Tag Archives: climate change





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rolling coal diesel 1a





peak oil graphs 2
oil rigs sunset decline peak oil


Windschmerz: The Wind Energy Landscape Holocaust


At least spare the mountains, you soulless utilitarians! Ruined peaks in Japan, California, Hawaii & Austria show a small fraction of the desecration this fickle power source requires.

Industrial wind turbines are arguably the most misguided, bloated technology ever invented. Instead of saving the planet, utilitarian zombies are sTaving it with carbon-dependent sprawl, dishonest slogans and misleading capacity data. Wind energy’s acreage requirements dwarf equivalent output from modern nuclear & natural gas power plants (many wind factories would sputter without gas backup). Big Wind is a prime example of corporate greenwashing in plain sight. Physics-defying claims for “100% Renewable Energy” have made wind energy “too big to fail” while it keeps getting physically bigger. Its impacts on scenery and wildlife have irreversibly corrupted the definition of environmentalism and its supporters are in too deep to admit their mistakes.

Windschmerz, a newly coined word*, describes the sinking feeling of witnessing a huge industrial plague being spun as good for the environment despite its obvious negative impacts. A good companion word is klugly (kludgy + ugly). And disenchanted Germans compare turbine towers to unsightly asparagus, calling them Verspargelung der Landschaft.

Instead of constraining the human footprint with serious conservation, rooftop solar and fast-tracked nuclear (e.g. safer molten salt reactors), people decided to turn rural lands into industrial parks. If this urban mega-sprawl is the new environmentalism, nature has a slim chance of remaining intact anywhere the wind blows and transmission lines are feasible.

Wind turbines are so absurdly large that one can only view them with profound disappointment or concoct stories about their “beauty” to distract from the obvious blight. Mainstream environmental groups have done exactly that, along with sneaky obfuscation of noise and wildlife threats. Whatever happened to “small is beautiful” in environmental circles? The Sierra Club, NRDC, The Union of “Concerned” Scientists, and even Audubon have sold out to platitudes like “wind is a vital part of our energy mix” (despite its futility as a fossil fuel replacement) and “they can be carefully sited” (despite growing protests as unsullied views run out). Something is rotten in Windmark when self-proclaimed environmentalists chide people for lamenting the replacement of natural horizons with spiky machines.

The dictionary needs another new word: windvironmentalist (Noun: A sellout/shill for Big Wind companies, or naive youth who think 500-foot machines are only the size of Tinkertoys.)

Even though it’s the environmental equivalent of trying to prevent arson with vandalism, wind power has a momentum that’s hard to control because an Environmental-Industrial Complex has grown around it, propped up with slick cover stories. When thousands or millions of jobs depend on massive construction projects, moral objectivity gets lost in the stampede. Anything green about this hulking enterprise has been a farce since the 1990s. A whole government/industry PR machine is dedicated to pretending these giants are midgets.

Independent climate activists like Greta Thunberg are sending mixed messages on this issue. She sailed across the Atlantic as an apparent symbol of wind power, yet implores governments to “do something” as they obliterate nature with that very thing. She’s at least one of the few questioning “green growth” but it’s hard to find specifics.

Windschmerz is a variant of the German word weltschmerz (world pain or sadness) focused on a specific technology that’s destroying nature while claiming to save the planet. Germany has been a test-case for this misguided form of progress with its Energiewende mandate. They went all the way with their landscape holocaust, driven by a zeal reminiscent of an earlier one. Germany’s scenic legacy has effectively been exterminated, especially in northern regions. Just as with earlier extremism, they mostly sat by and let it happen. They’ve built over 30,000 wind turbines (density equivalent of 826,000 in America) with little net CO2-reduction, due to additional carbon sources needed to back up wind, and social factors like the Jevons paradox. Germany serves as a scale model (or omen) for energy sprawl nightmares like the Green New Deal.

Germany Energiewende wind power landscape holocaust
This map is merely from 2011 and it resembles a viral plague. Some wise locals warned of its futility decades go but legendary German persistence & insanity won out.

Despite getting a quarter of their electricity from nuclear power at one point, Germany plans to close all their nuclear plants by 2022, spurred in part by overreaction to the Fukushima tsunami event. This seems insane, since Germany hasn’t had major accidents, and newer technologies like molten salt can make nuclear far safer. By shuttering nuclear capacity, Germany not only dooms its landscape with more “clean energy” blight, it must safely dispose of nuclear waste away from temporary power station sites. It makes no economic sense to do this while trying to reduce carbon, since wind and solar will always need backup. One gets the impression that German governance will always be driven by strange emotions, well-meaning and otherwise.


wind turbines cellular tower metaphor tree of utah


The existence of eagle take permits shows that these “100% Renewables” icons are sanctioned to kill, despite industry attempts to deny the problem. Researchers are trying to trick eagles with sounds (on top of existing noise) to help them avoid wind turbines, but they ought to question the very existence of flyway gauntlets. Wind factories kill scenery along with wildlife and have been futile at reducing CO2. Their biggest pragmatic function is a construction industry gravy train. Big Wind claims that mitigation efforts will eventually work but the very premise of keeping birds and bats out of vast areas is implausible. The very existence of huge machines in flyways can discourage birds from using some routes, but that’s a Faustian benefit! Wind turbines are intruders, period. You have to either stop building them or accept that further carnage is inevitable and drop the “green” lie.

GE wind turbines in desert

There are several ways people create unnatural landscapes:

  • Removing plant cover with logging, farmland plowing, etc.
  • Building structures for cities, factories and energy production.


Here are structures that environmentalists have routinely protested:

  • BILLBOARDS (nowhere near the scale of industrial wind turbines)
  • HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS (aka urban sprawl)
  • TRANSMISSION LINES and TOWERS (commonly called PYLONS in Europe)
  • MOUNTAINTOP MINING (wind turbines just carve up mountains differently)
ski resort vs wind turbines 1c
smokestacks look like wind turbines minus blades

Why are industrial wind turbines allowed to break so many old rules respecting nature? The worst wind pimps display no humility about their goals. They just want to build, build and build some more, like other rapacious enterprises. History is repeating itself in the context of petroleum replacing whale oil (literally saving the whales) while wind power now tries to replace oil by killing scenery, trees, birds, bats & insects. It’s a full-circle techno-fix blunder.


wind turbines with other industrial projects 1
mountaintop removal wind project in BC

The 2018 Kilauea eruption generated publicity for “damaging” Hawaii even though it’s a natural force. Much more attention should be paid to relentless man-made destruction of tropical landscapes. The image below shows Maui’s Kaheawa Wind Power project occupying a significant piece of the island, with the smaller Auwahi project to the south (yellow ovals). The Kahuku project on Oahu was initially more ambitious but ran into problems, including a battery storage fire. Later, proposed 650-foot wind turbines in the same area prompted outcries over bat kills and further losses of scenery. Wind power sprawl on small land masses makes a clear case for their limits. The Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea is a similar case of construction overshoot, protested by those who still respect nature’s integrity. Another island in the crosshairs of Big Wind is Robbins Island, north of Tasmania. As usual, scenery and birds are under threat, and the project is opposed by people like former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, who successfully fought a dam on Tasmania’s Gordon River. The similarities between damming water and damming air should be evident but the latter gets preferential treatment now.

wind energy projects, Maui, Hawaii

Compounding the bleakness of this hypocritical sprawl, a sizable number of wind energy opponents are global warming deniers who think wind turbines were invented expressly to fight climate change and must be part of a Green/NWO cabal to infringe on their property rights. Equally thickheaded people might claim cancer is a hoax due to its association with unpleasant/ineffective chemotherapy. Donald Trump (environmental idiot savant on wind power) is a famous critic. Trump’s claim that wind turbines cause cancer was a gift to the industry, but they are a cancerous growth on the landscape. The “unbiased” FactCheck.org claimed “Trump Again Overblows Risks of Wind Power” but they lied about noise, birds and low-wind days vs. grid stability. UK writer James Delingpole is another example of someone who laments one type of environmental harm but ignores another. A promising book by an “ecologist,” called “The Wind Farm Scam” is tainted by climate denial and it’s common in other books like “Paradise Destroyed…” These people make reasonable points about the economic & environmental hypocrisy of wind sprawl, yet foolishly question the existence of gaseous atmosphere sprawl. Some otherwise clever sites like StopTheseThings are strewn with climate “skepticism” and get blacklisted on sites like SourceWatch as fossil fuel shills. Some critics, like Joanne Nova, market themselves as former “believers” in AGW, but have ditched the scientific method for conspiracist ideation. A similar anti-wind blogger seemed to flip-flop on whether AGW was real (before, after) with the common rural angle that people should do what they please until an obvious local offense occurs. Both sides of this debate try to vilify opponents instead of tackling intrinsic flaws in growth-based capitalism.



The next time you look at a horizon full of mutant pinwheels and windschmerz hits you, just let it happen. Then get angry and join the fight to stop them. We need more conscientious objectors to the industrial war on nature, beyond fossil fuels. It’s too late to help in many regions but some famous environmentalists have called for sanity. Germany has seen major resistance due to its high turbine density and VernunftKraft (translated) is one of the better known sites. Here are links to many other groups trying to do something locally and nationally. Hopefully, a few mainstream environmental groups will wise-up before these things metastasize. Small modular nuclear reactors could be the best hope for an alternative if the public can get over old fears.


cenobites pinhead planet of wind turbines


Blight for Naught: Wind Turbines and the Rationalized Desecration of Nature


Laurel Mountain wind and battery storage
wind turbines red lights at night (animation 1)





  5. We can carefully site wind turbines to minimize their impact.” Terms like “careful siting,” “proper siting” and “responsible siting” are farcical on a finite planet with finite zones of adequate wind and limited open space within those zones. In wind power’s 1970s infancy there were few protests because people saw it as a limited-scale experiment, but the monster escaped its cage and there are ever-fewer places left to build them after every new installation. In 2007, before the U.S. wind industry exploded, the National Academies Press published a detailed analysis of all the problems discussed here. Wind turbines back then were smaller in size & scope but it was clear that they were an “invasive species.” Now, too much land is already developed and wind power just adds to existing blight. Wind energy advocates think their giant machines can’t be ugly due to a righteous anti-carbon message but landscape blight didn’t vanish as an issue when global warming took center stage. Turbine apologists say that smokestacks are ugly but wind towers just add blades to the same general structure. The industry talks of making towers even bigger to work in lower wind areas, and concrete may become a means to that end, with a more smokestack-like appearance. Will they keep calling them beautiful? Some wind drones do admit that turbines blight landscapes, and they think offshore wind factories are the answer but it’s not cost effective to install them at distances where they’re invisible from shore. Many people see an unbroken ocean horizon as a basic right. Where else can you look to “infinity” without disruption? Ocean-based turbines also tend to be the largest models and harder to hide. See calculators for visibility at a distance, which the industry probably views as burdensome.
  6. Wind turbines occupy relatively little acreage.” Popular influencer Neil deGrasse Tyson repeated this deception in the 2014 Cosmos remake, along with the fable of “100% renewable energy.” He perpetuated the myth of wind tower-bases as the only intrusions among vast arrays of preternaturally large machines, like only noticing the bottom floors of skyscrapers. It’s the same rationalization the GOP uses for ANWR oil drilling, citing “only 2,000” affected acres that would actually sprawl over 1.5 million acres. A direct parallel is Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, which claims to need only about 2,000 acres of a 320,000-acre ranch but would actually sprawl over 229,000 acres (see map) and require hypocritical eagle-take permits. Most environmental groups understand the ANWR ruse, so who are they kidding? See the NRDC ANWR land-grab map vs. their wind energy platitudes. The Union of Concerned Scientists also tows that line, apparently unconcerned with scenery. Any industrial complex has a footprint of its total encompassed acreage, including access roads. The whole area becomes aesthetically tainted and cannot be classified as natural anymore. The greater separation of wind towers as heights increase just widens the sprawl zone. The industry also pretends home values aren’t affected when turbines are in the viewshed. A number of people have simply moved away, as they might with any lousy, permanent neighbor. Such large machines are difficult to remove for legal and financial reasons, even when decommissioned, e.g. Falmouth, MA. Those who claim turbines can be a bridge technology, later dismantled, are not facing facts. Their roads and cement bases may remain for centuries and energy put into building them is wasted now.
  8. Cats, cars and windows kill more birds than wind turbines.” People who parrot that excuse show the same glibness toward life as they do scenery. Also, cars or store windows never claimed to be saving the world. More birds will obviously die as more turbines are built on this finite planet, so the “X kills more than Y” diversion becomes less true with every wind-sword placed in a flyway. There are no house-cats in many areas where wind turbines are installed, and the species of birds are often different, e.g. large raptors that rarely succumb to other animals. Birds tend to be mentioned first in mortality discussions but the plight of bats is worse. Read these articles. Bats can’t escape wind turbine blades via sonar and are actually drawn to them. Even when they avoid the blades, they die from pressure shocks as they pass by, and few other machines can duplicate that effect. Insects are also dying in great numbers, which affects food chains from the bottom up. Why would any “green” technology be causing death on a regular basis? A job description for a fatality monitoring technician near Minot, SD is frank about the problem. Even with growing evidence that wind turbines function as apex predators, the rationale is that AGW could eventually kill more wildlife, stacked on the assumption that wind energy will stop AGW, so let’s keep building more; a Faustian bargain at best. Given human greed, the most likely outcome is a warmer and uglier planet with more dead wildlife.
88.4m turbine blade denmark
offshore wind turbines 1
wind energy propaganda images 1

Below is an example of wind industry propaganda and arrogance from wind-energy-the-facts.org, which echoes awea.org. The .org domain is also a ruse since wind power is clearly commercial.




Stop calling this growing blight progress.
Globally, there were over 350,000 of these eyesores as of 2019 and some wind zealots want to see up to 3.8 million. They’re far more interested in megawatts than rural scenery.

Propaganda and denial sites dismiss wind power’s downsides with “careful siting” lies and implausible schemes to discourage birds & bats from entering expanding gauntlets. They won’t explain why they find landscapes non-integral to the environment, except to insist that AGW dwarfs other concerns per feeble evidence that wind turbines can stop it. Here are random samples of attitudinal greenness:

  • awea.org (money clearly motivates them, just like their parent fossil fuel business)
  • wind-works.org (wind advocate since the 70s, pretends the scale hasn’t grown ugly)
  • windustry.org (lists the downsides but gives them little weight; common shill tactic)
  • eon.com (“Many people delight in the sight of wind turbines” plus other loaded claims)
  • climatecrocks.com (“wind turbine syndrome is bullshit” sums up the smugness of that site)
  • earther.gizmodo.com (“earth-friendly” tech site that panders to the world’s kludgiest gizmos)
  • desmogblog (shows no concern for the large-particulate smog look of wind turbines on horizons)
  • electrek.co (another tech site full of bean-counting shills who prefer gigawatts to natural scenery)
  • Mother Nature Network (hundreds of articles praising Big Wind and rejecting low-sprawl nuclear)
  • awwi.org (American Wind Wildlife Institute insists that birds & bats can be protected; naive or evil?)
  • Films For Action (negatively reviewed “Planet of the Humans” because it questions green growthism)
  • cleantechnica.com (see no evil, hear no evil; bans anyone who criticizes wind power in a forceful way)
  • Yale Climate Connections (another university spawning engineers and financiers, not ecological thinkers)
  • oceana.org (“protecting the world’s oceans” by supporting vast, ugly construction projects in their waters)
  • globalwindday.org (shameless photo contest spins industrial scenery as a beautiful nature enhancement)
  • skepticalscience.com (allows glib pro-wind praise, yet rejects reasonable comments on aesthetics as sloganeering)
  • ramblingsdc.net/windenergyopposition.html (rambles about the “benefits” of rural ruination, claims to respect nature)
  • reddit.com/r/wind/ (post anything negative and you’ll feel the wrath of snarky environmental posers defending paychecks)



The USGS Wind Turbine Database is a good way to visualize the total sprawl of these “farms” and debunk minimal land use claims (points 5 & 6 above). You can drive for hours in some places and always see turbines. The industry wants to keep making them taller so they’ll work in lower wind areas. Scenery be damned is the general consensus. Be mindful of the 360-degree viewshed, not just their exact placement on the map. No other energy infrastructure has such far-flung visibility.





In case you think this is a rant with no hope, I’m all for rooftop & parking lot solar panels or putting them over train tracks and canals. They can be much greener than wind monsters if they don’t increase the human footprint, though that hasn’t proved pragmatic due to economics. Deep geothermal is another potentially good renewable source which could fix the problem of rare locations near the surface. Small wind turbines (under 50 feet tall) can meet modest power needs if people don’t depend on them 24/7. The most promising large-scale alternative is safer forms of nuclear power like SMRs, if old fears can be dropped. The whole centralized model of building “energy farms” and moving electricity over long transmission lines needs to end. Anything truly green should have a minimal footprint, like cargo ships assisted by rotor sails. Unless people practice restraint and use more birth control, our long-term existence on this planet isn’t assured by any technology. Fossil fuels built this whole mess and it’s hard to sustain without them. The whole notion that there “must be a solution” is countered by historical evidence of human greed and shortsightedness. The modern energy quagmire vs. the scale of growing wants & needs is unprecedented. Very large machines in the countryside are a new phase of urban sprawl that leaves many of us speechless. Ecocide, Phase 2 is a good term for it. If these were housing developments or freeways, most environmentalists would oppose them for destroying open space! In light of these inexplicable new values, some ecological thinkers have resigned themselves to the continued destruction of nature by old and new technologies. Wind power is actually an old technology, rebooted in the worst way.


Scene from “Planet of the Wind Turbines.” Also see “Planet of the Humans” by Michael Moore, released on Earth Day, 2020. His clout could turn the tide on clean energy hype.
