… Continue Reading“Next to aesthetic impact, no aspect of wind energy creates more alarm or more debate than noise…. Wind turbines are not silent. They are audible. All wind turbines create unwanted sound, that is, noise. Some do so to a greater degree than others. And the sounds they produce—the swish of blades through the air, the whir of gears inside the transmission, and the hum of the generator—are typically foreign to rural settings where wind turbines are the most often used.”
– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 371.
“Why is sensitisation to noise and vibration important? From a public health perspective, sensitisation of individuals to noise will predictably lead to worsening individual health outcomes, especially via the well-known disease pathways associated with chronic stress, and chronic sleep deprivation.”
“We build into our automobiles more power and greater gas consumption than we need. We use the press and radio to push the sales of more cars. We drive them hundreds of millions of miles a year in pursuit of futility.”
“With the exhaustion of our own oil wells in sight … much of our resource capital has been used up, but we still have our yacht, our stable of horses….”
– William Vogt. Road to Survival (New York: William Sloane, 1948), p. 68.
MasterResource documents the historical record behind the grand energy debate from the vantage points of business, economics, political economy, and history. What was said? When? Why? And to what effect?
One aspect of the debate has been the difference between natural market efficiency/conservation versus its political offshoot, conservationism, defined as the belief that less usage is per se a moral good or economic necessity.…
Continue Reading“… environmentalists, politicians, regulators and courts have united to block tree thinning, brush removal and harvesting of dead and dying trees. The resulting conditions are perfect for devastating wildfires, which denude hillsides and forest habitats, leaving barren soils that cannot absorb the heavy rains that frequently follow the fires – leading to equally devastating mudslides.”
Abnormal, explainable weather conditions set the stage for 2017’s intense, highly destructive wildfires in California. But so did the state’s public-policy choice of au natural, where the absence of tree thinning, brush removal, and harvesting of dead and dying trees super-fueled the destruction.
But this is not the story being told by California political establishment. To them, the wine-country fires of October and the Thomas Fire in December were the result of global fossil-fuel burning and land-use changes, each increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) that increased temperatures and produced more severe droughts.…
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