“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”

Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.

And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever.…

Ed. Note: The Great Lakes “Icebreaker” project, with $13 million of DOE/taxpayer money wasted, is a boondoggle waiting to end. Yet the Chicago Tribune tries to gin up hope for an expanded project to prop up the Net Zero narrative. Sherri Lange of North American Platform Against Wind Power and Great Lakes Wind Truth responds in her letter-to-the-editor below.

Dear Editor

I read the piece by Nora Schoenberg, Illinois may be up to bat next to build first Great Lakes wind farm after Cleveland drops project (Chicago Tribune), with interest.

We respectfully point out that the Icebreaker failed for numerous reasons, not all financial, not all regulatory.

The mass outpouring of objections, literally from the entire globe, it is certain had some impact on the OPSB (Ohio Power Siting Board), and in 2014, then Chair Todd Snitchler agreed with many objectors, showed that the bench line for safe harbor for the project had not been achieved.…

Thank you very much for your interest in the English translation of my new book ‘Down Wind’. It mainly describes the Dutch situation, but there are multiple examples reflecting situations in the United States and throughout Europe. Some description follows.

“Large numbers of (sea) birds, bats and insects are already being killed by the spinning rotor blades. Horizon pollution, infrasound and drop-shadow are driving more and more people to despair, and there seems to be no end in sight.”

Down Wind: The impact of large-scale energy production using wind turbines

In the summer of 2023, it became evident that the wind power industry was facing serious challenges. Sweden’s Vattenfall was denied permission by its own government for a wind farm on Sweden’s west coast. Why? “Negative impacts on the environment.” Vattenfall also cancelled the construction of a new offshore wind farm on England’s North Sea coast due to ‘cost’.

“Inner organs are sensitive for sound and vibration. The current state of knowledge on mechano-transduction together with known oscillatory and oxidative stress effects, point in the direction of our hypothesis and should be reason for urgent precautionary actions and further research.”

It is a very technical subject–but certainly one for deep ecologists that see humankind being a cancer to optimal, fragile Nature. Industrial wind turbines, huge and disruptive in the open space, are certainly man-made and subject to the guilty-until-proven-innocent doctrine of the “precautionary principle.”

Infrasound and low-frequency noise (ILFN) is an important issue that wind apologists do not want to discuss or debate. MasterResource posts by Stephen Cooper and others over many years have made a case that “what you cannot hear can hurt you.” As one critic put it:

More than just audible sound, grinding, whomping, blade pass whooshes, an ever-present hum, industrial wind turbines have a silent, below audible impact.