For your curiosity, here is a picture of a street demonstration by a group of Greens against a planned wind plant on the Appennini mountains, in Italy. And, no, it is not from the 1980s. It was last week! Really. The main street signs says "No all'eolico selvaggio," that is, "No to the wild wind power"
I have no doubt that this small group of Greens who collected in the town of "Vicchio" truly believe in what they are doing (I know some of them personally). But they are a good example of the mental fog that's overtaking the minds of most people, but in particular the "Greens." They seem to find no contradiction in sponsoring carbon taxes and advocating measures to reduce emissions, while at the same time approving "green hydrogen" and protesting against all sorts of renewable energy plants (and being against nuclear energy, too!).
Truly, they seem to have emerged out of a multi-dimensional gate, catapulted to our time from the 1980s, still holding the same signs they were showing at that time.
But so is life. One of the good things of the universe is that contradictions can't exist for long. The natural evolution of things tends to remove them. It will happen this time, too, one way or another.
Thanks as ever for your posts Ugo.
ReplyDeleteThere is an excellent "documentary" about this, it's from the perspective far in the future from a devastated earth and a human exploring the archives to see what went wrong. Protesting wind farms being one of them.
The Age Of Stupid with the wonderful alas deceased, Pete Postlethwaite
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300563/
That said, no amount of windfarms can replace fossil fuels (the renewables being built don't replace fossil fuels, they just help with the increasing energy demand) , which seems to be the counter argument from some. The only way is to reorganise society with a significantly lower energy use, Professor Susan Krumeidck makes that point here
https://low-emission-future.blogspot.com/2016/05/can-engineers-change-world-energy.html
"The most popular concept of this transition involves a substitution of renewables for fossil fuels and development of elusive tail-pipe technologies like carbon-capture and storage. This concept is comforting and simple. But it is also profoundly wrong. There is no way to achieve an energy transition without completely reworking every aspect of our infrastructure, industry and economy to vastly reduce energy demand."
No chance of that, as voters won't allow it, so the Seneca Cliff it is :)