GP was mocking you (not calling you names) because your comment was just a classic uninformed (some would even say stupid) opinion, and was presented as you "looking at wind as objectively as I can"
Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.
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Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:
> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly
First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.
Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.
How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).
That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.
This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material
So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.
There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different.
And you didn't address the environmental damage to the oceans. this case is specifically greenlighting off-shore windfarms. Iif this was on land, i wouldn't care what people do with their own money and resources. But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
> There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different.
Those are also tiny marginal percentages relative to the amount of fossil fuels that are saved, even if everything is constructed from virgin materials instead of recycled.
> But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
The largest threats to whale populations currently are
1. changing ocean temperatures and PH stressing them, and disrupting their food chains
2. overfishing disrupting their food supply and stressing them out
3. getting entangled in fishing nets, and being struck by boat propellers
Wind turbine installation may be a brief stressor when piles are driven into the seabed (but there are mitigation techniques), and operating noise from wind farms might be a mild irritant for them, but it's quite minor relative, and geographically constrained compared to other more significant day to day noise sources in the ocean such as a shipping, drilling, and fishing.
The impact of wind turbines on whales is inconsequential compared to other much more acute impacts (especially net entanglement and boat strikes). There's a pretty wide literature on this.
> You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
I don't take your complaints seriously because your complaints (whether by accident or by design) happen to very closely coincide with deliberate misinformation spread primarily by fossil fuel companies to try and limit threats to their business model.
claiming something is a tiny percentage while not providing numbers is just a failed argument
you've not properly accounted for anything in support of your own argument through anything other than anecdotes and insults
given i havent provided data, ive certainly not provided insults
there's the cement to hold the turbine in place, the production of the turbine, the making of the materials that go into it, and the transportation of everything in this chain of events
even the mining of the materials has environmental impacts that aren't easily quantifiable, you've simply peaked through a door that most people can't realistically walk through
i have a hard time believing you've somehow accounted for all of these things in privileged enough manner to go around calling other people stupid
there's all sorts of environmental impacts that are simply difficult to calculate
and whales are a big topic, as the same people making the wind turbines are the ones whose overfishing are hurting the population (the chinese). should providing money for their economy via the purchase of wind turbines effect the number of whales being hunted, then what's the difference? the changing pH isn't as big a deal as people make it out to be, and it's not widely consistent across the entire ocean either, none of this is simple enough to just brush off
Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.
_______________________________
Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:
> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly
First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.
Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.
How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).
That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.
This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material
So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.