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A Line in the Green Sand
Last week the government published a shortlist of five schemes for harnessing the tidal power of the river Severn, to provide renewable electricity. It is no secret which is favoured in Whitehall - the biggest one, as ever: a 10-mile mega-barrage that would cost £14bn, and could generate 5% of Britain's power.
This may sound the kind of thing environmentalists ought to be unanimously keen on. Yet many say that the damage done by this mammoth piece of technology - destroying mudflats and bird habitats, and weakening the famous tidal wave known as the Severn bore - would outweigh the benefits. A battle is being joined over the fate of Britain's longest river, and it is highlighting an uncomfortable truth which environmentalists don't much like dwelling on: some green technologies can have distinctly un-green impacts.
Britain is a small, overcrowded and overdeveloped country in which wild places are at a premium. On moors and glens, on tidal rivers and empty beaches, humanity's impact can be escaped, at least for a time. A mountain is an example of what the American poet Robinson Jeffers called "the transhuman magnificence": a place that rises above the detritus of civilisation, where we may go to experience the reality of nature and the reality of ourselves. I have had such experiences on mountains, and they helped lead me to become an environmentalist.
When I climb a mountain, then, and find that the detritus of civilisation has followed me, in the form of giant wind turbines, my reaction is not to jump for joy because it is zero-carbon detritus. My reaction is to wonder how anyone could miss the point so spectacularly. And when I hear other environmentalists responding to my concerns with aggressive dismissal - particularly if they have never visited the mountain in question - I get really quite depressed.
Fifteen or so years ago, as an excitable young road protester, I tried to prevent the destruction of beautiful places. To me, building a motorway through ancient downland, or a bypass through a watermeadow, was a desecration. To me today, a windfarm on a mountain is a similar desecration. A tidal barrage that turns a great river into a glorified mill stream is a desecration. Carpeting the Sahara with giant solar panels would be a desecration. The motivation may be different, but the destruction of the wild and the wonderful is the same.
It is de rigueur among greens to respond to such heresy by explaining that we have less than 100 months to get to grips with global warming; a few turbines on the odd hillside is a small price for preventing the apocalypse that would result from our failure.
Well, maybe. But while renewable energy is a good thing in principle, if schemes end up, like their conventional forbears, as centralised mega-projects that override local feeling and destroy wild landscapes, then they become precisely the kind of projects that people like me cut their teeth trying to stop.
If you don't understand what makes Helvellyn awe-inspiring, or the Severn bore magnificent, or the Lewis peat moors evocative, in some deep - and possibly inexplicable - sense, then you will have no idea what I'm talking about. These places will seem not to be places at all, but "resources", ripe for exploitation; and your response to them will be about not breathing space or spiritual nourishment, but kilowatt hours and energy security.
Environmentalism is surely inspired by a sense of wonder at the richness of the natural world. Without that inspiration, it becomes the kind of bleached, technocratic, office-bound variety so common today, which pushes for the taming of rivers, mountains and wildlands in the name of making the ever-expanding human economy more "sustainable". Desperate to seem grown up, serious and economically literate, many greens seem to have become terrified of talking about the things that motivated them in the first place. Beauty. Wildness. A connection to the non-human, the remote, the untamed.
Human impact on the world is now so enormous that the civilisation we have built is feeling the shudders. If the world's governments, with the collusion of some environmentalists, want to pretend that the need to question that civilisation's values can be staved off with wave machines and wind turbines, it is up to them. But we should understand that, whether we dig up coal or carpet the wildlands with barrages and turbines, we are making a statement: this is our world, and we will exploit every inch of it. We want - no, need - more energy for our TVs, cars and planes. It is our right. There is no alternative.
There is only one place this attitude can lead: to a collision between civilisation and the biosphere. I don't see any number of barrages doing much to prevent that. And I would put a lot of money on the winner.
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9 Comments so far
Show AllCarpet the Sahara with solar panels? Give me a break. One hundred square miles in the Nevada desert would supply all the electrical needs in the USA. After a recent viewing of parts of the Libyan desert I think solar panels would be an improvement. Of course aesthetics and enviornment must be considered in using renewable energy. In fossil fuels and uranium there is Always unavoidably enviornmental damage.
Perhaps the writer is lobbying against the poor placement of renewable generators but his tone is to dismiss the whole technology. One may remove Turbines alot easier than Coal or Nuclear plants!
I and most enviornmentaly conscience consumers agree that green power should be decentralized and aesthetically placed.
"One hundred square miles in the Nevada desert would supply all the electrical needs in the USA"
Given that US summer demand for electricity is about 800 GW, and that 1 sq ft of solar panel generates about 10 W, I calculate that you will need 3,000 sq miles of solar panels (about 60 mile x 60 mile area). And this will only work in the middle of the day. I also calculate that we will need a battery that measures 1 cubic mile distributed across the country to sustain us through the dark hours. More battery will be required for extended cloudy periods.
A wind farm that covers all Indian Nation land in South Dakota could meet US electrical needs. The Indians are looking at this proposal very seriously, as it is a bigger cash cow for them than casinos.
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in their moccasins - Native American proverb.
WTF 2:31 ------ I am glad you all are paying attention, I stand corrected on size. Zman the Nevada example was just that.
Forget batteries people have been storing energy through electrolysis for a couple of decades and an MIT researcher this year developed a catylist to make it more efficient.
Also for now power can be generated when the sun is shining(peak demand) or wind blowing almost always some places and the old sources take up the slack when neccessary.
What it will look like is the green less loss lines will be necessary for transmitting power to areas where it still isn't feasible to produce power locally(sorry). But there should be a removal of less efficient old technolgy lines for a zero net increase in lines. New Mexico has two of these second generation( possibly able to transmit DC power) lines on the drawing board.
Every house and possibly every apartment building should be able to generate its own power on site.
And of course all the newest tecnologies should be implemented where it is feasible and there are many possibilities.
Very well said. You summed up my feelings on the article quite perfectly.
The idea for placing solar panels in the Sahara is to provide Europe with that power, not America..
Did you get the one hundred square mile measurement from Al Gore's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Comittee on CSPAN about a week ago? I'm pretty sure he said an area 100 miles by 100 miles, which would be 10,000 square miles, could power the whole U.S. in an area like Arizona, and he was talking about the new type of solar power concentrated by mirrors. That is still very impressive.
As for carbon neutral energy having bad environmental consquences, it seems obvious it wouldn't be "green" then, and I won't be satisfied until it is genuinely green and sustainable. It will take more work to figure out something that won't kill the planet either coming or going. Break up the solar array into 10,000 small plants, or a million rooftop generators, or 10 million car roof tops. Let's send some of that stimulus money to some smart engineers.
There is a missing piece from the issue here considered. Wind turbines athwart our mountains and plains and solar arrays in far off deserts require armies of huge marching metal towers with crackling transmission lines criss crossing the wilderness and rural lands from coast to coast. Such plans are already being laid on every continent. Behind them is the lust for profit, once again. Remember the war cry of Vietnam "We had to destroy the village in order to save it?" Now do we need to destroy the eco-system in order to save it? Will we be watching old nature program archives on our 'green energy' fed televisions to remind us of the beautiful sight of unspoiled horizons or the unsullied habitat of animal and plant or pristine geologic wonders no longer present? Let us consider an alternative to big-time corporate 'green washed' energy strategies whose ultimate aim is after all about money and control of the source, missing the more fundamental human need for aesthetic beauty and environment healing protection of remaining species of the globe. This war on nature is a war on humanity itself--the deepest core and heart of us, the better nature we must revive to truly save the earth. There are better ways. Local generation at closest point of use, within the communities served is one answer. Each tree in the forest, indeed every plant upon the face of the earth is a natural solar energy collector. I see no wires strung between the pines or tangling the hillsides of sage and chapparel, no transmission system but the rays of the sun suffused through the sky. Might we be clever enough to develop our own elegant system, inspired by such original genius? A new field of science and technology is emerging now called 'Biomimicry,' showing us how to replicate what nature has already devised. Let us take up this inspiring challenge and be done with old robber baron industrial age thinking. We have wounded the earth and our own spirit enough--have we not? The war is over if we want it . . .
This debate is going on long and loud here in West Virginia, and I must ask Mr Kingsnorth the same question I ask those who wring their hands at the suggestion that the mountain ridges on the eastern part of this state--the only place suitable in the region--be dotted with big wind farms. Namely, How are you powering YOUR house? Here, usually, it's with coal, which produces 99% of the power in WV. Much of this coal comes from mountaintop removal mining--I actually got a message from one person concerned about what the proposed Coal River Mountain Wind Farm would do to the habitat up there--when the proposal is a desperate attempt to save the mountaintop from being literally blown up and dumped into the valleys! Kingsnorth is apparently opposed to ALL forms of electricity production except solar panels on one's own house, or a little windmill in one's own backyard. This seems highly unrealistic to me, and if his answer to my question is, "I get my power from the local company, which is burning fossil fuels or using a reactor to generate it (or I don't know how they generate it)"--then I feel free to dismiss these arguments with contempt. If he does have solar panels or his own windmill, then at least he isn't a hypocrite. But it's questionable whether we can produce enough power for domestic and commercial and industrial use with only distributed power.
On the other hand, we will end up doing too much damage if we don't recognize a few salient points left out of this piece. One was mentioned by a previous commenter: that high-voltage transmission lines must be used if you think you're going to have one huge solar farm (more likely solar thermal than photovoltaic, perhaps) in the Nevada desert, or a wind farm in the Dakotas, supplying power for half the country. These lines do environmental damage of their own, they create a big fight with the landowners, AND they lose a certain percentage of the power. Thus it has been argued that it would be just as cheap to produce wind power in Ohio for Ohio, than to ship it in from the better sources out on the plains, but lose the efficiency gained by the time the power arrives in Ohio.
Secondly, no plan is going to work without our facing up to the need to stop wasting so much power. This is likely true even in Great Britain. Here in the US, we waste TWICE the electricity to do the same job, and it's high time we changed that. I'm talking about various technical improvements in efficiency, but also a change in behaviors such as the idea that we are entitled to a 73 degree house in January and don't want to bother turning off devices we're not using, etc.
Thirdly, we will not be able to live as we have been living with dwindling oil supplies and a rising population. Sooner or later we must face the ugly task of deciding how we can cooperatively and fairly reduce our numbers--sooner would be much better than later.
Too many damned people. Institute a program to pay anyone - anyone at all - $500 if they will be sterilized.
http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray
http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms