Lying Doesn’t Help
It happens all the time. People want to be popular so they say popular things – true or not. Mayor Daly made rash promises about the city government’s use of renewable energy and now has created a sense of disillusion that will make many considering RE have second thoughts. This would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic.
After pledging in 2001 that his city government would run on 20 percent renewable power by 2006, the end of the year showed Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (D) could not fulfill his pledge to run the city on the more expensive fuel sources.
Daley’s pledge inspired an avalanche of accolades, including feature stories in such publications as the Washington Post, Time, and Christian Science Monitor. In 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named Chicago its Partner of the Year for green power. Daley was invited to speak to Robert Redford and a conference of mayors at the actor’s Sundance Resort in Utah.
But Daley learned a costly lesson about trying to outsmart private citizens, who have long rejected so-called renewable power as too expensive. Renewable power turned out to be too costly for the city to implement.
And when presented with the advance bill for new wind power, the city balked.
Other forms of lying are more insidious, like when trying to get someone to let you make money. The wind farm people are promising “no noise”. How is that possible? It’s not.
Residents say that town officials and company representatives repeatedly assured them that the wind farm would be silent.
Silent? An exaggeration, or a lie? I’ll bet you can’t get an engineer to use the word silent.
In Vermont, where the same company is proposing a 16-turbine wind farm in Sheffield, residents hammered the developer with questions about noise at a hearing last week.
“Developers are still saying that the projects will be noiseless,..
Who in their right mind would say that?
A preliminary study of the Mars Hill wind farm suggested that it had potential to exceed the noise limits in a handful of locations. But state environmental officials decided that the excess noise would have no “unreasonable adverse effect,” and said the project could go ahead.
So “noiseless” is wrong and it even “exceeded the limits” but what the hell, build it anyway. We don’t care ’bout no stinking limits. Town manager Raymond Mersereau said:
He said he never expected to hear complaints about noise. But while it is louder than he expected, he said the noise is less than a major disruption.
So we’ve gone from “noisless” to “less than a major disruption” eh Ray. How close do you live to the turbines?
Specialists say the tension between wind farms and neighbors is heightened by the need to place turbines in the windiest locations. Many of those spots are rural, with little background noise, so the impact of any new sound is greater.
“Noiseless” means there is no sound Mr. Specialist.
Proponents of wind farms say that concerns about scenery and silence should be weighed against the benefits, such as decreased air pollution.
And they certainly shouldn’t be upset about being lied to.
“People say, ‘Why should I accept this? I’m not getting anything?’ ” Gray said
“Well, you are. There are benefits everyone gets from accepting projects like this.”
Yeah, some people are getting money and some people are getting lied to.
Then there is the lie of the great dream. I remember reading that nuclear energy would produce electricity so cheaply that it wouldn’t be worth the cost of metering it. We were going to get robots and video phones too, ya gotta love furturists – just don’t believe them. I hope this grand plan comes to fruition, but I fear China just needs to generate some good press.
The good news is that in Dongtan, on Chongming Island near Shanghai, half a million people will live in a car-free, zero-emission, recycling city with an ecological footprint one-third that of people in Shanghai.
Environmentally sustainable city living is possible, its planners say, and within our grasp. The Dongtan project could be the solution to the demands of city living, combining the need to be environmentally sustainable with being extremely cool.
The initial phase will be finished by 2010, when the Expo fair comes to Shanghai, and it is forecast that by 2030, there will be more than 500,000 people living here.
The planners describe Dongtan as a “holistic, systemic view of a city,” a view of the world they say is vital to the survival of cities.
I hope those developers aren’t as prone to lying as others are. This whole RE thing is about to get a very bad name. The most easily deceived are those who want to believe. They are also the ones most hurt by the lying.
- Posted in : Environment, In the News, Philosophy, Politics, Renewable Energy
- Author :Rt
Comments»
All of the large scale wind turbines I have been to have been pretty damn quiet, as the wind blows harder there is more background noise to muffle them, that being said they are anything but silent. If you start with an honest assessment of what the project will, and will not do, you can get the local people to be much happier about their renewable energy projects. If you promise someone the moon, they are always going to be disappointed. If you promise them something reasonable, and explain the shortfalls, they will end up being very happy.
Amen, brother. Under promise and over deliver.
I can’t think of a greater bitterness than feeling like you were intentionally misled.
Sono felice che lo avete trovato.
I’m hoping that means – I am happy you found it.