Do we need to destroy the environment to save it?
That's the question I faced a few years ago. I co-founded a movement that was the precursor
to the Green New Deal. It was called "The New Apollo Project." If we could send a man
to the moon, we reasoned, surely we could save our own planet. All we had to do was
harness the power of the wind and the sun
and get rid of fossil fuels. Compared to the
original Apollo mission, how hard could that be?
Well, it turned out to be very hard—practically impossible, in fact. The basic laws of physics
and chemistry proved to be very stubborn. But, as I did more and more research, something
else began to trouble me: the prospect that pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy
would actually cause more harm to the environment than good. There's no better example of this
than what wind and solar energy do to birds.
Industrial wind turbines—those giant generators of wind power—are the greatest new threat
to golden and bald eagles. But the eagles are hardly the only ones threatened. Condors,
owls, hawks and falcons all fall prey to the turbines’ mighty blades.
Big Wind—and believe me, there's a Big Wind industry now, just like there's Big Oil and
Big Pharma—claims that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. That's true. But
whereas cats kill small, common birds like sparrows, wind turbines kill big, threatened-with-extinction
and slow-to-reproduce species like bald eagles and condors.
Indeed, industrial wind farms are killing fields for birds. The more turbines you put
up, the more birds you're going to slaughter.
According to the American Bird Conservancy in 2017, "Research shows that hundreds of
thousands of birds and bats die every year when they accidentally collide with the…turbine
blades. That number grows with each turbine built." The Royal Society for the Preservation
of Birds reports that wind farms built off the coast of Britain could be the "final nail
in the coffin" for endangered sea birds. The Center for Biological Diversity calls the
Altamont Pass wind farm in California "a population sink for golden eagles as
well as burrowing owls."
As for solar farms, they produce an entirely different set of problems, although they also
are very harmful for birds. In California, according to a federal report, massive solar
arrays produce heat up to 900 degrees. When birds fly into those arrays, they
simply burn up.
Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of massive industrial facility.
You have to clear the whole area of wildlife. For example, in order to construct the Ivanpah
solar farm in California near the Nevada border, developers hired biologists to pull threatened
desert tortoises from their burrows. The tortoises were then loaded on the back of pickup trucks
and caged in pens where many ended up dying.
Solar farms also need millions and millions of gallons of water to clean the mirrors and
to generate power. Since most solar farms are built in the desert, we're talking about
a precious resource already in short supply. "When push comes to shove, water could become
the real throttle on renewable [solar] energy," according to Michael Webber, professor of
mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Then there's the issue of what to do with solar panels that wear out. The panels contain
lead and other toxic chemicals that can't be removed without breaking up the entire
panel. Since it's far cheaper for solar manufacturers to just buy the raw materials than recycle
old panels, those old panels end up in landfills—or, as the New York Times discovered in a 2019
investigation, dumped in poor African nations.
Wind turbines may have an even worse disposal problem than solar panels. First, they are
gigantic—a single blade can be longer than a wing on a jumbo jet. Second, they are made
of fiberglass, which has to be cut by a diamond-studded saw to be carted away on giant trucks. And,
as with solar panels, the only thing to do is to bury them, toxic materials and all.
This is done, as you can imagine, in enormous pits, creating yet another landfill problem.
All this environmental degradation is happening on a relatively small scale right now because
we get less than ten percent of our electricity from wind and solar sources. If we really
were to embark on a wind and solar buildout of the kind environmentalists advocate, the
damage would be much, much greater.
Consider this: Today's energy system requires just a half a percent of the land in the US.
If we were to get all the energy we now use from wind and solar, at least 25% of all land
in the US would be required.
That's a lot of dead wildlife.
Doesn't sound very green, does it?
I'm Michael Schellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and author of Apocalypse
Never, for Prager University.