Are we rushing headlong towards another environmental debacle?

Energy balance on the way to Los Angeles (2011)

A cautionary tale from Australia’s old red cedar trees …

As Tim Flannery wrote in The Future Eaters, early settlers viewed Australia’s resources as infinite. A fitting example, in the nineteenth century, was the general belief that the ‘Big Scrub’, the extensive area of red cedar and other magnificent timbers growing in dense forests along the east coast of Australia was so vast, we could exploit it indefinitely.

“In 1847 Commissioner Fry of the New South Wales Public Service informed a Commission of Inquiry that the Big Scrub of northern New South Wales could not be cleared within five or six centuries. Clearance of the Big Scrub began in earnest in the 1880's, and by 1900 it was all gone”.

And so it is, that today we humans perhaps delude ourselves that we can harness the wind without consequences.

As Newton told us a mere 335 years ago: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

It is not a question of tilting at windmills! If the blades of a wind turbine absorb some of the wind’s energy, allowing us humans to warm our spa baths, won’t that wind now contain less energy?

When forests of wind turbines populate the land and sea, won’t this affect global circulation patterns and therefore rainfall, temperatures, and the oceans?

I am not arguing against “renewables” but shouldn’t we at least consider these questions before we blithely accept this technological fix as a benign solution to the urgent problem of our hunger for more usable energy?

Good science can provide factual evidence which will help us avoid future debacles.

We could, for example, ask our national research body, the CSIRO, to conduct a detailed life-cycle analysis of the benefits, costs, and consequences of wind energy over the medium to long-term before rushing headlong towards yet another possible environmental debacle.