“Carson made little effort to provide a balanced perspective and consistently ignored key evidence that would have contradicted her work. Thus, while the book provided a range of notable ideas, a number of Carson’s major arguments rested on what can only be described as deliberate ignorance.”
– Roger Meiners, et. al (cover insert)
Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement when published 50 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has had a profound impact on our society. While Carson was not the first to write about the dangers of pesticides or to sound environmental alarms, her writing style and ability to reach out to a broad audience allowed her to capture and retain the attention of the public.
Yet this iconic book, hardly scrutinized over the decades, substituted sensationalism for fact and apocalyptic pronouncements for genuine knowledge.…
Continue ReadingThis post completes the determination of wind costs, and Part IV covers subsidization and emissions. Part I, Introduction and Summary, contains links to all the posts in this series.
Just about any analysis you see understates wind’s cost. In fact there can be no comparison between the costs for wind and reliable, dispatchable generation plants such as coal, nuclear and gas plants. Reliability is so important in electricity systems, and wind’s persistent erratic behavior is so problematic that any electricity it produces is not usable and is a threat to electricity system reliability.
Add capacity from reliable generation plants flexible enough to balance wind’s erratic output and a steady, reliable electrical energy flow can be provided. However there is a substantial cost associated with this. As shown in Part II, for wind to produce the same amount of useful, reliable electricity over 40 years, wind and associated balancing overnight plant capital costs are almost 3 times that for nuclear, the most expensive conventional generation plants reviewed.…
Continue ReadingThe carefully-crafted press release by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) presents their new wind-energy jobs report as thorough, objective, and academically sound. Although such an assessment would be very welcome, their “report” is no more than marketing propaganda. Their blatant bias here gives further credence to a piece by Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution, “Bad Faith and Bad Science at the NRDC,” which concluded that “NRDC continues to peddle junk science” for their own financial gain.
Energy specialists ordinarily don’t have the time to critique sales brochures, but here are some quick observations on this material:
… Continue Reading1 – There is a strong implication given that a 250 MW wind energy facility creates “1,079 jobs.” That is not true. The vast majority of the jobs cited are for people already employed — e.g.