Fun Science Fact #30: Everything Costs Something.
A few days ago, a friend sent me a photo of a dead bird, with a wind farm in the background. The caption said, “If this bird was covered in oil, this picture would be everywhere.” The implication, obviously, was that wind power sometimes kills birds, just like oil sometimes kills birds, so therefore they’re basically equivalent. So, I sent him back an answer: “You know what else kills lots of birds? Cats. Are they the same as oil?”
Was this a constructive response? No, probably not. He sent me back a string of question marks, and a picture of Archie Bunker calling me a meathead, which led me to believe that I probably could have expressed myself more clearly. So, here is what I was actually trying to say: nothing that we do in this world is completely free from harm to someone or something. The strictest of vegans still murders carrots on a regular basis, and probably eats a few dozen spiders in his sleep every year to boot. You can’t simply say that because something has a downside, we can’t do it, because if you follow that methodology, we’d never do anything at all. What you can do is weigh the costs of any particular thing you want to do against the benefits, and then make a decision as to which carries greater weight.
Power generation poses a particularly sticky problem if you’re concerned about minimizing our footprint on the world. It’s not something we can do without at this point. Without power, we lose mechanized farming. More importantly, we lose the Haber process, which, as you may recall from Fun Science Fact #19, requires a great deal of power, and is responsible for much of the nitrogen fertilizer that eventually turns into all that tasty wheat and corn that we like so much. Take those things away, and the carrying capacity of the planet drops drastically, probably to no more than two billion or so humans at the high end. We’re willing to put up with a lot of cost to avoid that eventuality.
So, if we accept that we need to generate power (a great deal of it, at this point, and more of it every day) the only question becomes how to do it with the least cost. This, of course, raises the additional question of what, exactly, we mean by “cost.” If we approach this from a strictly economic standpoint, it’s actually tough to beat the tried-and-true method of digging things up and setting them on fire. Coal and oil are relatively cheap, and we have a well-established infrastructure set up to exploit them.
This argument, however, ignores the ancillary, non-economic costs of burning fossil fuel, which are considerable. In particular, burning oil and coal in the quantities that we need in order to generate power for seven billion people is changing the composition of our atmosphere. Also, there’s all of those oily birds, a whole lot of unnecessary respiratory disease, and the occasional coal mine disaster. If we take these into account, we should be willing to pay somewhat more per kWh for a less impactful power source.
This leads us back to windmills and solar farms, and that poor dead bird. Renewable energy is generally more expensive than energy derived from fossil fuels. It also has ancillary costs. Wind farms do kill birds sometimes, especially when they’re situated near migratory routes. Thermal solar plants (the kind that use mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler to generate steam) can actually fry birds in mid-flight. Solar panels, which generate electricity directly, require rare earths, which can be both toxic and environmentally costly to mine.
The thing to understand, though, is that these are not reasonable arguments against building wind farms or solar plants in and of themselves. Unless we’re willing to curb our population pretty severely in a short period of time (hint: we’re not) we need power. The question is not whether renewable sources come with costs. The question is whether those costs outweigh their benefits. Yes, a wind farm will kill some birds. It may also spoil your view of Nantucket harbor. If we want to keep playing Call of Duty and Googling ourselves and eating, though, we’re going to have to learn to cope.
