Many natural gas wells are so small that they are surrounded by a small chain link fence about four feet high and are hardly noticeable.
One way to be just a tad more greenish - Just Say No!
Seems like everyone in my house thinks if it’s free, take it. I am forever trying to convince them that they can say no to the free tote bag, the free stress ball with the name of a company on it, the endless pamphlets at the home and garden show, etc.
Here’s a little cheer on this lovely Earth Day so we don’t become too morose:
http://grist.org/article/here-are-4-big-pollution-problems-epa-has-mostly-fixed-already/
Thanks for the fracking link, emeraldkity.
Instead of drama, all these things need to be put into perspective. The numbers of birds killed by green installations like this, including windmills, is measured in the hundreds of thousands, but the birds killed each year by windows is measured in the hundreds of millions and those killed by cats in the billions.
ETA: Earth Day is tomorrow.
My kid’s school (the one with the bottle filling stations) get something like 1/3 of their power from a school wind turbine. It could be more but I’m going from memory.
- will look up when I have time and come back with a better number
Even so they are really ugly blights on the landscape. Some are being situated just outside Joshua Tree National Park. Some are proposed just outside the boundaries of the California Poppy Preserve or the Manzanar Historic Site.
Wind and solar factory sites are not ‘green’ energy.
So the birds are ok to kill and not the smelts from the delta in California?
I have a regular commute that takes me past a wind farm and an oil refinery. Give me the wind farm any day of the week. I’ve been out to a solar plant too, and I think they’re a lot prettier than the coal plants I grew up with.
They are an order of magnitude greener than the greenest fossil fuel sources. In conjunction with nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal, they provide a far better source of energy than we currently use.
Not so much “ok” as “better”. We aren’t running out of the birds, that gives us more time to solve that particular problem. Besides which, if we were running out of the birds, the best remedy wouldn’t be to nix the solar panels, it would be to ban outdoor cats (as @JustOneDad noted).
Maybe we are supposed to say “renewable”. Who knows what the Green detractors have chosen for a definition to suit their twisted logic.
Anyway, personally, I’m not too worried about the birdies. There always seem to be adequate numbers when the blueberries come ripe.
^^^ it’s funny how words become co-opted. I was listening to a radio ad a few years ago that kept using the word “sustainable” - usually a catchword for something with a low environmental impact. The radio ad was for Monsanto!
They were talking about meeting the world’s hunger by growing “crops that need less water” - and you know and I know that they weren’t talking about xeriscaping and drip irrigation. They were probably talking about crossing the corn gene with a camel and blasting it with roundup laced water.
Some college graduate got paid real money to figure that ad out.
Open spaces are being ruined by these things. Not to mention the electrical transmission lines that accompany them. There’s a lot of NIMBYism in wind and solar facilities also. They’re only put in or near rural communities. We will never see one in the hills above Malibu.
A solar panel on someone’s roof is more efficient in providing electricity to their house than the same panel a mile away, all other conditions being equal. There is a lot of energy lost during transmission over distances, and all those lines also require some maintenance.
Yes. I’ve only heard of minor problems with rooftop solar. In one case, the neighbor’s solar panels melted parts of a car next door, but that’s minor compared to frying birds and ruining habitat for desert creatures.
It just seems a bit curious that you’re so against solar and wind because they aren’t visually appealing and they may harm wildlife. Not meaning to be snarky, but are you also against any other kind of human building that might do the same thing? It’s a pretty rare structure that looks as good as the nature it replaced and all structures harm, or at least displace, wildlife.
However, big commercial players like Costco have gone solar and that saves money and “dirty” energy. Costco can install solar on their roof and it’s no uglier than if it were blank.
Nothing is absolute. One single solution is not always better for everyone. Ugly or inefficient solar in one setting does not mean that it isn’t a perfect solution in another (Costco for example)
It looks like I was about right on the StO wind turbine. The number that I found was 33% of campus energy is produced by the turbine.
With wind turbines, part of the problem is the people running them. If they set the turbines to kick in when the wind is above about 13 MPH, instead of the 9 they use, it would save a large percentage of the birds being killed today, since at the higher windspeed the birds will not be flying.
“Natural gas does not create eyesores on the landscape like wind turbines and big solar.”. Natural gas still puts CO2 into the atmosphere, as clean as it is, but the other thing you have to keep in mind if that some natural gas comes from oil wells (not exactly very nice to look at), but worse, a lot of the natural gas used today is coming from fracking, and there are serious questions about its impact on things, things like the chemicals they use getting into groundwater, or in Oklahoma, apparently they are dumping the waste products deep in the ground and there is growing evidence that may behind the huge increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past X years (and I am talking a serious increase, they get some ridiculous number/year).
There was just an article in the NY Times how utilities in Hawaii are going nuts, because apparently a lot of homeowners are going solar and it is cutting into their profits, that tells you it can work. The point about green energy is that there doesn’t have to be one solution, things like solar and wind power can add to the power grid, and other technologies can come online as they are developed. One potential is using bio engineering to get algae to produce hydrogen (which can be used in place of natural gas, and before someone on here points out the hindenburg, hydrogen is less explosive than gasoline vapor or natural gas mixed with air, just ask the people who survive buildings when they blow up from gas leaks), hydrogen is zero emissions and zero greenhouse, or use algae to produce oil and gasoline, which would be carbon neutral (though still polluting).
Nuclear energy is zero greenhouse, the problem is the nuclear industry so totally screwed things up (with the help of the government, that instead of regulating them, was their chief promoter) that no one trusts them, the greed factor is just too high. Years ago a neighbor of mine when I lived in a town just across the river from NYC was an engineer, he worked for Babcox and Wilcox, who designed the reactors. He said they would design a reactor, and would go back to inspect the reactor after they started building it, and would find things like radioactive water lines, that are supposed to use special stainless steel alloys, were using stainless steel like you buy at home depot. They would specify 3 or 4 levels of redundancy on things like cooling pumps, and when the plant was built they would find the backup systems missing, and the owner of the plant saying “oh, yes, we plan on installing them later”…and government inspectors seemed to let them do this. Not to mention that they often seemed to hire back in the good old days people who literally were like Homer Simpson, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. It is sad, there are modern reactor designs that are relatively safe if operated properly, that produce nuclear waste that isn’t weaponizable, but no one trusts the industry and i don’t blame them, in this world of ‘shareholder management’ it is just too tempting for those operating the plants to cut corners, and with a government that basically acts as cheerleader, even worse (not to mention they still can’t figure out how to dispose of the waste). Fusion is a pipe dream that always seems 30 years off.
Everyone is looking for a magic bullet, when the reality is it is a combination of things. Gasoline consumption is actually a lot less then it ever has been, cars today are incredibly fuel efficient, 450 HP Corvettes can do 26 MPG on the highway, and overall consumption because of fuel efficiency is down. Efficiency in appliances and other electric users is also up, so add that to new sources of energy, it is not small, and that is the way I think it should be looked at.
As far as the hypocrisy goes, it is all over. Those politicians who have made a career yelling and screaming about the middle east are often the same politicians who promote oil and gasoline as our main energy sources, not wanting to spend money on research into other fuels and such, yet oil is one of the prime reasons a)we are tangled up over there and b)fuels the terrorism we are all so scared of. Politicians promote ethanol as being ‘alternative energy’, when it is neither economically viable, costs more in terms of energy to make then it puts out, causes a basic food stock (corn) price to go through the roof, and to be viable needs huge tax subsidies (and said politicians often are the same people yelling about pork barrel politics and waste, Ethanol is the classic example of pork). I personally think Al Gore was the biggest mistake when it comes to climate change, the term “Global Warming” is a mistake, plus having someone with feet of lead telling others they are made of iron doesn’t help things, nor did his exaggerations, it just fed fuel to those trying to pretend nothing is wrong.
I don’t know about Oklahoma, but fracking has definitely been linked to earthquakes in Ohio. Here’s one source:
P.S. My spellcheck doesn’t recognize fracking and keeps turning it to tracking, grrrrr.
When D3 and I were driving her to school in AZ, we drove through miles and miles of windmills along highway 40 in either OK or the eastern TX panhandle. It was quite lovely to me. Especially when there was a horrid looking cattle stockyard on the other side of the road at one point.