The Dirty Secret of Wind Energy

 Daniel Greefield has a stinging article at Sultan Knish entitled Wind Turbines Are Destroying The Planet. Greenfield points out that while wind turbins don't provide the engery advertised, they destroy the environment in innumerable ways. First, wind turbines require huge amounts of rare earths metals that have sickened entire villages. But just as bad, the manfacturing of wind turbines is denuding the Amazon rainforest for Balsa wood. Didn't environmentalists used to say that the Amazon was the lungs of the World? What do they say now?

Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors. A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment. One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages". "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed."

A recent Associated Press story about rare earth mining operations in Burma told of a world where "birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown."

One wonders where the Sierra Club is in all this. If this happend in the United States, they would be screaming about it from the roof tops, and every news cast would show graphic pictures of the destruction. But it is okay if it is in China, while we reap the supposed "benefit" of these peoples lives? Understand that someone in the United States is profiting...handsomely...from the deaths of these Chinese and Burmese people.

Meanwhile, the Chinese manufacturers of wind turbines use huges amounts of Balsa wood for turbine blades, which requres cutting down te Amazon rainforest.

Balsa wood is light, airy and popular for everything from model airplanes to planes. The obsession with green energy has created a massive demand for balsa wood to use in wind turbines. While a story from 2020 about how 14 million trees had been cut down in Scotland to make way for wind farms recently went viral, far more trees are cut down to make turbines.

Billions of trees.

One wind turbine blade can require as much as 5,300 cubic feet of balsa wood.

The price of balsa wood shot up, driven by demand from Communist China. While the Chinese have tried to grow their own balsa with limited success, they have turned to deforesting the Amazon. The Amazon, the world’s largest carbon sink, is being destroyed to reduce carbon.

Again, where is the outrage. Were is the pearl clutching on the Left. These are poor, brown people by the Left's own definition being exploited for the profit of white straight males. Why is nobody chaining themselves to balsa wood trees to save the Amazon.

Green eco-business and its allied leftist politicians remain obsessed with carbon, but the Amazon rainforests have been described as the “lungs” of the planet. And environmentalists themselves argue that the Amazon is a "carbon storage sink". Destroying the Amazon to build wind turbines to reduce carbon would wreck the planetary ecosystem leading to the natural disasters that green energy proponents claim that they want to stop.

If astroturf environmental activists really wanted to save the planet, they would start chaining themselves to wind turbines, instead of vandalizing classical museum paintings.

I hope gentle readers will read the whole article, and use what Greenfield provides as a way to begin to counter the push for "greem energy," and windmills in particular.