Bat Batters!
Quixotic Windmills.
Boy! This one is making a big hit. You know, what bowls me over is all this self-righteousness these guys are coming down with all over the landscape in their effort to disguise the fact of their willful ignorance, or even the reality that they themselves have participated in their own dementing debilitation. And here come the Europeans, the last ones on earth I would have suspected, champions of carbon dioxide sequestration and reduction of greenhouse gases. And now your beloved wind generators are turning out to be a greater ecological disaster than ever.
Didn't it ever occur to you idiots that the problem lies in deforestation? Haven't you done the homework or even the science? What's wrong with you people? The biggest culprit of the greenhouse dilemma is your own destruction of forests to line your greedy self-righteous pockets.
Forests safely control carbon dioxide and keep it under control by housing the carbon in the wood and the fruit or nuts, and release the oxygen back into the air. They also help to move water back into the atmosphere for rainfall somewhere else. But the greedy politicians and business persons see the trees as a cash crop of lumber until the whole landscape looks like a butch haircut.
You better get this whole thing out of the hands of the politicians. Forget your green parties, there's no way to politicize this. Just let the politicians play in their sand boxes with their laws and taxes, let the people get along despite them, and leave the serious stuff to the scientists.
It's quite simple. Maybe that's your problem. You're so used to having things complicated or desiring to show off and be complicated and try to pretend to be so smart. When all you needed was not so much smarts as intuition. For every car on the road, you should have at least 30 trees. 100 would be better, but 30 is doable. Now what's so hard about that? Instead of going around with your self righteous carbon dioxide sequestration, just go ahead and plant 30 trees per car.
Back when I was a kid and earning my pioneering merit badge for my Eagle Scout award, I learned in the field how densely trees tend to grow in the wild. Now I realize your green pizza false doctrine is to leave nature alone and have nothing to do with it. But in reality, the human being is a part of nature and needs to lend a hand in thinning out a naturally dense and overgrown forest. Using power equipment, and powerful earth movers, and trucking, and even helicopters and other paraphernalia, it is possible to thin out a forest, removing the trees to be thinned out in such a way that you can transplant them elsewhere. The adult trees or even large saplings can then be planted in their new locations. All over the planet.
It is also possible to improve the architecture of housing to armor the roofing so that houses can exist amongst trees. If a branch or even a tree falls on a house no damage occurs. Other housing can become subterranean, saving a lot of energy, since the underground is actually warmer than winter and cooler than summer. I mean, if you want to be ecological, it may as well be the real thing. Remember, stupidity is no excuse, especially for you, because you're not stupid. Destabilized, maybe, but destabilization is undoable.
It's not that hard to do and think of all the job creation it would entail to produce vibrant natural forests with plenty of healthy transplants for many more new ones. You don't have the acreage for huge new forests? Sure you do. Striate them among the existent human communities. Forests could be striated in huge stripes between fields and populated areas or industrial areas or any combination thereof and so on. Some could be put on the open seas in huge forest carriers. They could be genetically altered to exist above timber lines.
Put that in the politicians' pipe and let them smoke that and drag the green pizzas out of the courtroom and let them plant a few trees and do some ecological work for a change. Every last remnant of the unemployed could have a job. It would even be permissible to carefully harvest selectively the new forests and whole populations could use the prunings of the hardwoods for furniture and fire wood.
Now somebody comes up with a neat design for a wind electricity generator about 30 years ago, and nobody improves on the design. But the politicians get so self-righteous about polluting the atmosphere that they fill the sky with these antique wind generators and wipe out whole bird populations, and then polish off their dastardly self-righteousness by destroying huge flocks of bats at night. The same lethal apparatus does it all. Remember the Murphy's Law concept in that everything you do will tend to backfire on you if you don't watch it.
Didn't it occur to you guys that you could house the moving veins of the windmill? By putting a cowling around the windmill you can actually enhance or focus the wind power. Talk about 30-years-old designs, I've been working on that one since I was a teenager. Now I have my own design, which I'm not going to tell you about, because I was saving that one for an application someday that I might actually be able to patent. But in the meantime, we'll see if you can come up with something more innovative than that vertical helicopter you have that's been clobbering all those birds and bats!
Now you know the bat has adapted over the eons to work on a sonar system where everything in nature travels in a random manner and where nothing moves laterally as quickly as a windmill generator blade does. So when the bat "sees" the blade it's flying by, it's sonar abilities in no way let it know how fast that blade is going, illusively causing the blade which seems to be safely to one side to smack the little guy right out of the sky.
The bat needs to know it's going to be right in front of the blade to avoid a collision or even getting chopped in half. This has always been a problem: Man's infatuation with the propeller. For example, the outboard propeller and the manatee. The other problem is that the propeller is designed wrong, but that's another topic.
It is possible to just step back and let your intuition, which each of you have in abundance, come up with something a bit more radical and a bit more novelistic and a bit more, shall we use the word (?!?), "biological". What's wrong with that? You are biological. Maybe your shampoo isn't or something else like your synthetic clothing, but you are.
In the meantime, house the blades, use cowling to enhance the wind power and cover the forward edge of the mill with a grill. Too expensive? Then decelerate the rotation of the blades. Use larger blades like those old Dutch wind mills and gear ratios inside the tower to increase the spin rate for the generator.
It is also possible to make the blades out of a soft material that the poor animals can bonk into and not get a headache. I know! Deer whistles on the tips. All kidding aside, all that to say this: There's really no such thing as the easy solution. Before that loud-mouthed kid starts to pretend he or she can save the world, let them do a bit of homework first about the realities of the real world beyond the confines of their dinky pop culture.
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2005 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: cosmos@paulhallart.com
January of 2005