Australian blogger Jo Nova had a pair of posts on Friday, one on wind and one on solar. The solar story was simple: some birds caused a fire at a California solar farm, dramatically reducing its output for a couple weeks.
The wind story, meanwhile, addresses the longstanding myth hilariously botched by President Trump when he claimed wind turbines cause cancer--that there are health impacts to living near wind farms. According to a new study with an incredible sample size of NINE HOUSES, researchers found that noise from wind turbines can occasionally be heard in houses that are less than 3.5 kilometers away. They didn’t find any health impacts.
Nova claims there are “almost no studies into the health impact of wind farms,” pointing to another study with a similarly insignificantly small sample size of six people in three houses, and asks why there aren’t more large-scale studies on the issue. “Are we afraid of what the results might show?” she questions.
Except, of course, there have been plenty of other studies on wind farms and health, and they show that there are no impacts.
And not only are there no real impacts, but the only places where people claim wind farms are hurting them are places where anti-wind activists have sowed fear and doubt about the health impacts. (A particularly pithy Guardian headline puts it best: “Windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth.”)
The supposed health problems caused by wind turbines are actually self-induced ailments triggered by the fearmongering of astroturfed anti-wind groups, like the Waubra Foundation, which Nova cites in her post.
Combined, these posts are clearly meant to send a message that renewables are unreliable and even potentially dangerous.
But what else happened on Friday? A major oil refinery in Philadelphia exploded, shaking walls and echoing out of Pennsylvania and into Southern New Jersey. What’s worse, this was actually the second fire there in as many weeks.
And making matters still worse is that hydrofluoric acid is used at the plant, leading to Kate Aronoff’s intense but not exactly hyperbolic tweet pointing out that “‘will acid dissolve my bones’ is not a thought anyone should have to have so that a few extremely wealthy people can keep making outrageous amounts of money.”
On the one hand, we have wind turbines that make a little noise people can only hear sometimes. On the other hand, we have a refinery exploding, potentially threatening to melt the flesh off the bones of the surrounding community.
How weird that Nova only covered one of those things...
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