Many Mendonoma friends and neighbors still display “Don’t
drink chainsaw wine” bumper stickers, which came to mind as I read a Spiegel article “Mutiny in the land of
wind turbines.”
To refresh our memories, “Chainsaw wine” refers to the
now-defunct Preservation Ranch proposal to “plant 1,150 acres of premium,
sustainably farmed vineyards on 1,769 acres” (9% of 19,645 acres), which ardent
environmentalists fought by abstaining from consuming a non-existing product.
Ardent environmentalists also spear-head the movement in
Germany to aggressively replace nuclear and fossil fuel electrical generation
with wind power, and so far succeeded in boosting Germany’s electricity cost to
$0.31/kWh compared to $0.08-$0.17/kWh in the US. As wind turbines in Germany have to locate deeper
into its interior, productivity per turbine falls to under a third of offshore
turbines, while greatly increasing visual and noise pollution, lowering
property values, and slaughtering birds, bats, and insects. These are all the
typical unintended consequences of blind environmental idealism.
But there’s more: ironically, the increase in land-based
wind turbines unleashes a vast chainsaw-wielding army to clear-cut trees for
foundations, access roads, and power lines. The German state of Hesse alone plans
to cut down forest acreage equal to over ten proposed Preservation Ranch
vineyards, and North Rhine-Westphalia wants to do even more.
Since automobiles are the preeminent German export produced
by intensive electrical energy exploitation, true environmentalists should join
me in fighting the degradation of German forests and loss of CO2-sequestering
trees by buying and displaying my bumper sticker “Don’t buy chainsaw
automobiles©”.
Unlike “chainsaw wine”, German automobiles are real, not
symbolic, and their production is causing real environmental degradation.
Save the world! Buy bumper stickers, not BMW’s!
