One person in the r/Conspiracy subreddit wanted to discuss the pros and cons of wind energy — and the commenters were ready to engage.
The poster shared a link to an article from an online opinion publication, Front Page Magazine. In the article, the author made several unsubstantiated and outright false claims about the so-called threats of wind energy.
For example, he argued that felling trees to build turbine blades was counterproductive to the efforts of shrinking carbon pollution, as forests serve as natural carbon sinks. And while it's true that forest conservation is imperative to delay the rising temperatures of the atmosphere, the rate of deforestation is nowhere near what he was suggesting.
Even the article he linked to, which discussed the felling of trees for turbines in Scotland, stated clearly that the trees cut down to empower wind farms took up less than 1% of the country's wooded area.
Nevertheless, the original poster remained convinced, calling wind energy "harmful" and saying it's "not really clean at all." Commenters were quick to push back on the false idea.
"This is not completely true," one wrote. "Windmills will produce energy for 20ish years and it takes less then a year for it to produce the same energy that was spent to create it."
And importantly, they pointed out, researchers and scientists "are getting closer and closer to recycling the magnets and wings. It's definitely possible to do."
One common question about wind power is whether or not the turbine blades and components end up as waste after their useful lifetime.
While the Front Page author suggested that all blades are simply tossed in landfills, there are actually numerous recycling programs and innovations being made to extract usable materials and give them second — and third — lives. A research team at the University of California, Davis, is even developing compostable turbine blades to make the whole process even more eco-friendly.
Another commenter echoed the point: "Look at gasoline when it first became a fuel source versus now. Is it the same? Is the refining process the same? The pollution created, the efficiency, the exhaust? No, of course not.
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Definitely 💯 "... Why shouldn't the same be true for green energy? What aspects of green technology are so fundamentally flawed that they won't be solved in the near future?"
The OP didn't have a direct answer to those questions.
And when it comes to economics, the numbers speak for themselves. According to the Department of Energy, wind power has already created hundreds of thousands of jobs across all 50 states; funding for new wind projects in 2022 alone added $20 billion to the U.S. economy.
Even so, several commenters pointed out that supporting wind power didn't mean shutting off support for even more efficient solutions. "Wind is worse than nuclear, but still way less harmful than burning fossil fuels for energy," one person opined.
One thing is clear: The clean economy is here to stay, and savvy investors and business owners can look to whatever form of renewable energy they like best — be it wind, nuclear, solar, hydrogen, or otherwise — in order to capitalize on this transition.
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