Whenever President Donald Trump criticizes wind energy, left-wing elites mock him for allegedly being an “uneducated’ simpleton.
Yet new findings by Bloomberg suggest that the real simpletons are those too thick-skulled and arrogant to at least consider his points, for it turns out that wind energy produces a lot more waste than initially expected.
“A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away,” the outlet reported Wednesday.
What happens, therefore, is that the blades are instead forwarded to a landfill, where they then proceed to become environmentally unfriendly trash.
“Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills,” Bloomberg noted.
“In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022.”
As the lifetime of wind turbine blades come to an end, there is no way to recycle them, left forever in landfill sites.
Great environmental friendly wind turbines….
? pic.twitter.com/8UFUH7oMUy— Francois Loi (@FrancoisLoi) February 6, 2020
That’s a lot of blades …
Because of their heavyset construction, which is designed to withstand hurricane-force winds, wind turbine blades “can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed.”
“That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under,” Bloomberg noted.
According to Bob Cappadona of Veolia Environnement SA, a resource management group based out of Paris, chances are these blades will remain “there, ultimately, forever.”
“The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges,” he added.
Yet that’s exactly what the increased use of wind energy has engendered.
The good news is that groups like Veolia are working tirelessly to develop methods for essentially recycling wind turbine blades. Whether or not this is enough good news to justify the continued building of wind turbines remains for the people to decide.
That said, there’s a lot of bad news regarding wind turbines, besides for the fact that their blades will continue filling up landfills for the time being.
“Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of green energy,” the National Audubon Society notes.
Audubon is one of the oldest environmental non-profits in the world dedicated to the conservation of birds and other wildlife.
Yet when the president spoke in December about “the number of eagles being killed by the wind turbines,” he was mocked for it by left-wing elites:
In an unhinged rant, Trump lashed out at wind power farms in a speech Saturday, claiming that the production of windmills could produce “fumes spewing into the air” and endanger birds, including bald eagles. #MoronPresidenthttps://t.co/iA4qDAkZ6c
— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) December 23, 2019
While a critic of all forms of “renewable” energy, the president has made it clear he’s a supporter of nuclear energy, which some allege is the true future of energy policy in America and the rest of the globe.
In 2018, he signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act, which was designed “to speed up the development of advanced reactors in the U.S. by eliminating several of the financial and technological barriers standing in the way of nuclear innovation,” as reported at the time by Greentech Media, a subsidiary of Wood Mackenzie.
But according to left-wing elites, this too — just like Trump’s assertions about wind power — was bad, because nuclear power is itself bad.
“Personally I am against nuclear power,” left-wing elite Greta Thunberg, the infamous climate change activist made famous for ranting about climate change when she hasn’t even made it through secondary school yet, said last year.
She added though that she’d allow it to play “a small part” in the future carbon-free universe she envisions.
“[A]ccording to the IPCC [the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change], it can be a small part of a very big new carbon free energy solution, especially in countries and areas that lack the possibility of a full scale renewable energy supply – even though it’s extremely dangerous, expensive and time consuming. But let’s leave that debate until we start looking at the full picture,” she wrote on Facebook.
On Friday March 15th 2019 well over 1,5 million students school striked for the climate in 2083 places in 125 countries…
Posted by Greta Thunberg on Sunday, March 17, 2019
Like other notable climate change activists, she’s a staunch advocate of renewable energy sources like wind and further believes all traditional energy procurement needs to be halted immediately and replaced with their renewable counterparts.
The problem, according to environmental policy expert Michael Shellenberger, who was named as one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” back in 2008, is that renewable energy forms like wind can’t possibly power all of society.
“The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to,” he bluntly stated in a column last year.
Plus, they use up an abundance of resources.
“[N]o amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables,” he wrote. “Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.”
Like Trump, he too is a proponent of nuclear energy.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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