Bishop Hill Intelligence Squared debate
Oct 1, 2011 Climate: WG3 This looks like it will be fun. I don't think I'll make it unfortunately:
If a windmill is about to blight your cherished view of the green English countryside, you might start to wonder why on earth the Department for Energy and Climate Change thinks it is a good idea to subsidise the monsters at vast cost to the British taxpayer. Why not retune some boilers in Guangdong instead? Or encourage the booming cities of China to power themselves with gas, not coal? There’s a whole raft of practical, carbon-saving steps which can be more cheaply achieved in the growing, bustling emerging world. After all, a ton of carbon saved in China is as good in global terms as a ton saved in the UK. So why ever spoil our green and pleasant land?
Hang on, though. Wasn’t the “green new deal” all about creating jobs in a new sort of economy? Making Britain a leader in an industry of the future? Not to mention making us just a little less dependent for our energy on geopolitically unstable regions of the world. Make China the focus of all our policy effort, and it will be China that reaps the knock-on benefits. Why would we realistically agree to that?
So who is right? Join us on October 20th 2011 at the Royal Society to find out.
The speakers include George Monbiot.
Reader Comments (64)
Intelligence Square Rooted?
The windmills are mainly made overseas so no jobs there, installtion yes but they are short term so you are left with maintenance.
And the economies of scale is rubbish also, the more windmills are made the higher the price of rare earth elements used in them due to China's monopoly and the price of plate steel has been increasing too for 6 years and may only now show signs of weakening.
Another speaker is Vicky Pryce. Might she answer some questions about the moral integrity of Chris Huhne?
Ease your troubled mind,
Feel the vibrations, hum it.
Bird death prayer wheels.
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Nice one Kim
Kim
A pungently accurate allegorical allusion. Quite brilliant.
Josh
There is something to be done with this one -- give it a try.
No point in looking for reason, sense or truth. These static displays have nothing to do with good economics, jobs, or saving the planet and other such nonsense. They are the follies and monuments of the green religion. The ancient world had its towering statues to the emperors and their gods; the medieval world had its shrines and statues to saints and the Virgin Mary, as well as the most prominent spires that money could buy. The communists have their huge statues and ostentations promoting their cult. These useless wind monstrosities are the necessary images that the proponents of green cult need to make them and others believe that their gods and values are the dominant ones, and making the cult conspicuous. Like the idols of old, they are utterly useless in themselves but keep worshippers captive to an ideology. Hasten the day when our countrymen will wake up and see how they have been fooled and tear these things down, and destroy the foul cult that deluded them.
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[SNip]
Windmills don't generate electricity, they generate cash.
A rather pointless debate from the perspective of our side I'm afraid. All of the guest speakers are noted warmists and are merely counting angels. I know exactly how it will finish with both sides more or less agreeing to the notion that more green technology should be developed and built in the UK.
Move on nothing to see there.
Don Pablo
We did suggest Josh brings out a calender. Well Matt (of the Telegraph) has got his 2012 calender out in the shops already- and its got more climate related jokes than any other theme, including on the front cover.
KIm, wow, that is a good one. And yes, Don, something to be done there I feel sure.
I have a ticket and will make some visual notes of the debate. If anyone else is there do come and say hi and hopefully we can find time to have a drink afterwards.
Pharos, so little time so much to do! Maybe I need an assistant or something.
Stupidity cubed.
Josh
Go for the calendar !!!
The 2012 Calendar in the style of perhaps the "Calendar Girls" but with 12 Climate "Personalities" covering up !!!.
Embarassing declines can be hidden !, Hockey sticks placed where the sun don't shine, Sea Levels can engulf San Fran condos !, Maldives president can perform Dolphin-like tricks for cash from the UN President, James Hansen handcuffed to a polar bear saying ...."are you feeling lucky punk ?".
Use the "when did you last see your father" painting as a young Greenpeace activist advising the IPCC on the next alarmist report.
You could really have fun with this.
Can anyone tell me why windmills in my area go round when there is absolutely no wind? Near where I live there are people who live on boats, they often have a little windmill on them which I presume has some use for charging a battery so that they can have electric lights and a portable telly. When it is so still that the boat windmills are not turning at all, the great big ones are slowly going round. I surmise that they are rotated to avoid damage to the massive sails, but if this is the case then they are doing the exact opposite of generating power.
OT The hottest October day on record has been misreported on BBC Radio as the hottest October on record, on October the first FFS.
Stonyground
Occasionally the blades of the Windcash machine are turned by taking power FROM the grid.
This is to keep the gearing lubricated and shafts from bending under the strain of remaining idle for too long.
This is to ensure the main shaft does not develop a "memory" and remain slightly out of 'true' when the wind finally comes along. Such a situation would cause the gearing to er, explode.
http://www.aweo.org/windconsumption.html
I dare say this consumption is not taken into account when the 'efficiency' ratings are calculated ?
Stoneyground - yes, I've wondered about that too. I've looked pretty hard at treetops to see if it is a windshear thing and I've concluded that they must be "motoring" or freewheeling at best.
Would be nice to know for sure - there are some small turbines that have a "kick start" (!) function and IIRR they (and others) had negative energy production in the Warwick Wind Trials:
http://www.zephyreco.co.jp/en/products/product/air-dolphin/
http://www.warwickwindtrials.org.uk/
Josh
"hopefully we can find time to have a drink afterwards"
Try the Red Lion in Duke of York Street - Fullers and a very fine Victorian interior. Wish I could join you.
http://fancyapint.com/Pub/london/the-red-lion-duke-of-york-st./844
The more cynical observers of the last decade of energy politics will laugh again at this:
You will remember the blatantly obvious attempt by T Blair and others to re-tool dead shipyards in the NE as turbine factories. The shift from vast public subsidy for the region in the form of public sector make-work jobs to one of public subsidy for making windmills was meant to be a stroke of genius. Green jobs, regeneration and saving the planet, all in the same paragraph.
Unfortunately, for this fantasy to crystallise into a functional economic and energy reality, wind power needs to deliver reliable baseload without conventional backup. Since it doesn't and never will, the whole thing is just a vast, empty promise made by opportunistic politicians who have now left the field to a new batch.
And so it goes, on and on.
Side note: bird mortality is a non-argument against wind. Cats kill millions of birds, and every renewables booster with half a brain will throw this fact right back at you.
To recap and summarise, the problems with wind are:
- low energy density so...
- huge footprint
- vast cost
- huge grid extension required at further vast cost
- variable, intermittent and unpredictable (so not dispatchable)
- equivalent spinning reserve required at further vast cost
- no clear emissions advantage
- very high cost per kW/h
- offshore wind is failure-prone and near impossible to maintain in winter (sea conditions)
- onshore wind cannot deliver meaningful capacity without an unacceptably large footprint
There's more, but that'll do for now.
The lampooning of those in positions of authority who treat the common man as a gullible fool and seek to exploit or deceive him, provided it confirms latent suspicions already held, has been one of the historic pillars of free democracy, and very effective too. Whether free democracy still exists is debatable enough, but until cartoonists get the knock on the door in the middle of the night, they are probably the few to whom so much is owed by so many.
BBD,
How many cats would you have to kill to replace them with one average wind farm?
Stoneyground
This particular windfarm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/8147168.stm
German owned, exploiting UK taxpayer funded incentives, and opened in a blaze of censorship so no locals were aware of it, by the then Right Honourable Minister of Energy and Climate Change, now Leader of the Opposition, today, had no blades turning whatsoever, as is commonly the case for at least a third of them even when the wind blows. Rated as capable of supplying the need of up to 33,000 homes. Just as the the tried and trusted Dungeness B, rated as capable of supplying over 1.5 million homes, with output for the year ended 31 December 2010: 3.6 TWh, which locals overwhelmingly want replaced by newbuild but rejected by DECC on environmental grounds, presumably flood risk, despite it is located on an accreting rather than eroding part of the coast, will be forced to close by 2018 at the latest, supplied reliable power as normal to the grid..
John in France
It's an interesting question ;-)
This provides a rough idea of the relative numbers (just as a talking point; I'm not endorsing anything):
So without bothering to do any actual work, I will risk that surprisingly few cats would have to go to compensate for the windmills. Even allowing for substantial expansion of wind capacity.
This is not to say that expanding wind capacity will not kill lots of birds. It will. And they will be in addition to the toll taken by the moggies.
If business people get sued possibly thrown in jail in florida because animal righters cough up photos of 2 tarred pelicans, then bird mortality is definitely an argument against wind.
Cats kill birds which is true and should be pushed as a fact under the sniffer of every single selfrighteous spinster in the country. but we're far too political correct to criticise people in an equivocal way. Cats are totally superfluous they became domesticated in our fight against rodents. Nowadays we do not have enough rodents especially the smaller ones so cats should be culled. We do not have enough insects anymore either. It is part of the nefarious and sterile effeminisation of our life and our world.
[SNip]
I don't particularly like cats
Being an enthusiastic feeder of wild birds during late Autumn, Winter and Spring each year, I have come to love the birds which visit my garden. I have been lucky to have seen brambling in the recent hard winters and I have also seen a cat take a blue tit about 20 feet from my back door.
Cats should be banned as far as I am concerned.
Incidentally, I have also had two kills of small birds (got the photos too) of sparrowhawk kills in my back garden in the last 2 years. The 1st was a greenfinch, the 2nd another poor blue tit just a few months ago.
PW
[snip]
[Any more language like that and I will block your IP]
Syncrude, an operator in the Canadian Oil Sands business had an equipment failure that lead to the unfortunate demise of 1,606 ducks in the company's tailings pond. For this, they were fined $3,000,000, or $1868 per duck.
There is no record of prosecution of windfarm operators for the havoc caused by their avian Cuisinarts!
On a related topic, some wag suggested that more birds had been Killed by Margaret Atwood's cat. (Margaret Atwood is a prominent publicity seeking Canadian author.)
alan davies has tomcats, but that character passes for an old woman, as well.
Phinniethetutut
Basically agreed. And Gen III+ nuclear is getting closer to what you require.
tutut
Strong words, but if I'm being honest, agreed. All of it.
The RSPB is sanguine about birds taken by cats
'Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season'
http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/gardening/unwantedvisitors/cats/birddeclines.aspx
Tut Tut, TutTut.
Your passion is admirable but your language is deplorable.
I think a number of you do not understand what birds are being killed. We are not talking sparrows and blue jays, but the raptors and owls:
KQED
House cats do not take these birds. Indeed it is often the other way around.
Don Pablo
You are correct.
Nevertheless, the strong argument against wind is technological rather than ecological.
Although watching 'environmentalists' defend wind power is always queasily amusing.
BBD - birds are very good argument against windfarms, not sparrows etc, but rare red list species which are protected by UK and EU laws. e.g. Hen Harriers, peregrine falcons, golden and sea eagle, all of which are losing potential habitats for nesting and feeding. SNH and the RSPB have been in denial about this for a number of years, hence their refusal to object to various inappropriate wind schemes in Highland Perthshire and further north. But perhaps the chickens will come home to roost - so to speak - when the latest raptor mortality rates from Norway and California are presented to the relevant officials in Brussels:
http://www.bou.org.uk/bouproc-net/ccb/nygard-etal.pdf
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wind-eagles-20110803,0,2891547.story
I hope so anyway.
As for big wind farms on Scottish islands - please - the intermittent return is just not worth the infrastructure, and that is before you consider the transmission costs of getting the energy to the mainland and then down to where it is needed in the south of England. Wind is good for domestic off-grid situations and fine for local small scale demand, (where for example it can save shipping in so much diesel), but it is just a joke when it comes to trying to provide power for even a post industrial country.
tutut
Actually, there is one point of difference above. You say:
We are becoming infantilised, not feminised.
lapogus
I think tutut meant local use, not NG.
Chance that anyone at the 'debate' will attempt to explain that jobs are a COST, not a benefit: zero.
this localised disputation stuff is all very well...but how about the devastation that mining for the magnetic materials for windmills will cause in the local environment?. Let's get real. If we increase wind-power in the UK, we will denude massive parts of Chile. As an economist, I am used to dealing with trade-offs....what is the trade-off that you can handle and still go to your dinner parties and pontificate about how green you are?
So if, for a slight extra charge, we are allowed by Brussels to offset our emissions againt saved Chinese emissions, we can borrow some more debt from China to get them to build even more wind turbines, helping them raise their employment standards, and their GDP, with the added advantage of not defiling our environment, letting them keep them there, saving on transportation costs. And we save our birds. Terrific. Win win.
diogenes
Ask Al Gore who is laughing all the way to the bank with the money he is making off being green.
BBD
Agreed, which leads to economic reasons as well. I was merely pointing to the hypocritical point that wind turbines are "green". There is a lot of bird blood on them that the "greens" ignore.
Don't start me on cats. The 12 million feral cats in Australia are an environmental disaster. From the link -
The mathematician and environmentalist Dr John Wamsley had it right.
My neighbours cat used to delight in coming into my backyard and killing native birds around the feeder I had set up. Not bothering to eat them of course, just killing them or severely injuring them and I would have to put them down. The final straw was when it killed a rosella, a large and beautiful parrot. So I got out the .22 and shot the big, fat useless thing.
My small part in the conservation of Australian fauna.
Last I heard, jobs creation and economic value are economic concepts. That's not in the ken of climatologists and activists, and I rather think a proper application of microeconomics will quickly contradict the apparently intuitively appealing idea that throwing enough subsidies at high-cost energy sources to make them look low-cost can create wealth. I am not one to dismiss anyone for their lack of credentials, but if Monbiot stands up and argues for wealth creation from deriving energy from sources that consume a lot more capital than the alternatives then I think the obvious question is: how could that be true when it is untrue, and obviously so, for every other type of good or service. How can spending $10 to get $1 worth of energy not make us poorer?
If the response from Monbiot et al relies on externalities then, regardless of its correctness, it contradicts the proposition that we will be made wealthier.
"...After all, a ton of carbon saved in China is as good in global terms as a ton saved in the
UKAustralia". A good point, lost however on our politicians.Meanwhile, as the huge bulk coal carrier sail north, our pollies are about to impose the worlds highest tax on our local "carbon pollootin industries" as our ex-union lawyer Prime Minister calls them. The first fleet arrived in 1788 with sailors, soldiers, convicts, settlers and all of the English language except the words irony and hypocricy apparently.
Re previous post - here's a 5'10" feral cat.
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