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Sue Nunn
Edinboro, PA
Doing research for a graduate degree in Sociology. My research area is family violence.
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Sue signed the petition | -
Sue signed the petition | -
Sue signed the petition | -
Sue signed the petition | -
Sue commented on the article |thanks for the clarification Roxann.
Sue
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Sue commented on the article |
I just want to make a point that the people who have introduced the bill are Senators and this is a Senate bill. Contact your Senators.
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Sue signed the petition | -
Sue commented on the article |Hi, Emily,
I recently traveled to beautiful, hilly, central Pennsylvania, where my family goes back generations. I attended a community meeting in Luthersburg regarding wind proposals in that area. The presenter was Laura Jackson of SOAR (Save Our Allegheny Ridges).
I know that you want to promote clean energy. But I ask you to study industrial wind further before endorsing it. Please go to a place that has many turbines and spend some time in their presence. Talk to people who live near them. Speak to wildlife experts on the impact of these turbines on animal behavior and wellbeing. And research how viable this technology is to actually produce electricity over the long run. Even if you want to disregard their impact on the landscape, will these turbines be able to deliver? The evidence I have read is that they will not.
Ms. Jackson's talk was very illuminating. She pointed out that energy-development maps list wind potential in the Eastern part of the U.S. as low to marginal. Yet wind projects are being implemented here regardless of their efficiency. Why? Like so much other questionable public policy, the wind projects are a mutually-beneficial arrangement between elected officials and developers. The wind industry lobbied heavily for taxpayer subsidies and renewable energy targets. Public officials hope to stimulate "growth" while at the same time appearing "green." Their degree of environmental motivation is debatable when the turbines are being pushed through so fast, regardless of suitability. I observe that politicians frequently value their roles as conduits for corporate profits more than their roles as protectors of the public good.
The citizens are being left out of the planning for these grand schemes until the plans are already in place. Industrial wind turbines dramatically transform our places, our homes, yet the attitudes of the powerful seem to be that our treasured environments are expendable. Just last week, there was a conference sponsored by the US Dept of Energy and the PA Dept of Environmental Protection, held at Penn State. This event, titled, "Pennsylvania Communities and Wind Energy: Thriving Together," was by "invitation only." Only PA municipal officials and officers of economic development were invited. Why not allow broader public participation? It seems very undemocratic.
You observe that people throughout our nation use electricity, and you advocate that we accept these turbines as the responsible way to diminish our reliance on other forms of polluting power. But wind turbines, particularly those in the eastern U.S., will never be more than a drop in the bucket in terms of what they will add to the grid. In Ms. Jackson's presentation, she showed that it will take 7,000 wind turbines to take the place of one of PA's coal plants. To get anywhere near that number you would have to saturate the whole state with them regardless of public will or property owners' consent. And most of those turbines would be unproductive because the winds in so many places are negligible.
As I mentioned before, it makes more sense to question our profligate energy usage instead of banking on just another expensive, destructive scheme like Industrial Wind to keep current power consumption patterns intact. The bottom line is that electricity is way too cheap, and consumers take this cheapness for granted, as do building designers.
When gasoline went up to $4 a gallon, consumption went down. People changed their habits. The government could easily reduce electricity use through a system of carrots and sticks. They could raise taxes on electricity or give income tax breaks for living off the grid. At minimum, they should put forth a full-blown P.R. campaign asking citizens to reduce electricity usage as a patriotic necessity. I doubt this will be done, though, because it would result in people buying fewer goods that use electricity, and would interfere with the capitalism directive of "growth."
The "growth" mantra has already led to the destruction of so much of our environment. Now the same economic appetite is careening toward the usurpation of the one remaining thing that heals -- our landscapes. It looks like a done deal because the politicians are blinded. I just ask environmentalists like you, who have good intentions, to not be sold on this without a more critical examination.
Contemporary lifestyles are unsustainable. People may want their air conditioning, but nature is not wealthy enough to allow us to subvert summer into some other type of climate. Once fossil fuels are depleted, we will have to lead lives that are more localized and with less technology.
Yes, small windmills have helped humans do work for many centuries. But Industrial Wind is nothing like that. Constructing and transporting each turbine is a massive undertaking, and costs $7 million (!) apiece, of which the taxpayers pay 2/3. Plus, they need existing power sources to compensate for their variability.
Wind turbines will not alter the necessity of human lifestyle change. They will only do more damage to our remaining natural areas.
There is no energy source that will easily or cheaply replace fossil fuels in a large-scale way. Nuclear is too harmful with the waste it generates. We will have to live very differently in the future and the longer we postpone realizing that, the more harm will be done.
To me, living more simply is not a depressing proposition -- it most likely will bring benefits like closer community. In the meantime, if developers have their way, our landscapes of the future may very well be littered with these turbines in states of decay, with no funds to decommission them. Do we want to stop that depredation now? I say "yes!"
Wind turbines are not a green solution. I believe that if you research it further, you will find that the promises of wind are hollow.
[P.S. I find that wind turbine artwork in the media is frequently of an idealized type and does not show the truly monstrous scale of these. Graphics like those on your page often do not have human points of reference like houses, barns or roads.]
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Sue commented on the article |
Hi Emily,
Thank you for posting up some of my comments about wind turbines on your blog ... presenting an alternative perspective to the pro-wind position of many environmentalists.
There is much evidence that wind is not living up to its green promises. Please see "The Problem with Wind Power," http://www.aweo.org/ProblemWithWind.html .
People may think "Wind is sustainable ... a great alternative to coal!" But wind cannot replace conventional power sources because wind power is notoriously unreliable, particularly during the hottest months when there is the most energy demand. For more information about the technical limits of wind energy, and why it requires a "shadow capacity" of conventional sources, I have forwarded to your inbox an extensive post that a contributor made to the Buffalo News discussion board on this issue.
"Renewable energy" might sound good, but we have to be careful about what we choose to subsidize with our tax dollars. There are often unintended impacts. When we subsidize wind turbines, the developers and those who lease their land receive the monetary income, but there are corresponding losses to other humans (property value loss and psychic income loss) and to the earth. A wind turbine does create damage to the land. Here is a link to a photo essay. Look at the bottom photo to see how much the environment must be disturbed to put up just one turbine. http://www.ricks-bricks.com/LookoutMountain/photoessay.html
Yes, you are right that much of nature is already defiled with toxins like PCBs. But does it make sense then to not defend our rural areas from the industrial invasion of wind turbines?
The "dragon" - the term used in feng shui to describe the sacred form of the landscape - renews us. We mess with that at our peril. The wind turbines are: 1. way too large, and 2. a "built form" that is very destructive/ chaotic in terms of its energetic effect on us. Those massive structures with swirling blades do affect our psyches, whether people are aware of it or not.
One of the responses to my comments mentioned that coal is not a desirable power source. It's true that coal has also negatively impacted the landscape. Unfortunately the tops of mountains have been lopped off to get at the coal underneath and that disruption of the landscape affects humans in the area as well. But adding wind turbines is imposing another form of harm, and it will not reduce much the need for conventional sources of power.
I am passionate about this issue because from the time I was small, the land has been a healing resource. Anyone who has spent much of their childhood in nature, ask yourself, do you want the sacred dragon defiled?
It is senseless, in my opinion, to defile the landscape to continue the use of air-conditioning. A/C currently accounts for 18% of U.S. electricity demand, and it is not a necessary technology. I grew up without a/c, even though in my teen years my family lived in Florida. Our FL schools at that time did not have a/c. Yet now it is nearly ubiquitous in US public buildings, and most homes even in the northern latitudes are being built with central air.
Frankly, I would rather live like the Amish than turn our landscapes into something resembling a bad science fiction movie, as these wind turbines do. Please, if a person loves the land, I ask you to look at this issue more deeply.
Sincerely,
Sue Nunn
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