Tagged: hydro
NIMBY Neck – more rebuttal
Alistair Watt writes:
The negative effects of living next to a wind power generating station have been known for some time. Consequently, to label opposition to them on that basis as NIMBY is unfair. Not In Anyone’s Back Yard (NIABY) would be more appropriate.
OK, let’s review. We have to do something about electrical generation in Nova Scotia, because we currently burn the dirtiest possible fuel, coal, to produce about 75 percent of our power, and greenhouse gasses pose a grave and urgent risk to the future of the planet. However:
- We can’t use hydro, because there are no big rivers left to exploit, and even if there were, dams kill fish and reservoirs wreck habitat.
- We can’t use nuclear, because we’re not certain how to deal with the long-lived radioactive waste it produces.
- We can’t use oil and gas, because they are only marginally better than coal.
- We might not be able to use tidal, a technology that is at least a decade away from commercial development in any case, because it might change fish migration patterns.
- We can’t burn waste wood, because doing so is inefficient, and will destroy the forests.
- We can’t use wind because the noise bothers people, and the blades cause sunlight to flicker, possibly triggering epileptic seizures in rare susceptible individuals.
If one believes (as Contrarian does) that environmentalists have done society an enormous service by forcing climate change onto the world’s agenda as an imminent threat to the future of humanity, then what are we to make of the same environmental movement’s penchant for throwing up roadblocks to every conceivable solution? And to indulge anyone and everyone who masks aesthetic objections with trivial, exaggerated, or bogus claims of harm?
The neighborhood school is burning down, but we’re not going to send the fire trucks, because diesel fumes from their exhaust might give some of the children an asthma attack.
Whole Earth Discipline
Seminal environmentalist (and sometime Cape Breton summer resident) Stewart Brand promotes a series of environmental heresies in this surprising talk.
In 1968, Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, which Apple founder Steve Jobs described as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web. A counter-cultural touchstone, the Catalog helped inspire and galvanize the environmental movement.
Today, Brand calls himself an ecopragmatist. This talk previews Whole Earth Discipline, a book he will publish this Fall challenging contemporary environmentalists to reconsider objections to nuclear power and genetically modified foods. Brand is pro-city, pro-genetic engineering, pro-nuclear, and so profoundly worried about climate change, he believes geoengineering will probably be necessary. After the jump, some excerpts from the talk.
