Arguments
“Serious stress, serious stress.”
“An industry in its last days.”
“Steady decline [in growth, demand] for the past decade.”
“Cratering.”
Those are a few of the characterizations of today’s oil, natural gas, and coal industries put forward by several independent journalists, writers, and analysts in the new edition of the “This is Not Cool” video series.
… And then, along came the coronavirus and the COVID-19 challenges, providing one more blow to the energy industry.
Even pre-pandemic, the conventional energy sector “already had plans to cancel major infrastructure projects like pipelines,” independent journalist Keith Schneider told Yale Climate Connections. And with the pandemic, oil and gas experienced “the worst body blow in its modern contemporary history,” he said.
Journalist and writer Antonia Juhasz agrees, pointing to “an industry in its last days, it’s just getting hit from too many sides.”
“Most of the new electricity generation coming online today is coming from wind and solar,” says Houston Chronicle reporter Chris Tomlinson. And professor Dan Kammen of the University of California Berkeley says solar and wind have been the cheapest energy options worldwide for at least the past three consecutive years.
Kammen also says that he believes solar and wind energy initiatives can advance two to three times as many job opportunities as traditional fossil fuel projects: That would be critical to help long-time coal and other fossil fuel industry employees whose decades of work has been critical to economic development … and who society cannot simply leave stranded as momentum turns toward a clean economy. Tending to the plight of those workers whose jobs are lost will have to be part of the energy-options puzzle, interviewees say.
So long as wind turbines are the built in mind of the most advanced and long lasting environmentally recyclable building materials known to mankind. Today's widely used wind turbine construction materials are NOT recyclable nor conducive to a healthy environmentally sensitive present and future; compounded by typical two-year economic investment/return business cycles that at the epicentre, driving deafening climate change disaster.
Larry Smallwood,
I fully support awareness of the need for everything that humans do to be Governed by the pursuit of Sustainable Development. That includes correcting unsustainable and harmful activities that were incorrectly allowed to develop popularity and profitability, and especially forcing the rapid ending of actions that powerful wealthy people harmfully incorrectly prolonged through misleading claim-making that delayed the development of the required corrections.
So I question the imposition of High Standards of Sustainability on actions to replace harmful unsustainable activities that have incorrectly remained popular and profitable.
Keeping sustainability in mind the alternative to not building wind turbines unless they are completely sustainable (not harmful, not unsustainably consuming materials) is to stop all activity that uses generated energy that is more harmful and less sustainable. All the other ways of getting artificial energy have impacts.
So it is clearly absurd to demand the high standard for the replacement of unsustainable ways of living. What needs to be understood is that the unsustainable harmful ways of living that have developed need to be ended. Hopefully that will be by being replaced by more sustainable, but potentially more expensive, ways of doing things. But the most important understanding is that if the more expensive more sustainable ways of doing the activity are not liked then the activity needs to be ended no matter how popular or profitable it has become.
People cannot be allowed the freedom to enjoy a Better Personal Present in ways that negatively affect the attempts by Others to Develop the Gift of a Sustainable Improving future for humanity. Many people enamored by westernized consumption-based capitalism struggle to understand that essential Governing principle. That understanding of the need to responsibly self-govern and be less harmful and more helpful really bothers people who were indoctrinated in the fatally flawed belief that it is best for people to be freer to believe whatever they want and do whatever they please.
Freedom Governed by the pursuit of expanded awareness and improved understanding applied to achieve and improve on the Sustainable Development Goals is what is required. And it is harder work that the alternatives.
Larry Smallwood @1
"Today's widely used wind turbine construction materials are NOT recyclable nor conducive to a healthy environmentally sensitive present and future"
I appreciate your concerns but this is wrong, and just an assertion. Most wind towers have fibreglass blades but at least one company is recycling these by grinding them up for use in composite wall boards and similar products as below. So they can be recycled. Its not easy but they are making it work. I suggest it could be expanded rapidly with some sort of government incentive like a small tax break or a similar device.
resource-recycling.com/plastics/2019/03/27/company-expands-wind-turbine-recycling-operation/
Its also possible to make the blades from aluminium, which can be recycled. And the wind towers and generators are made of things like steel and aluminium and copper and we know those can be recycled from past experience.
Its even possible to make the blades out of timber, from what Ive read, which is probably the most sustainable material of all, but obviously this would be labour intensive with all those curves.
And yeah, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good as others say.
I agree with your comments and concerns about business investment.
Yes, that link does show how this company has developed a way to recycle the glassfibre into reusable beads for many further uses. I’m sure their initiative will be amply rewarded financially, as it should be, for beginning to solve a problem that was for a long time just ignored.