The Peakist

From Economist.com

Power generation: If people object to wind farms cluttering up the countryside, one answer might be to put them in the air.
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The New Scientist looks at the carbon footprint of the large scale wind turbines:

“It started with Turbine 68. On 16 October 2003, following excavations for the 49-metre tower’s massive foundations, the peat bog above the village of Derrybrien in county Galway, Ireland, began to move. That night almost half a square kilometre of bog slid 2.5 kilometres down the hillside, engulfing an unoccupied farmhouse and blocking two roads. Journalists dubbed it the “bogalanche”, and speculated about what might have happened had the weather been wet. Two weeks later they found out. Heavy rains washed peat soup into the Abhainn Da Loilioch river, where the sludge killed 50,000 fish and affected 50,000 more. (more…)

“We had hoped this climate review would inject an additional boost to offshore wind to ensure it joined onshore as a major provider of new power and carbon savings to hit our 2010 targets.  The Government’s failure to act in this review must be addressed in the forthcoming Energy Review.  Without a vibrant offshore wind sector it is hard to see how the Government’s 2010 climate targets can be met and how our 20% renewable aspirations by 2020 can become a working reality.”    Marcus Rand, BWEA’s Chief Executive

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Diderot has summarised Lovelock’s argument for nuclear energy for us. Perhaps the most contentious issue facing us today, whilst nuclear energy has always been the bete noire of environmentalists Lovelock has endorsed nuclear energy as the only practical solution to the twin crisis of global warming and energy supply. Diderot writes:

Lovelock devotes chapter 5 of his new book, “The Revenge of Gaia”, to a
discussion of our major energy options.  The background to the
discussion is Lovelock’s belief that the planet is poised to flip into a
new hotter stable state with average temperatures 8 degrees higher than
now.  It’s an equilibrium that Gaia has reached many times before, most
recently 55 million years ago when carbon dioxide was at a concentration
similar to the one we are currently creating.  No one knows when we’ll
flip but all known climate systems are now in positive feedback and we
can expect to move to ‘hot earth’ within the next century.  When we do
most parts of the planet will become uninhabitable, the sea will swallow
London.

With that in mind, Lovelock considers the energy options: (more…)