Editor:
Remember Mr. Winkler’s 2015 admonition to an inspired group of high-school students planning to fly to the Paris Climate Conference? Instead of praising them for their eagerness to learn, and concern for the future of their generation and the rest of the planet, he scolded them for the carbon expenditure of the flight!
Well, the project he’s pushing now (“Why I Support Terra-Gen’s Wind Project,” June 27) has a huge carbon footprint and it doesn’t decrease carbon emissions one iota, according to the draft environmental impact report itself. It just makes electricity. Nothing about it says anything about cutting carbon emissions. Furthermore, the forest destruction envisioned therein impacts the greatest carbon sequestration entity on earth: according to the National Academy of Sciences, preservation of forests can achieve 37 percent of the world climate target of less than 2 degrees C temperature increase.
Forests last way longer than the 30-year lifetime of wind-generators. As well as offering enhancement of climate change resilience, forest have additional benefits of water filtration, flood buffering, improving soil health, biodiversity and wildlife habitat.
Mr. Winkler and Terra-Gen spokesperson Natalynne DeLapp have no expectation that Humboldt County can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions independently. They must hire an outside entrepreneur who will invest the profits from this Humboldt adventure in its fossil fuels portfolio.
This is passive and cynical, and a lamentable fixation on reaching Redwood Coast Energy Authority’s own Comprehensive Action Plan for Energy goals.
It’s tunnel vision.
Ellen Taylor, Petrolia
Related Stories
This article appears in ‘Absolutely Preventable’.
Winkler needs to do his homework, or visit some of the decommissioned wind farms littering the deserts.
However, consuming one-ton of jet fuel per person (round trip) to attend a climate conference for a few days, (the same fuel used annually by an average U.S commuter), illustrates a tragic failure of education…and imagination.
Simply put, every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated from a wind farm connected to the Humboldt area grid will reduce the generation of roughly the same amount of electricity from the gas-fired PG&E Humboldt Bay Generating Station at King Salmon because the Humboldt grid is largely a closed system with little capacity to import (or export) power to or from outside of Humboldt.
Wind turbines in southern Humboldt County, or offshore of Humboldt, will absolutely reduce the carbon footprint of Humboldt in a substantial and direct way.
See:
The Best Trees To Plant For Global Warming Have Three Blades & Generate Electricity
July 27th, 2019 by Michael Barnard, Green Technica
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/27/the-b…