Wind turbines not the answer to energy needs

 Daniel Greenfield:

New York, along with other states, is moving forward with massive wind turbine projects.

The push for "9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy" comes at a high price, not only for families who are left dependent on expensive and unreliable energy, but for the planet.

Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors. A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment. One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages". "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed."

A recent Associated Press story about rare earth mining operations in Burma told of a world where "birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown."

An offshore wind turbine can produce somewhere between 9 and 14 megawatts depending on its size. New York's goal would require a thousand offshore wind turbines. Fiberglass wind turbine blades can’t be recycled and end up in massive landfills where they remain, according to one executive, “forever”. But within the fiberglass sheath is balsa wood that can be recycled.

Balsa wood is light, airy and popular for everything from model airplanes to planes. The obsession with green energy has created a massive demand for balsa wood to use in wind turbines. While a story from 2020 about how 14 million trees had been cut down in Scotland to make way for wind farms recently went viral, far more trees are cut down to make turbines.

Billions of trees.

One wind turbine blade can require as much as 5,300 cubic feet of balsa wood.

The price of balsa wood shot up, driven by demand from Communist China. While the Chinese have tried to grow their own balsa with limited success, they have turned to deforesting the Amazon. The Amazon, the world’s largest carbon sink, is being destroyed to reduce carbon.

Environmentalists are destroying the planet to save the planet.

Even while they were profiting from an artificial "green boom" fed by western green special interests, astroturf activists, fraudulent science, and pop culture crisis, Chinese companies were wiping out millions of trees in the name of saving the planet from a manufactured emergency.

Companies answering to Chinese interests found isolated tribes, traded them drugs and alcohol for slave labor, encouraged violence against those who would not comply, and the results were hailed by western environmentalists. The costs of China’s “wind power boom” were ignored.

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Both wind and solar are poor choices to replace fossil fuels.  They are expensive and more harmful to the environment while producing intermittent energy.  They are much less dependable, especially in extreme weather.