Arguing Against Renewables is like ...

... arguing for a hole in your head when you don't believe in trepanation. Check it out:



Ruining the "view"? Why do we vote for new coal-fired electrical plants - how does doing so enhance one's view?

It only enhances the view because we put the site on unwanted or cheap land, and then fence it off so you can't get too close to actually see how ugly the giant, smoke-billowing towers wreak havoc on you and yours. Oh, and if you are no longer able to see the horizon due to smog and such, because your precious cheap/convenient electricity has pumped too much particulate matter into the atmosphere, how will that haze impact your view, you short-sighted, greedy, selfish, pathetic excuses for a sentient being?

There's only one quasi-logical argument against wind power: migratory birds.

If your argument is that "big" wind is evil because it disrupts migratory birds and/or kills them, what do you think the particulate matter from a coal-fired generator does to their lungs if it can cause asthma and cancer in humans? Isn't a long, drawn-out death from illness worse than a spontaneous, near-instant death? Nature is red in tooth and claw - I recently watched 2 larger birds force a smaller bird into a pond, from which the smaller bird could not get out b/c his feathers got wet and it could not fly. It kept bobbing up and down, trying to get to the edge, but it drowned before it could get there. It took something like two minutes to play out, and it was gut-wrenching to watch. The bird that was forced into the water had recently flown into a glass window of a nearby buiding - it was obviously no threat to the 2 larger birds and in no shape to defend itself properly, but that's just survival of the fittest, isn't it? I guess how you view it depends on whether you believe in social darwinism or you find it ironic that it takes some of mankind's greatest intellectual capacity to understand the most brutal, possibly immutable, laws of the natural world.

Or you could view birds as deserving of the exact same rights as people, in which case do you also think that birds, if they were endowed en masse positions of relative power and a sentience at (or above) our level, would not hesitate to kill a few humans if it meant they could all have labor-free nests or access to practically inexhaustable supplies of food?