects are run by oil companies.

In Ayrshire, Scotland, residents’ water supplies were contaminated by toxic releases from what was—at the time—Europe’s biggest industrial wind-energy-harvesting facility. A local doctor, in response to the contamination, said “It’s highly unlikely that Airtnoch Farm is the only supply in Scotland that has been contaminated. There may be hundreds of rural water supplies unknowingly affected by wind farm development.”75

In Kenya, a facility at Lake Turkana (the largest alkaline lake in the world) displaced an indigenous village through the privatization of 150,000 acres of their land. The facility is set to be the largest industrial wind-energy-harvesting facility in Africa (310 MW).76

In southern Mexico, more than 15 major wind-energy-harvesting facilities (the largest would install more than 130 turbines for a total of 400 MW of capacity) are under construction or already built in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco and Veracruz, despite almost unanimous opposition from the people. “This is an assault on the way of life and the sacred places of the indigenous communities who live in the region,” writes Santiago Navarro, a Mexican journalist. Most of these projects are being built on land held communally by local peoples who have defended it for generations; now they are being cheated or intimidated out of it. Industrial lubricants are polluting aquifers, and noise from the turbines and changes to wind patterns have scared away fish and birds and harmed traditional food practices. “We are worried because they are attacking our way of life, our health, and the sea,” says Carlos Sanchez, a community activist in Oaxaca. These wind-energy-harvesting facilities are just another expression of colonialism; most of the energy harvested by the projects is planned for use for major corporations like Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Heineken.77 One human rights observer wrote that due to lack of public consultation, local people “see the wind industry as ‘new conquistadors.’” Opposition has been widespread, with indigenous groups using protests, blockades, grievances, and courts to fight wind projects.78

Another example is the Wayuu, the indigenous people of the Guajira Peninsula, on the border of Colombia and Brazil. Due to fierce defense of their land—at one point, they had 20,000 members under arms—they were never fully subjugated by the conquistadors, but capitalism and wind power are doing what the first invaders never could.79 In recent years, extortion, torture, and murder from government and both right-wing and Marxist paramilitaries have left the community near collapse. Forty thousand people in the community are hungry, with many of them starving to death.80 The 19.5 MW World Bank financed Jepírachi industrial wind-energy-harvesting facility stands on a tract of stolen Wayuu land, sending electricity and money to Colombian cities and leaving behind damage to the habitat, wildlife, and semi-nomadic herding and fishing traditions of the region. While the developer talks about “community participation” and creates a “social management plan,” the reality of the project is familiar: outsiders come with promises of material goods and leave with land and money. “To separate the Wayuu from their land is to destroy their identity as a people,” says Juan Guillermo Sanchez, a professor of indigenous literature at the Universidad Javeriana. Many Wayuu fear that Jepírachi is just the beginning of a wave of industrial wind-energy development that might lead to the end of their traditional ways.81

When industrial wind-energy-harvesting facilities are welcomed by local communities, or forced in despite their opposition, local human quality of life often suffers. There’s light pollution from hundreds or thousands of powerful, blinking aircraft warning lights. Subsonic “infrasound” that flits at the edge of hearing can cause terrible headaches. Infrasound is not blocked by house walls or pillows over the head, and it can excite the nervous system and cause dizziness, headaches, elevated blood pressure, and other problems. Some studies have found major sleep disturbances (due to infrasound as well as louder, more audible frequencies such as gears grinding and other mechanical sounds) and impaired mental health in residents living within a mile of wind-energy-harvesting facilities. Other reported effects include hearing problems, tinnitus, anxiety, and depression.82

Why would we believe wind turbines wouldn’t do the same to nonhumans, many of whom are far more sensitive to sound and vibration than are humans?

Or do we not care?

Energy harvested from wind turbines does not come from nowhere; it’s extracted from energy in the wind. Leeward of an industrial wind energy generation facility, wind speeds are lower, because energy has been removed from the system. Research based on NASA satellite imaging has shown, in fact, that these facilities cause a local warming of the area where they’re located. Other studies have shown these facilities cause precipitation, not only at the site but across the whole region.83

Some wind energy boosters acknowledge this effect, and even pretend it’s a good thing. For example, Mark Jacobson wants to use this effect to, in his words, “tame” hurricanes. A 2014 paper he wrote, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, titled “Taming Hurricanes with Arrays of Offshore Wind Turbines,” uses computer models to estimate that massive offshore wind energy harvesting facilities could reduce hurricane wind speeds by 56 mph to 92 mph and storm surge by 6 percent to 79 percent.84

What could possibly go wrong?

Here’s a list of just a few of the benefits of hurricanes: They bring rain to dry areas like the U.S. Southwest, and East and Southeast Asia; they maintain global heat balance by distributing huge amounts of energy around the planet; they repair barrier islands and beaches by carrying sand from deeper waters to the shore; they drive upwelling of deep ocean water, which carries nutrients and maintains deepwater circulation currents; they contribute to natural succession and biodiversity by killing old and dying plants and contributing to the complexity of natural communities; they bring influxes of water and nutrients to coastal swamps and lagoons; and they distribute seeds (and even whole plants and animals) to new habitats. This is, of course, only a partial list.

Hubris is one of the worst traits of civilization, and hubris lies behind the plans of Mark Jacobson and every other booster who claims to be able to harness and control the power of the wind without consequence. Have none of these people heard the story of Icarus?

Shiny fantasies of a clean, green future are being built on numbers that aren’t real. Most of us don’t have the time or the training to investigate past an article or two. We know there’s an emergency; we believe the educated, earnest leaders; we read headlines that ease our fears, and isn’t Germany doing it already? Someone has a plan—an engineer, a senator, an environmental group—and even if the details are difficult, surely the idea is basically sound? What we are asking you to consider is that the idea of “green energy” is not sound—neither in the broad strokes (continuing to fuel the destruction of the planet is in fact a bad idea) nor in the particulars (that nondestructive sources of industrial scale energy exist).

The numbers on wind energy don’t add up. To put it bluntly, two Harvard University researchers, David Keith and Lee Miller, used data from over 57,000 wind turbines and found that the estimates used as a foundation by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and green energy proponents like Mark Jacobson do not match reality.

For wind, “the average power density … was up to 100 times lower” than common estimates.85 The power density for solar energy was also much lower than in widely used estimates. Any meaningful transition to wind and solar electricity would demand five to 20 times more land than the plans on the table. Miller and Keith calculate that 12 percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet current electricity demands. But electricity is only one-sixth of the nation’s energy consumption. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72 percent of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. At the scale required, wind farms would be “an active player in the climate system.”86 They would change the climate.

Please read that again.

The turbines’ action forces rising hot air back down to the ground; heat can’t escape; temperatures rise. Wind turbines would warm surface temperatures by .43°F. The worst warming would be at night, when temperatures would increase by 2.7°F.87 Reports David Keith, who led the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, “If your perspective is the next 10 years, wind power actually has—in some respects—more climate impact than coal or gas.”88 Over 10 other studies have already established the warming effect of wind farms, yet there is utter silence from the people who claim to be fighting climate change.89

These so-called environmentalists are willing to sacrifice birds and bats, deserts and mountains, children in the Congo and entire regions like Baotou. They will also, as it turns out, be sacrificing the climate to save the climate, until the lone and level sands will indeed stretch far away.

Many well-meaning people call for small-scale, community-operated renewable energy. In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein dedicates a whole chapter to defending “local power,”90 citing Hamburg, Germany, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, as shiny green examples. The idea is that people should have a democratic voice in decisions about their energy systems. When left to corporate directors, profit will be the priority. That’s the nature of corporations. If local communities make decisions, public interest can take precedence over private profits. When citizens are in control, they have been able to vote for “clean” energy.

But does the ownership of the technology change the nature of the technology? We raise this point because the argument for local control always arises when we critique solar and wind. The argument, however well meaning, has an unspoken premise: industrial civilization has to continue and the problem facing us is how to power it.

This is the continental divide facing environmentalists. Is industrial civilization the thing that has to be saved? Or is it the destruction that has to be stopped? Think long and hard. On one side of that divide are whole towns of lung disease, rain that burns, the exploded hearts of birds and bats, and mines from which the earth will only heal in geologic time. On the other side is our only planet, once lush with life and the promise of more, still, despite everything, calling us home.

Before you decide, think how a wind turbine is made, though it requires the grammar of heartbreak. Remember the verbs: explode, strip, batter, massacre, devastate. These are not words that should ever apply to living beings. Remember the nouns: forest, wetland, heron, wolf. Remember the adjectives: endangered, indigenous, displaced, extinct. And remember the scale: every mountain for 50 miles, 58,575 valleys, a billion tons of toxic materials, 30 percent of the fish. This is the promise of renewables: more of the same, endlessly more.

Wind turbines claim to be “better” than fossil fuels, but in practice, this has little meaning. Wind turbines generate less CO2 than the equivalent generation from coal-fired power plants, but there’s no evidence that wind power has displaced the burning of coal, oil, and gas. As wind power has expanded globally, fossil fuel burning hasn’t gone down. In fact, the number of coal-fired and natural gas power plants is increasing. Research from Richard York at the University of Oregon has shown that for every unit of “green” power brought online, only one-tenth as much fossil fuel is taken offline.91

Solar booster Hermann Scheer says, “Our dependence on fossil fuels amounts to global pyromania, and the only fire extinguisher we have at our disposal is renewable energy.”

No, that’s just putting a different fuel on the fire.

There are plenty of ways to put out the inferno that is the fossil fuel economy; the simplest and most important would be to simply deny capitalists the ability to continue business as usual.

But that isn’t a popular thing to say. It doesn’t make for good headlines, it doesn’t bring £60 to your organization for each new customer, it doesn’t get you grants from foundations, and most important of all, it doesn’t make the capitalists any money. And so, capitalists get what they want: they make profits, they get good PR, and they don’t have to fight environmentalists (at least, not many). And the bright green groups get to walk away feeling they’ve won a victory for the planet. It’s a win-win, so long as the planet doesn’t do it for us. Meanwhile, the earth continues to be killed by the same old industrial processes.

We started this chapter in Spring Valley, Nevada, and in Spring Valley we will end it. Do you remember those big turbines that required materials from around the world, with the attendant harm caused by mining, milling, refining, and shaping those materials? These turbines have an extended usable time of about 25 years. After that, the turbines will be demolished and resulting materials hauled away. According to a representative of the company, nothing will be recycled. The concrete foundations will be removed to four feet below present grade.92

This is how we save the planet?

 

 

 

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1 Michael Bastasch, “Here’s Why This Warren Buffett-Owned Utility Wants to Use 100 Percent Wind Power,” Daily Caller, May 31, 2018.

2 Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 70.

3 Charles S. Sargent, “The forests of central Nevada, with some remarks on those of the adjacent regions.” American. Journal of Science and Arts, third series, Art. 53 (1879), 417–426.

4 Learn more at pinyonjuniperforests.org. “Chaining” is where deforesters drag a huge anchor chain, weighing up to 20,000 pounds, between two bulldozers, yanking up all trees between them. It’s a horrific practice.

5 “Wind Turbine SWT-2.3-101, Technical Specifications,” Siemens Energy.

6 The Economist Technology Quarterly. June 12, 2010, 12.

7 Diane Toomey, “Greenpeace’s Kumi Naidoo on Russia and the Climate Struggle,” Yale Environment 360, January 14, 2014.

8 Lester Brown, “The Great Transition: Building a Wind-Centered Economy,” Population Press, April 16, 2013.

9 Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials,” Journal of Energy Policy 39 (2011), 1154–1169.

10 David Suzuki, “Windmills are things of beauty,” David Suzuki Foundation, April 3, 2014. Thankfully, a significant number of the comments left below the article were sane.

11 Tomas Kellner, “Extreme Measures: At 107 Meters, The World’s Largest Wind Turbine Blade Is Longer Than A Football Field. Here’s What It Looks Like,” General Electric, April 18, 2019.

12 Vaclav Smil, “To Get Wind Power You Need Oil,” IEEE Spectrum, February 29, 2016.

13 “Repower 5M,” Database of turbines and manufacturers, the Windpower Wind Energy Market Intelligence.

14 “Energy portfolio diversification,” ExxonMobil Fuels & Lubricants.

15 Darren Lesinski, “Synthetics to Protect the Wind Turbine and the Environment,” Wind Systems Magazine, January 2013. Note: EPA considers synthetic oil to be just as dangerous as conventional.

16 “Steel Solutions in the Green Economy: Wind Turbines,” World Steel Association, 2012.

17 “World Steel in Figures 2019,” World Steel Association, June 3, 2019.

18 Cobbled together from Peter Fairley, “Can the U.S. Grid Work With 100% Renewables? There’s a Scientific Fight Brewing,” Spectrum, June 19, 2017; Nathaneal Johnson, “A battle royale has broken out between clean power purists and pragmatists,” Grist, June 20, 2017; and Ronald Bailey, “Powering U.S. Using 100 Percent Renewable Energy Is a Total Fantasy,” Reason, June 21, 2017. Please note that while Bailey’s work in general is reprehensible, that doesn’t mean his math is bad.

19 Roger LeGuen, “Amazon Mining: Extracting Valuable Minerals and a Pandora’s Box of Problems,” World Wildlife Fund. Note that WWF’s source is from 1997, and deforestation rates have gone up since then. We used that conservative estimate, but estimates run up to 4,000 square miles per year. Please note also that when environmentalists were opposing the mine back in the 1980s, they feared the mine would consume a little over 275 square miles per year. Isn’t that the way it always goes?

20 “Mine Tailings Storage: Safety is No Accident,” U.N. Environment, 2015.

21 Samantha Pearson and Luciana Magalhaes, “Inspectors Fail to Guarantee Safety of 18 Vale Dams, Dikes in Brazil – 2nd Update,” MarketScreener, April 1, 2019.

22 Gabriel De Sá, “Brazil’s deadly dam disaster may have been preventable,” National Geographic, January 29, 2020.

23 Fabiola Ortiz, “Brazil—The Polluted Face of Carajás. 1,” Latin America Bureau, September 17, 2014.

24 Dom Phillips, “Another huge and open iron mine is carved out of Brazil’s rain forest,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2015.

25 Raúl Zibechi, “Mining and Colonialism in Brazil’s Giant Carajás Project,” CIP Americas Program, May 31, 2014.

26 Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2008), 7.

27 “Empire & Tilden Mines,” Keeweenaw Bay Indian Community, Natural Resources Department; and “The Tilden Mine,” Michigan State University, Geology Department.

28 “The Environmental Track Record of Taconite Mining: The Facts Exposing the False Premise that Iron Ore Mining is Safe,” Wisconsin Resource Protection Council, January 2013.

29 William Sanjour, “From the Files of a Whistleblower, or how EPA was captured by the industry it regulated,” December 25, 2013.

30 Jeanette Fitzsimons, “Can we make steel without coal?” Coal Action Network Aotearoa, April 24, 2013.

31 David Chandler, “Electrolyis method described from making ‘green’ iron,” Phys.org

32 Laura Beans, “U.S. Mines Pollute Up to 27 Billion Gallons of Water Annually,” EcoWatch, May 2, 2013.

33 “Copper: An Indispensable Ingredient for Wind Energy,” Copper Development Association, Inc., September 2010.

34 Danny Chivers, “The Stuff Problem,” New Internationalist, August 15, 2015.

35 Bill Grosser, “Copper Mining and Refining (Redox),” November 3, 2012; and “Copper Info: Mining and Refining of Copper,” HowStuffWorks, July 21, 2009.

36 Judy Fahys, “Special Report: How Kennecott concealed warnings of a possible disaster from the people of Magna,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 24, 2008.

37 Compiled from: “Problems with Bingham Canyon Mine,” Earthworks, 2011; “Kennecott Copper Mine,” Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance, Asbestos Exposure Program; Bonnie Gestring, “U.S. Copper Porphyry Mines Report: The Track Record of Water Quality Impacts Resulting From Pipeline Spills, Tailings Failures, and Water Collection and Treatment Failures,” Earthworks, Patagonia Area Resource Alliance, November 2012; “Scoping Summary Report: Kennecott Utah Copper LLC Tailings Expansion Project,” United States Department of the Army Corp of Engineers, August 2011; and Leonard J. Arrington and Gary B. Hansen, The Richest Hole on Earth: A History of the Bingham Copper Mine (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1963).

38 Twila Van Leer, “Young John D. Lee Helped Lead a Hunting Contest,” Desert News, October 22, 1996.

39 “About Us” and “Environment” Pages, Rio Tinto Kennecott.

40 Dan Harris, “Rare Earths and Polysilicon. Does China Control Our Green Future?” China Law Blog, November 5, 2010.

41 Zimmermann et al., “Material Flows Resulting from Large Scale Deployment of Wind Energy in Germany,” Resources, 2013, 2, 303–334. Wind turbines can be made without rare earth metals, but they are far more expensive per unit of energy generated. And since the primary goal of creating wind turbines is to generate profit (and electricity), not to protect the planet, most contain these metals.

42 Bill McKibben, “Can China Go Green?” National Geographic, June 2011.

Also: Cécile Bontron, “Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages,” The Guardian, August 7, 2012.

43 David Shukman, “Renewables deep-sea mining conundrum,” BBC News: Science and Environment, April 11, 2017.

44 Maddie Stone, “The Future of Technology Is Hiding on the Ocean Floor,” Gizmodo, April 5, 2016.

45 Linda Ewing, “Stop poisoning our community! Herbicide spraying is wind industry’s toxic secret,” East County Magazine, May 2013.

46 Mia Myklebust and Miriam Raftery, “Do wind turbines harm animals?” East County Magazine, May 10, 2012.

47 James Conca, “Wind Industry Ignores Bird Conservationists,” Forbes, June 4, 2015.

48 Benjamin K. Sovacool, “The Avian and Wildlife Costs of Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power,” Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences 9, no. 4, (December 2012) 255–278.

49 Thanks to Geoff Pearce, Carver Deron Lowe, and Wolf Dieter Aichmann (a.k.a. WDA) for help with these calculations.

50 “Bird-Smart Wind Energy: Protecting Birds from Poorly Sited Wind Turbines,” American Bird Conservancy.

51 Mark Duchamp, “US windfarms kill 10-20 times more than previously thought,” Save the Eagles International, April 2014.

52 “What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?” U.S. Energy Information Administration, March 31, 2015.

53 Will Robinson, ”Rare bird last seen in Britain 22 years ago reappears – only to be killed by wind turbine in front of a horrified crowd of birdwatchers,” The Daily Mail, June 27, 2013.

54 Mastermax595, “Rebhuhn-Schwarm fliegt in Bubenheimer Windrad welches im Vogelschutzgebiet steht Dutzend Tote Tiere,” YouTube, July 20, 2015.

55 David Miller, “Offshore wind farms ‘threaten gannets,’” BBC, September 28, 2015.

56 “Emergency Order for the Protection of the Greater Sage-Grouse,” Canada Gazette (Gatineau, Quebec: Minister of the Environment) 147 (25), December 4, 2013.

57 Diane Cardwell and Clifford Krauss, “Frack Quietly Please: Sage Grouse Is Nesting,” New York Times, July 19, 2014.

58 “Developing Methods to Reduce Bird Mortality in the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area,” The California Energy Commission, Public Interest Energy Research Program, August 2004.

59 “White House gives wind farms 30-year pass on eagle deaths,” Associated Press, CBS News, December 6, 2013.

60 Josh Gabbatiss, “‘Shocking’ decline in birds across Europe due to pesticide use, say scientists,” The Independent, March 21, 2018.

61 Eric Andrew-Gee, “Bird populations in steep decline in North America, study finds,” The Globe and Mail, September 14, 2016.

62 “Global trends in bird species survival,” Canada Environment and Natural Resources, April 10, 2017.

63 Mark A. Hayes, “Bats Killed in Large Numbers at United States Wind Energy Facilities,” BioScience 63, no. 12 (2013): 975–979.

64 Thomas J. O’Shea et al., “Multiple mortality events in bats: a global review,” Mammal Review 46, no. 3 (2016).

65 Amy Mathews Amos, “Bat Killings by Wind Energy Turbines Continue,” Scientific American, June 7, 2016.

66 Mary Bates, “A New Deterrent System Could Help Save Bats from Wind Turbines,” Pacific Standard, February 11, 2019.

67 Amos, op. cit.

68 Michelle Donahue, “Seeking answers in the wind,” Bat Conservation International, February 24, 2017. The article suggests a number of technical fixes that may lower bat mortality. These include turning off the wind turbines at times when bats are most active, using ultrasonic deterrents, and so on. But the industrial economy is so sacrosanct that not even Bat Conservation International, which is supposed to have its primary loyalty to bats, dares to suggest not putting in wind turbines. The only people we know consistently opposing these industrial facilities are local grassroots environmentalists.

69 Art Sasse, “Wind industry has a legacy of caring for wildlife,” American Wind Energy Association, April 2, 2015.

70 Martin Harper, “Facing up to inconvenient truths,” RSBP, April 4, 2013.

71 Phil McKenna, “Bladeless Wind Turbines Offer More Form Than Function: Startup Vortex Bladeless makes a turbine that looks intriguing, but it may not solve wind power’s challenges,” MIT Technology Review, May 27, 2015.

72 Greg Russell, “Almost a third of wildcat population at threat over windfarm plans, says group,” The National, June 21, 2018.

73 “Renewable developments on Scotland’s national forests and lands: EIR release,” January 21, 2020.

74 Christine Morabito, “Cape Wind Project: A Tale of Crony Environmentalism (Part 2) Did Mass Audubon Sell its Soul to the Wind Industry?” The Valley Patriot, June 2015.

75 Marcello Mega, “Power company knew residents’ water supply was heavily polluted,” The Times [U.K.], September 21, 2013.

76 “COP19: Carlo Van Wageningen talks about wind power in Africa,” Responding to Climate Change, Climate Change TV, November 2013.

77 Santiago Navarro, “On Mexican Isthmus, Indigenous Communities Oppose Massive Energy Projects,” CIP Americas Program, April 2, 2014.

78 Soledad Mills et al., “Defining and Addressing Community Opposition to Wind Development in Oaxaca,” Equitable Origin, January 2016.

79 “Wayuu,” Intercontinental Cry Magazine, Indigenous Peoples.

80 “Humanitarian disaster in La Guajira,” Mama Tierra, April 9, 2014.

81 “Changes in the wind,” The City Paper Bogota, April 23, 2013.

82 Roy D. Jeffry. et al., “Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines,” Canadian Family Physician, May 2013; 59(5): 473–475.

83 David Kirk-Davidoff, “Wind Power Found to Affect Local Climate,” The Conversation (republished in Scientific American), February 14, 2014.

84 Mark Z. Jacobson et al., “Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines,” Nature Climate Change 4, 195–200 (2014); published online February 26, 2014.

85 Leah Burrows, “Wind farms will cause more environmental impact than previously thought,” The Harvard Gazette, October 4, 2018.

86 Ibid.

87 Lee Miller and David Keith, “Climate impacts of wind power,” Joule 2, no. 12 (December 19, 2018): 2618–2632.

88 Miller and Keith, op. cit.

89 Burrows, op. cit.

90 Naomi Klein, op. cit.

91 Richard York, “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels,” Nature Climate Change, 2, 441–443, March 18, 2012.

92 Julie Bundorf, “Notes on Spring Valley Wind Project Site Visit (Resource Advisory Committee for BLM),” July 20, 2012.