Wind farms get approval to kill Eagles for 30 years.

[NNadir]

http://news.yahoo.com/wind-power-us-extends-permit-eagle-deaths-145931345--finance.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration said Friday it will allow some companies to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty, an effort to spur development and investment in green energy while balancing its environmental consequences.

The change, requested by the wind energy industry, will provide legal protection for the lifespan of wind farms and other projects for which companies obtain a permit and make efforts to avoid killing the birds.

An investigation by The Associated Press earlier this year documented the illegal killing of eagles around wind farms, the Obama administration's reluctance to prosecute such cases and its willingness to help keep the scope of the eagle deaths secret. The White House has championed wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, as a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's energy plan.

Happily for the Eagles, most wind farms turn into to rusting piles of greasy heavy metal leaching junk before they make 30 years.



http://earth.usc.edu/~berkelha/?p=538

Don't worry, be happy! Like the destruction of the planetary atmosphere in service to this "wind will save us" fantasy, it won't affect you quite like it will affect your descendants, should you have any.

[Pryderi]

1. Yeah. Because we need more oil spills to kill a ton more not eagles. n/t

[NNadir]

4. As an intermittent and essentially useless power source, the wind industry...

...serves to entrench the dangerous fossil fuel industry.

Without access to dangerous natural gas and oil (diesel) back up, the wind industry would collapse in a New York second.

[cprise]

8. What a coincidence

Consumers are regarded by the nuclear industry as irritatingly intermittent and useless. The chances of them ever matching up with an increasing "BSload" are vanishingly small, despite the efforts of consumerism to make them perfect beings, dreaming of a 24/7 SAMS Club and cyborg hero existence from the age of 5.

Re: TFA, your pro-nuclear friends in the Obama admin know how to keep a company like Duke Energy happy (and this IS primarily about Duke and their disregard of conservation rules). I say let the conservationists have at them both; If the new rules are too lax, there needs to be an accounting.

If OTOH you think the system isn't up to the task of regulating according to the risks, then let nuclear decommissioning be the first priority for activists.

[longship]

2. Like coal plants and nuclear reactors don't kill things.

We just don't see the dead animals in the shadows of the other plants. The OP has a hyperbolic headline whose only intention is to twist the facts. Of course, there are probably not many studies about how many eagles killed by coal-fired plants. Not an easy study, no matter what the death toll.

My stand is that alternative energy solutions are better than burning fossil fuels because if climate change continues the way it is, dead eagles, and bats, and sparrows, etc. are the least we'll have to worry about.

Myself, I am for solar, if we can figure a cheap way to store the energy for nighttime. Not easy.

[NNadir]

5. Coal plants kill everything they touch, continuously and consistently.

I note that Germany - a big hawker of the wind fantasy - can't build coal plants fast enough.

They opened the first one they've opened in decades a few weeks back, and will add a total of 7 GW of coal capacity within the next year.

http://www.platts.com/latest-news/coal/london/analysis-german-coal-extends-dominance-in-power-26352497

Nuclear power plants are not harmless, nor must they be harmless to be vastly superior to everything else.

Consider this: More people will die from air pollution in the next 24 hours than nuclear energy has killed in 60 years of operations.

Neither the wind industry, nor the solar industry, nor the coal industry, nor the gas industry nor the oil industry will ever be as safe or as sustainable as the nuclear industry.

Were it not for public ignorance, nuclear energy could and would save far more than the 1.8 million lives that Jim Hansen calculates it saved in its history.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197

I recognize that Jim Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist has suddenly become unfashionable for telling the truth rather than people what they want to hear, but nevertheless he has a long history of not kissing up to nonsense.

[jpak]

11. Your famous Oyster Creek nuclear plant kills endangered sea turtles

and untold millions of marine organisms each day.

and your point is???

[NNadir]

12. Bull. In any case your German pals coal plants kill, um, people.

My point, however, to reiterate, is that the new German coal plants will be killing humans and many other species at least until 2075, adding to the death toll associated with the stupid wind fantasy of the anti-nukes.

The more than six million people who die each year from air pollution as described in the international broadly authored study of the global burden of disease from 1990-2010, published in Lancet 2012; 380: 2224–60, are probably worth a giggle or two to those who don't give a shit about humanity, and never have, but personally, like the world's greatest climate scientist, I consider these human deaths as unnecessary and the direct result of fear and ignorance, fatal fear and ignorance.

I don't know what they're smoking up there in Maine, where the elected Governor is applauding climate change on the grounds that it makes that it makes it easier for the residents of that polluting state to import even more oil and gas to replace the nuclear plant they shut in a festival of fear and ignorance, but like the rest of the shit they dump in their favorite dump, the planetary atmosphere, it is probably carcinogenic.

Have a nice day.

[kristopher]

14. Germany's new coal plants were started when they intended to extend the use of nuclear.

Merkels government extracted two concessions when committing resources to the Energy Transition - newer, more efficient coal plants and extensions of life of the nuclear fleet.

The coal plants did not replace the nuclear plants. They replaced, as planned by pronuclear conservative factions in the government, older less efficient coal plants.

Renewables and efficiency are replacing the nuclear plants.

[Gman]

3. Yup, we need more spills like the one BP dumped in the Gulf

[longship]

7. LATimes reports huge wind farm fuel spill, Santa Anna wiped out.

Couldn't resist. A little satire.

[Gman]

10. LOL!

[Laelth]

6. Wind power blows. Thanks for the post. n/t

-Laelth

[kristopher]

9. Oo, oo, oo! Can I play?

[NNadir]

13. Absolutely.

I never discourage children from playing, even when their fantasies are violent, not that I can applaud the puerile dangerous anti-nuke fantasy in Germany that lead to the construction of 7 new huge coal plants that will be killing people until 2075 at least..

When they, the playing children, graduate from wearing Halloween suits to trivialize the planet's enviornmental collapse, and burning dangerous fossil fuels to drive to nudist festivals in the Mountains, they of course, have nothing to do with the turkeys at the University for the Stupid, Greenpeace, but its not like there are very many of this type, who will ever grow up. Few mindless bourgeois brats ever do.



http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/naked-glacier-tunick-08182007/



Keep playing. The grow ups will try to save you in spite of yourself, although I doubt at this point, much will come of it.

Here, since you enjoy playing so much - not that I consider a picture of a plant that kills people whenever it is turned on all that much fun - is a picture of your two pals working together, the wind and coal industry together, as planned, as always will be, at the Vatenfall Jaenschwalde brown coal power station:



http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0716/The-dirty-coal-behind-Germany-s-clean-energy

Congratulations. You must be very, very, very, very, very proud:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

[kristopher]

15. You have a great deal of trouble with accuracy, don't you?

Posted with permission under Creative Commons license. Many supporting links embedded in original.

Nuclear Decline in Germany Not Compensated 100 Percent by Renewable

Jul 30 2013 Published by Karl-Friedrich Lenz under European and German energy law, Fossil Nukes, Nuclear energy

One of the recent pro-nuclear talking points is the fact that there is still coal burned in the German electricity sector. For example, this tweet by Steve Aplin, retweeted by the enemy of renewable energy Rod Adams:

Why is Germany burning more coal after closing nukes? Because coal = real electricity. Wind can’t provide it.

I am not familiar with the term “real electricity”. It must be something having meaning in the fantasy world of Steve Aplin and Rod Adams, but I don’t understand what that is supposed to mean.

Anyway, the tweet in question points to a recent article on development of electricity from coal in Germany at Bloomberg, titled “Merkel’s GreenShift Backfires as German Pollution Jumps“.

Pro-nuclear voices love it when Germany’s CO2 emissions go up since they can point to that as an argument for their desire to play with plutonium.

In contrast, I strongly dislike this development. Let’s look at the facts (not given at the necessary level of detail in that particular article). If you want to know about short term developments on the German electricity market, you need to look at the Fraunhofer reports.

?resize=570%2C263

From those we learn that lignite was up 2.0 TWh for the first six months of the year, and coal was up 4.0 TWh. In contrast gas was down 4.6 TWh and wind 2.4 TWh. And the export surplus remains high at about 11 TWh.

So we have a movement mostly from gas to coal, and partly from wind to coal, which amounts to about half of the export surplus.

The decline of nuclear energy as a consequence of shutting down some plants after the Fukushima accident was in the order of 40 TWh (from 140.6 TWh in 2010 to 99 TWh in 2012).

That’s one order of magnitude more than the increase in coal use.

Anyone claiming that coal is replacing nuclear in Germany either doesn’t know these numbers, or is lying deliberately.

In the real world, the 40 TWh decrease in nuclear was compensated (last year’s numbers) by a 32 TWh increase in renewable electricity and a 16.9 TWh drop in electricity consumption. (emphasis mine - k)

Since fossil fuel still has a high share in the German electricity market, it would have been only fair to expect that renewable would get only the part of the 40 TWh new market caused by the nuclear decline (that’s NUCLEAR DECLINE) that corresponds to their market share, or about 10 TWh.

The fact that they have punched way over their weight, getting around 80% of that new market, tells us something about renewable energy in Germany. And it’s not that they are losing to fossil fuel.

To go back to my headline, no, renewable has not compensated 100 percent for the nuclear decline in Germany. There was something left for energy efficiency.

There may have even been something left for fossil fuel. Around 2 TWh for the first half of this year, mostly caused by less wind. That’s less than half a percent of German production. Rounding error territory.

[NNadir]

16. Um, um, quick! What's the German words for Brown Coal and Hard Coal?

Braunkohle and sternkohle, respectively, no? Look at your graph.

Coal made up nearly 100% of the expensive, failed so called "renewable energy" scheme to deliver.

Nuclear infrastructure, (kernenergie) in the process destruction by appeals to fear and ignorance, even though - as is not the case with German coal - didn't cost the loss of a single German (or international), made up a small amount of the difference. It might have saved more lives about to be lost to coal, were it not for fear and ignorance.

Coal plants can't be turned on or operated without causing death, health problems, and the destruction of the environment.

If you're trying to convince anyone on this planet that the German policy is anything but a scheme to rely more and more on the form of fossil fuel energy responsible for the most deaths on the planet, your doing a pretty poor job, as your graph demonstrates, although one would need to be literate to read the graph.

Note that coal made up completely for gas.

There is not an environmentalist on the planet - and let's be clear that the defenders of the German disaster are anything but environmentalists - who thinks that coal is a better idea than dangerous natural gas, which is not to say that natural gas is a good idea.

My environmental outlook is that fossil fuels need to be phased out, as rapidly as is possible. This is very different than yours, which I read as being nothing more than a very weak effort to apologize for coal.

If I were I'd stick to hanging out with the little brat in the bear suit from Greenpeace hanging out in front of their diesel powered yacht, pictured in my post above.

Like I said, these people are not grown ups, but simply uneducated bourgeois brats running around crying "Look at me! Look at me!" while the planet, and millions of people on it, die, to some extent as a result of their silly efforts.

The more than 7 GW of coal plants coming on line in 2013 and 2014 are not designed to support the notion that the expensive, failed, "renewables will save us" scheme is anything but a fantasy, a DEADLY fantasy. Essentially these plants will be killing people until 2075, at minimum, maybe longer, unless the German people come to their collective senses and restore their nuclear infrastructure.

[kristopher]

17. Blah, blah, and ever more meaningless nnadir-blah....

If nuclear were actually a worthwhile way to procure energy, you wouldn't need to spend all of your time snorting and distorting. The lack of ability to clearly articulate the benefits of nuclear for someone so deeply in love with the technology means either one or both of you lack the qualifications for the job at hand.

...From those we learn that lignite was up 2.0 TWh for the first six months of the year, and coal was up 4.0 TWh. In contrast gas was down 4.6 TWh and wind 2.4 TWh. And the export surplus remains high at about 11 TWh.

So we have a movement mostly from gas to coal, and partly from wind to coal, which amounts to about half of the export surplus.

The decline of nuclear energy as a consequence of shutting down some plants after the Fukushima accident was in the order of 40 TWh (from 140.6 TWh in 2010 to 99 TWh in 2012).

That’s one order of magnitude more than the increase in coal use.

Anyone claiming that coal is replacing nuclear in Germany either doesn’t know these numbers, or is lying deliberately.

In the real world, the 40 TWh decrease in nuclear was compensated (last year’s numbers) by a 32 TWh increase in renewable electricity and a 16.9 TWh drop in electricity consumption.

Poor little feller is just so confused...