One thing you may find about me is that I have a lot of concern for the environment. That may surprise you with my obvious love for cars, but the majority of our carbon emissions actually come from electric producing coal plants and cars can be made more fuel efficient. It does not matter what the industry says, coal is pure carbon and when burned it makes carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. There is no such thing as "clean coal". Or as a work colleague of mine pointed out, it was clean in the mesozoic era, when it was in the form of dinosaurs and plant life. Now it is just carbon. Oh, and sometimes sulfur and other contaminants that create acid rain.
But the problem is that I live in central Pennsylvania which is Coal Country with a capital C. It is ironically a very good place to develop wind farms and the two industries make for strange bedfellows. They do not like each other, that is for certain. There is a lot of anti-wind power propaganda in this area. So much that they have even been able to convince the Audubon Society, of all people that wind power is bad and kills birds. What, and global warming does not? I have watched those wind turbines daily and they go so slow that only the sickest or most inept of all birds would be likely to get entangled in their blades.
The actual building of the turbines is something that one could have an objection to. The blades themselves are enormous, being longer than a standard truck trailer and requiring an oversize load carrier to be transported. There is a facility that stores them very close to where I reside and when they try to bring one through town, it makes for some sticky traffic snarls. The engines are no better being just as bulky and difficult to transport.
One of the biggest complaints offered against wind turbines in this area is the damage caused construction done on the tops of the mountains. To this I respond, it is better than scraping the tops off and dumping the remains in the valleys below causing certain environmental disaster and a flattened mountain in its place. This is a practice known as mountain top coal mining. Through a loophole in environmental regulations during the GW Bush years, this practice increased exponentially causing massive damage to homes, mountains and forests in West Virginia ever since. Yes, there will be damage to the environment to build the roads up to the top of the mountains, but this is no less damaging than that damage caused by roads built to put up cell or radio towers.
Certainly the question of aesthetics has been put forth. Wind turbines are no worse than all those cell phone towers they are putting up and nobody complains about those. Those cell towers are an ugly scar against the sky. The wind turbines are actually quite elegant in the way they slowly sweep though the air.
In the aesthetics debate, wind power still trumps coal power. If you saw my earlier post, you would have seen my first hand account of what it is like to drive through a strip mine, and no, it is not very pretty. And to reiterate, it is not clean.
There are other arguments about noise, light blinking causing headaches, and other distractions for local neighbors to the actual turbines. Much of the responsibility of being a good neighbor rests on the hands of the power company. The newest array of wind turbines going up is very visible from the city, but they went to great lengths not to build near enough to populated areas that they would be disturbed by them. People have had their lives disrupted by having wind turbines plopped down in their backyards. People have had their lives disrupted by coal mines, landfills, nuclear power plants, and strip malls, also. These are things that happen and people need to turn to their local government leaders for ways to work with this, but this does not mean that an entire industry as a whole should be rejected.
Coal and wind power are at odds largely over jobs. Coal was always been here and certainly does not want to give up its market share, but wind power companies have seen a market that is ripe for the picking when it comes to locations, available workforce and room to expand and have a newer option that sooner or later is going to have to become more of a mainstay. Coal power is one of the number one producers of greenhouse gasses currently and the survival of the planet depends on us moving away from coal as a mainstay and towards cleaner options. The sooner the better.
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