Fakery
Max Schulz has an op-ed in the New York Post that really should be read. It addresses a few of the environmental myths that are being pushed by some groups. These are widely believed, but totally untrue.
Result? According to the Forest Service, we have actually seen a net reforestation since 1985. We aren't losing forestland, we're gaining it.
Greenpeace's call for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives might make sense, but only if there were any realistic alternatives available. Presently renewable energies like wind power, solar power and ethanol aren't close to being able to substitute for the coal, natural gas and oil that make up the lion's share of our energy sources. Coal provides half our electricity today. Wind and solar provide less than 1 percent.
More, alternative fuels can be as land-hungry as agriculture. The typical 1,000 megawatt coal or nuclear plant might sit on a few acres. To generate the same amount of electricity with renewables would require 60,000 acres for a utility-scale wind farm, or about 11,000 acres of photovoltaic cells capturing the sun's light.
Ethanol, too, can't be produced in the massive quantities required to make a significant dent in our gasoline consumption - and its production depends on vast tracts of farmland, too.
Other myths?
* More than four of every five poll respondents said that our cities are getting dirtier. In fact, pollution has been slashed since 1970, and our cities are far cleaner today.
There is quite a lot more, read it all. I can't find it at the moment, but I know I looked at the EPA's own published figures at one time. Overall emissions of all types of pollution in the US have decreased by about 1/3 since 1970, despite a massive growth in the population and sharp increases in energy demand. Those figures are available right off the EPA website if you want to check it yourself. I have also posted numerous times about the realities of some of the alternative energy generation schemes - as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky claims made by proponents.
Environment | Gaius Saturday, 21 April , 2007
By Alan, Monday, 23 April , 2007 @ 7:39 am
Myths indeed! Schultz doesn’t cite his sources, but the idea that a 1000 MW wind farm requires 60,000 acres is laughable. As far back as 1989, a Department of Energy study commissioned under the Reagan administration found that a wind farm would use barely more land than a nuclear power plant of equivalent size. Can a wind farm use that much land? Certainly, if that’s how you design it, but it doesn’t need to. The 11000 acres for a 1000 MW photovoltaic solar plant is much closer to reality.
The statement that a coal or nuclear power plant only requires a few acres is misleading at best. Sure, the plant itself only needs a small amount of space, but do you have any idea how much land is used for mining coal and uranium? Uranium mining doesn’t actually use that much land, and the aforementioned study suggests that a 1000 MW nuclear plant needs some 3000 acres for mines, fuel processing plants, etc. Coal mining is an entirely different story, sometimes literally blasting the tops off mountains to create huge surface mines. A 1000 MW coal plant can use as much as 20000 acres once you factor in mining. This makes coal the land-hoggingest energy technology we have, and by a fair margin.
In short, if you’re going to argue against wind and solar power, land use is a lousy way to do it.
By Gaius, Monday, 23 April , 2007 @ 8:03 am
http://www.ompa.com/windfarm.htm
By Alan, Monday, 23 April , 2007 @ 4:50 pm
According to this PDF from that site, it uses about 24 acres/MW, or about 40% of what the New York Post author claims. This agrees well with information from Wikipedia. Not only that, but the land can still be used for other purposes, such as agriculture or recreation (and in many locations it is). Compare that to 20 acres/MW rendered utterly useless with coal, much of it soaked in toxic runoff from the mine tailings….