Unfounded claims about offshore wind threatening whales have surfaced as a flashpoint in the fight over the future of renewable energy.
In recent months, conservatives including former President Donald Trump have claimed construction of offshore wind turbines is killing the giant animals.
Scientists say there is no credible evidence linking offshore wind farms to whale deaths. But that hasn’t stopped conservative groups and ad hoc “not in my back yard”-style anti-development groups from making the connection.
The Associated Press sorts fact from fiction when it comes to whales and wind power as the rare North Atlantic right whale’s migration season gets underway.
Last night someone was telling me that the resin they use to make the blades deteriorates over time and covers the area in microplastics. Oh and each turbine needs 40 tonnes of cement which is not carbon neutral.
They main contributors for micro plastics are polyester clothing and car tires. Those people likely use both.
I just want to jump and say that that’s not a good argument. It’s next to impossible to get away from that kinda stuff, same as how saying that a person using an iPhone to write about capitalism being bad is just silly.
The absolute majority of my clothes is 100% cotton. I get jackets and stuff being synthetic, but how often if at all do you even wash them unless you’re going hiking a lot of whatever? And yes, it’s absolutely possible to get away from a lot of this stuff. Just like it is also complete bullshit to claim that wind turbines are major contributors for microplastics. That’s literally flat Earth levels of stupid.
Sure ok. This guy drives Australian road trains. Typically 15 axles, 58 tyres.
we gonna get you on board the fuck cars movement if microplastics are a big enough concern to not build renewable energy? Cus boy let me tell you about tire wear and microplastics.
The old “silver bullet” argument, eh? “X is not a perfect one size fits all solution with no downsides, so must be equally as bad as not doing anything”
I mean thats not really wrong but it reminds me of one of the dipshit oilfield guys I worked with in the wind industry.
“*hyuk hyuk* whats that greasing the gearbox? is that oil? in a so called green energy turbine?”
yeah dude a 2MW tower going through a few dozen gallons of lubricant a year is the same an oil fired plant burning 10,000 barrels in a year for a similar power output(napkin math explained here). You’ve exposed the big secret man, these things are equivalent because there are oil products in both. Numbers are a scam made up to trick god-fearing texans.
The only actual solution is to consume less power, but no one wants to talk about that yet.
What a silly thing to say.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t want to use less power.
I suspect what you really mean is that you want to reduce power requirements by some authoritarian policy.
No, there are many people who explicitly don’t want to use less power. They usually point towards a correlation between societal development and power usage, and imply that using less power would mean we’re sliding back.
A very obvious example of post hoc ergo propter hoc. I’ve never heard anyone believe that, certainly not a majority.
It’s not a common position, but it definitely occurs. I’ve seen it on Lemmy a couple of times, and much more often on Hacker News.
I’ve only heard it in the negative. “Economists used to believe that economic progress was tied directly to increased energy use but this data from the last ten years shows otherwise”
What I want is to save the world from overconsumption, and yes, that’s going to require governments rationing power and enforcing efficiency.
Calling that “authoritarian” is nonsense, though. It doesn’t require the army going house to house and killing people with incandescent lightbulbs or something. Grow up.
Sure mate, I guess the question of whether it’s authoritarian is subjective. Suffice to say rationing would be daft. What about roof top solar?
We can’t do that without an extremely exploitative supply chain that uses child slaves to mine for cobalt and lithium, that is built on an imperialist supply chain that subjugates nations under the boot-heel of the likes of the US and France, that releases massive amounts of CO2 and causes huge amounts of deforestation from mining and shipping and manufacturing and installing this “green” technology.
We also can’t do that on a reasonable timeline that will prevent catastrophic warming. The majority of estimates put us past 2040.
Also? You aren’t going to get rooftop solar to replace coal and gas without “authoritarian” measures like mandates and penalties.