Advocates for "green" energy keep getting smacked in the face with the Law of Unintended Consequences. That would be a better thing if these folks were capable of learning from their mistakes, but as my quick-witted grandfather was fond of saying of some people, "you can teach 'em, but you can't learn 'em."
Another such case has surfaced, and it has to do with wind power - those big, ugly, raptor-killing wind turbines that mess up landscapes around the world. We've learned of the costs of putting these things up: The cost in rare earth metals, in steel, in concrete, not to mention the cost of all the diesel fuel consumed in transporting the components of these things to where they are going to be put up.
Now, there's a new problem: Balsa wood, used in turbine blades. In the Amazon basin, where balsa trees grow, as many as half a million balsa trees a year are being cut, illegally, for these monsters.
Over half a million balsa hardwood trees are being illegally logged in the Amazon rainforest every year to feed the massive demand for wind turbines in many parts of the world
Balsa is a lightweight but strong wood that is commonly used in the core of giant turbine blades.
It can make up around seven percent of the blade and each set of three can use up to 40 trees.
Wait, aren't the people who are shouting about the need for wind and solar power the same ones who were shouting about the destruction of the rainforest? These people call the Amazon basin the "lung of the world," which is something of a misnomer; the great northern taiga forests actually produce more oxygen than the Amazon rainforests, and both are dwarfed by the O2 produced by oceanic phytoplanktons.
Here's the onion:
This discovery is a genuine shock and follows an exclusive investigation by the Daily Sceptic.
It adds to the huge ecological toll that the ‘green’ wind turbines are taking on the natural environment.
These inefficient, unreliable, unsightly monsters require a large footprint on land and sea, kill millions of bats, decimate raptor populations, sweep the air of quadrillions of insects and alter local ecology on both land and sea.
We've documented all of these things many times, of course, right here at RedState.
Read More: Fossil Fuels v. Green Energy, Part II - The Horrible Cost of Wind Power
The Hidden Cost of Renewable Power: Toxic 'Green' Waste to Hit 1 Million Tons
And now we find that each one of these things, each one of these big eagle-crunching monstrosities, consumes as many as 40 balsa trees, many of which were harvested illegally.
It gets worse.
Most commercial balsa is exported by Ecuador and it has produced approximately 500,000 cubic metres annually in recent years, or about 80,000 metric tonnes. Around 55 percent of production is thought to end up in wind turbines and each group of three requires about 10.5m3 a set.
Each set requires about 40 trees so annual balsa consumption for wind turbines equates to 1,047,619. Balsa is a relatively fast-growing tropical wood and until the soaring demand from turbines kicked in, it was harvested in sustainable plantations.
Over a million trees a year, for an energy source that is expensive, unreliable, intermittent, low-density, and ugly. These things literally have nothing going for them, and now we have this, on top of everything else: As many as a million balsa trees a year are being cut for no good purpose.
Now, balsa is a uniquely useful wood. Balsa trees have been harvested for hundreds of years for various purposes. But the poaching, driven by demand for wind turbines, may even be placing these trees in danger of extinction:
But since the turn of the decade, this sustainable harvest cannot keep up with demand. In a damning survey, the Environment Investigation Agency (EIA) found that exports were boosted by up to 50% following illegal logging in virgin rainforest.
Halve the turbine consumption of 1,047,619 trees and the illegal logging amounts to around 523,810 mature specimens. This figure is likely to be controversial so the Daily Sceptic has shown its workings-out in full.
What alternatives are available? The blades are also largely made from carbon fiber, which takes a great deal of energy to produce, much of it energy generated with natural gas or coal. The carbon fiber in those blades cannot easily be disposed of. Recycling isn't practical, so now we have piles of worn-out turbine blades, another item cluttering up the landscape. Balsa wood, of course, could be disposed of with a few gallons of kerosene and a match, but that would require disassembling the blades - and you're still stuck with the carbon fiber.
The proponents of these boondoggles seem to be constitutionally incapable of examining an issue past the end of their own noses. It's very nearly daily, now, that we discover some new unintended consequence of these schemes, consequences that tip the cost-benefit ratio of these schemes ever farther into the red.
Will the climate scolds and green energy shouters ever learn? If we consult the Magic 8-Ball, it would surely say "signs point to no."
