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The Inconvenient Truth About A Green Revolution
The Inconvenient Truth About A Green Revolution
“Green energy is the future!” “Green energy will create tens of thousands of new jobs!” Statements like these have become the new mantra for green energy advocates even as fossil fuel emissions have fallen dramatically thanks at least in part to the rise of natural gas. Fossil fuel emissions today are roughly 10% lower than they were a decade ago in the United States according to the EPA. Combined with the precipitous decline in oil prices, green energy generation has become less economically appealing and less environmentally necessary. This has led to increased emphasis on the employment aspects of green energy.
Related: Could The World Cope With Almost Limitless Energy?
A recent panel of climate scientists concluded that by 2020 around 1 million new green energy jobs would be created if the US, European Union, and China all adhere to their climate goals. This statistic is predicated on these countries managing to switch from producing conventional fossil fuel energy to green energy sources. By 2050 around 3 million new green energy jobs would be created if all conventional fossil fuels are phased out by that point and replaced with renewable energy sources.
These figures sound great initially, but there is a catch. For those jobs to materialize, fossil fuels have to be phased out. And once those fossil fuels are phased out, a lot of existing jobs will disappear.
How many jobs will disappear as the “green revolution” picks up steam?
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Wind Offers a Healthy Way to Generate Power | David Suzuki
Wind Offers a Healthy Way to Generate Power | David Suzuki.
There’s no free ride when it comes to generating energy. Even the cleanest sources have environmental consequences. Materials for all power-generating facilities have to be obtained and transported, and infrastructure must be built, maintained and eventually decommissioned. Wind turbines take up space and can harm wildlife. Hydro floods agricultural land and alters water cycles.
That’s why conservation is the best way to reduce energy-consumption impacts. Reductions in energy use and investment in energy-efficiency technologies are so significant that the International Energy Agency refers to conservation as the “first fuel“.
No matter how good we get at conserving, though, we’ll always need energy, so we must find ways to employ the least damaging technologies and reduce negative effects. We know the world’s preferred, and currently cheapest, method to generate power — burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas — is the most destructive, causing pollution, global warming and massive environmental damage during extraction, transport, refining and use. And supplies are becoming more difficult to obtain and will eventually run out.
In contrast, wind power doesn’t create pollution or global warming emissions, is affordable and will never run out. Improvements to power-generation capacity, efficiency and affordability will continue to boost its importance in the energy mix. But we must ensure turbines are installed in locations and using methods that reduce negative impacts on humans and wildlife.
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Survey Says… wind farms don’t hurt people’s health. But some people find them annoying. | – Environmental Defence
We now have another study that confirms that there are no health impacts associated with living near wind farms.
The study, conducted by Health Canada at a cost of $2.1 million, agrees with the findings of the study by Ontario’s Medical Officer of Health, which found no “causal link between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects.” A study by the American Psychological Association found the same. So have a myriad of other studies done over the years in multiple jurisdictions.
Health Canada’s study found that there was no relationship between wind turbines and reports of trouble sleeping, incidence of self-reported illness, stress, or quality of life.
They did, however, find that some people are annoyed by wind farms. In the language of epidemiology, the study found a correlation, but not a causal relationship, between increasing levels of wind turbine noise and “annoyance.”
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Wind Energy Too Unreliable For UK, Study Finds
Wind Energy Too Unreliable For UK, Study Finds.
A conservative British think tank has concluded that wind energy can’t be relied on to meet the United Kingdom’s power needs and must be supplemented with fossil-fuel power plants.
A study issued Oct. 27 by the London-based Adam Smith Institute (ASI) says there are wide fluctuations in the output of wind farms because of the equally wide fluctuations in the presence of wind. Therefore, it concludes, the wind farms will need to be backed up by powerful conventional generators.
In the study, the ASI constructed mathematical models of the likely output from a planned 10-gigawatt fleet of wind farms. It found that for fully 20 weeks in an average year, the farms would produce less than 2 gigawatts of power, and for nine weeks of that year it would generate less than one-tenth of that figure.
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