I’ve been accused of being pro-wind — I admit I can blow plenty of hot air — but in reality I’m both for and against it. Let me explain.

The planet is dying. Not the crust, the mantle, the outer core, or the inner core — the stuff we learned about in middle school — but life on its land and in its waters. Life, most of it anyway, needs breathable air, clean water, and healthy soil to survive, but only one species is deliberately poisoning all three.

Earth is in crisis chiefly because of humans. So how has the self-proclaimed most intelligent creature on the planet responded? Pathetically, with denial, conspiracy, lies, and nimbyism. We — those with the means, anyway — continue to ravage the world’s finite resources as if the global Walmart can be restocked indefinitely.

We buy new phones every year, even though the previous model works just fine. We continue to relentlessly crisscross the skies and oceans in heavily polluting crafts.

The status quo isn’t the path to salvation. Neither is burning more fossil fuels. (In many states, the largest source of pollution is a petrochemical plant or an oil refinery.) Offshore wind isn’t a panacea, but perhaps it can play a role, depending on what direction we decide to go.

Next week, on Oct. 16, ecoRI News is sponsoring an offshore wind forum, a panel discussion about the pros and cons of this controversial issue. The audience will be allowed to submit written questions.

ecoRI News rented a space in Newport that can hold 100 or so people, and asked people to register for free.

Less than two days after the event was announced, Green Oceans, a vocal anti-wind group, sent out an email to its members encouraging them to attend. “Register for a ticket as soon as possible. Please contact us if you can’t get a ticket — we have extras.”

Some of their members signed up themselves while also scooping up a handful of other tickets that didn’t have a name attached. One member took 10 tickets.

This tactic quickly sold out the event. Our publisher had to change the Eventbrite settings — so a single email couldn’t snag more than one ticket — and create a waiting list; she had to reach out to the Green Oceans members to get the email addresses for the tickets taken without a name, to make sure people were going to attend because the waiting list is still 75 deep; and she hired someone to stream the discussion online for those boxed out.

Green Oceans went out of its way to pack the room. Why? This conversation won’t set policy or come up for a vote.

In its red alert email, the organization also said, “The sponsors claim that the purpose of the forum will be to ‘explore the real pros and cons of offshore wind and combat misinformation about offshore wind and its potential effects on ocean habitat.’ To accomplish this noble goal, they have enlisted five panelists, four of whom are known wind advocates.”

Of the now six panelists, two have spoken out against offshore wind development. I don’t know how the others — a marine mammal scientist, the Atlantic Coast offshore wind policy manager for The Nature Conservancy, and the acting commissioner of the state’s Office of Energy Resources — would label themselves.

But since I’m also a panelist, I’d like to set the record straight. I’m for stopping our relentless attack on the natural world and the diverse life it supports. I’m for protecting environmental justice communities and the Global South from more pollution being shoved down their throats. I’m against those with the most taking even more. I’m disgusted by those who only care about the natural world when industrial-scale energy production invades their ecosystem.

As for offshore wind, as I mentioned, I can take it or leave it. My choice is dependent on how we decide to address the crises we have created, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. At the moment, it is abundantly clear that the United States and the rest of the Global North, especially those who are the most well-off, have no desire to rein in their consumption. To feed this ravenous appetite to mindlessly and selfishly consume requires destructive industrial energy.

We can’t keep siting utility-scale energy production in low-wealth neighborhoods and in communities of color. If we want to continue to feed at the global trough, it’s time for more of us, most notably those who use the most energy and consume the most resources, to get acquainted with the sights, sounds, and smells of industrial capitalism. Locally, it can no longer be contained on Allens Avenue.

My mentioning of Green Oceans’ rapid response is less a complaint — I’m genuinely happy members will be attending — and more of an observation as to why reasonable discussions about how to address the crises we have created are nearly impossible.

Endless growth leads to dead end

We’re trapped in an industrial economy that demands we commodify nature. Bigger is better. Greed is good. Wastefulness is a right. In many countries, especially of the wealthy variety, it is illegal for publicly held corporations to act against making a profit. That means constantly striving for economic growth. It also means the ceaseless destruction of the natural world.

During a conference in 2016, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the richest individuals in the world, told the audience how he and his capitalist ilk view the planet: as a superstore.

“You don’t want to live in a retrograde world. You don’t want to live on an earth where we have to freeze population growth, reduce energy utilization. We all enjoy an extraordinary civilization, and it’s powered by energy, and it’s powered by population. … We want the population to keep growing on this planet and we want to keep using more energy per capita.”

Translation: We need more and more people for cheap labor and to consume more and more stuff.

By the way, we don’t all enjoy this “extraordinary civilization” — most certainly not the non-human life on this planet, with the possible exception of cage-free rats and cockroaches, and not the estimated 28 million to 50 million people who are living in situations of modern slavery on any given day, nor the estimated 160 million kids worldwide who are engaged in child labor.

Those living in the polluted, cancer-ridden communities where the furnaces of capitalism burn probably don’t see the world in the same way as someone whose net worth is $203 billion, and who reportedly bought a 417-foot-long superyacht for $500 million and one of the world’s fastest jets for $65 million.

More than two centuries ago, a Shawnee Nation warrior tried to warn us about the greedy path we were on. In the 1993 book A Sorrow In Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh by Allan W. Eckert, there is a quote from Chiksika Matthew (c. 1760-1792), a war chief of the Kispoko division of the Shawnee Nation:

“The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”

That path has since been asphalted and turned into a superhighway.

Today, the United States is first in line when it comes to gorging at the Golden Corral buffet. But despite being advertised as endless, this buffet will end, and the cost is way more than the listed price.

The United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population, but consumes about a quarter of the world’s resources. This country’s poorest 10% account for just 0.5% of this consumption and the wealthiest 10% account for 59%.

On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 307 Tanzanians, and 370 Ethiopians.

While the world wastes about 2.5 billion tons of food annually, the United States discards more food than any other country: nearly 60 million tons, 120 billion pounds, every year incinerated or buried. This needless waste has been estimated to be about 40% percent of the entire U.S. annual food supply.

Of course, we could use that food to feed others, or animals. We could also compost it into nutrient-rich soil. But we don’t rescue this food at any significant scale because: it’s too hard and stinky; it won’t make anyone rich; too many of us just don’t care.

Food isn’t the only resource we like to waste. When the bathroom remodeling project is done, the extra tile is thrown in the trash. We buy single-use plastic bottles filled with water and routinely throw them in trash barrels or on the side of the road still containing water. We’re too self-absorbed to share the commodity by simply pouring the remaining H2O on the ground.

Passenger vehicles, on average, are about 20% larger today than they were 20 years ago. We commute to work in gasoline-guzzling SUVs named after a lake, a tree, a mountain peak, a mountain range, and a national park. We buy supersized pickups with oversized tires for no practical purpose. We drive Hummers, and whatever this is.

On average, a ton of steel is used to make a passenger vehicle, more if it is a sport utility vehicle or a recalled Tesla Cybertruck. The production of steel and metallurgical coke, which has a dual role in the steelmaking process, is the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after fossil fuels and electrical generation.

Yet, we continue to expand highways and ignore public transit and other non-car forms of transportation. Here in Rhode Island, the Department of Transportation despises bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and the Providence mayor wants to spend $750,000 to tear up the South Water Street bike lane that cost a few million dollars to build three years ago because a handful of noteworthy donors want a return to two lanes of vehicle traffic.

Since 1975, the average size of a new single-family home in the United States has nearly doubled, even though the average family size has shrunk. In 2023, the average size of a new home was 2,514 square feet, to house 3.15 people.

We don’t build affordable housing. We build massive second homes — a tribute to the industrial economy and our unquenchable greed.

It takes industrial-scale energy to power all this industrial-scale consumption.

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. This very affluent group, as well as the rest of the world’s other billionaires, millionaires, and financially well-off, travel the world in megayachts, private jets, and helicopters that spew greenhouse gases. They own multiple vehicles. They gobble up resources to build luxurious estates and second, third, … homes.

Some build sprawling compounds with underground bunkers to escape the apocalypse they are fueling. In 2023, Architectural Digest named “luxury bunkers” a top real estate trend.

You won’t find a luxury bunker, though, in Gary, Ind., which is home to the largest steel mill in the country and is the 15th-most polluted city in the United States. The median household income in Gary is $35,033; the state’s median household income is $69,477. The city’s poverty rate is 32.3%, and 80% of the population is Black.

Of the 329.3 million people in the contiguous United States, 33 million (10%) live within 3 miles of one or more power plants. The population living near power plants is comprised of 53% (17.5 million) people of color and 34% (11.2 million) low-wealth individuals.

Industrial appetites

Artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and the filthy rich rocketing themselves into space demand ever more energy.

As a solution to all this pollution and consumption, the anti-wind crowd supports converting U.S. coal-fired power plants to natural gas ones. OK. We can start hydraulic fracturing in their neighborhoods and building substations and other fossil fuel infrastructure along the borders of their backyards.

In 2022, Rhode Island generated 83% of its electricity from natural gas, the second-largest share of any state after Delaware, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

All of that methane comes from out of state, including from hydraulic fracturing in Ohio, which last year approved fracking for oil and gas in state parks and designated wildlife areas. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is delivered to Rhode Island via natural gas infrastructure that includes more than 3 million miles of pipeline.

(An Environment Defense Fund analysis found natural gas pipelines nationwide are leaking as much as 2.6 million tons of methane annually. A 2020 study estimated that there are 630,000 leaks in U.S. natural gas distribution pipelines. A recently published study found that liquefied natural gas, better known as LNG, is 33% worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.)

Offshore wind opponents routinely mention nuclear as a better alternative. Fine. We can build a reactor in Little Compton or along the shores of the Sakonnet River in Tiverton.

The anti-wind crowd also likes to note it takes fossil fuels to build renewable energy. It also takes fossil fuels to build power plants, nuclear reactors, and the homes they live in and the cars they drive.

The solution to these human-caused crises isn’t simply to change the type of fossil fuels we are burning or to reignite the nuclear energy revolution.

Human-manufactured carbon capture is most certainly not an answer. Nature actually provides this service for free, but we keep destroying forests, wetlands, peat bogs, soil, and the oceans.

For instance, when it comes to the latter, the burning of fossil fuels is acidifying marine waters. These changes in ocean chemistry are detrimental to shellfish and coral and can impact the behavior of non-calcifying organisms. The ability of some species of fish to detect predators is decreased in more acidic waters, which puts the entire marine food web at risk.

It’s not about swapping out internal combustion engines for electric ones. It’s about more than turning down the thermostat, or going vegan. It’s about local food and not industrial agriculture and concentrated animal feeding operations.

It means downsizing in a drastic way. It’s about massively reducing our consumption. It’s about substantial change, to our energy generation and use and to our lifestyles. It means unplugging from industrial capitalism and demolishing the military-industrial complex.

“Industrial civilization has been here less than 200 years, and the place is trashed,” the authors of the 2021 book Bright Green Lies wrote. They noted a 2017 report published in Nature found that deforestation, agriculture, and other land-use changes have reduced the global biomass of plants by more than 50%.

They shared a quote from Dutch ecologist Frans Vera: “Animals are drivers of habitat creation, the impetus behind biodiversity. Without them, you have impoverished, static, monotonous habitats with declining species. It’s the reason so many of our efforts at conservation are failing.”

The book’s three authors — Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert — said the solution is pretty straightforward. “First, we need to stop the ongoing destruction being caused by so-called green energy products, by oil and gas extraction, by coal mining and ore mining, by urban sprawl, by industrial agriculture, and by all the other million assaults on this planet that are perpetrated by industrial civilization,” they wrote. “And second, we need to help the land heal.”

The natural world can heal itself if we allow it. The COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse of what Mother Nature can do when we tamp down our consumption.

A chapter in Bright Green Lies is dedicated to healing solutions. Stopping deforestation and restoring logged areas would remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year than is generated by all the cars (there are an estimated 1.475 billion) on the planet. Stopping the annual global destruction of 2 million acres of coastal wetlands for development would save 550 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year. Increasing the organic matter and carbon content in the planet’s soil by 2% would offset 100% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

“But you can’t begin if your time and resources go toward false solutions,” the authors wrote. “That’s why the first step is to stop believing in bright green fairy tales that technology will save the planet. Instead, put your belief in soils, grasses, forests, seaweeds, and the billions of living beings who every moment are working to regenerate the conditions that support life and beauty on this planet.”

Are we, the human collective, willing to significantly change our ways? Something tells me we are not. But if we are, be prepared for the keepers of the status quo to respond in kind. They already have.

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion, according to a recent Guardian investigation.

If our appetite for energy and consumption remains gluttonous, more offshore wind is inevitable.

Monstrous destruction

There are 8.2 billion humans, and that number is projected to increase to 11 billion by the end of this century. We are already consuming an unsustainable amount of energy and resources that are destroying the fragile systems that make life — not just our own — possible.

Humans, especially those in the Global North, need to go on a diet. Our insatiable appetite is devouring the world. Let’s take a look at some of the destruction, to both ourselves and the natural world, being caused by our dissipation:

Every year about 706 million gallons of oil are estimated to be spilled into the ocean. Oil floats, so animals close to the surface, such as birds and marine mammals, are often sickened or killed. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, for example, resulted in the death of 250,000 seabirds, 3,000 sea otters, 1,000 harlequin ducks, 300 harbor seals, 250 eagles, and 22 orcas. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill killed 11 people, a million seabirds, 5,000 marine mammals, and 1,000 sea turtles.

The true extent of oil pollution released into United Kingdom waters by the fossil fuel industry has been “significantly underestimated” and it is putting marine wildlife at risk, according to a recent report. The conservation group Oceana found chronic oiling, defined as frequent, small-scale releases, into the North Sea was much higher than estimated due to an “opaque” system of reporting oil discharges and spills.

About 12,000 active offshore oil and gas platforms exist worldwide. Beginning in the 1940s, when ocean oil drilling began, the offshore fossil fuel industry expanded rapidly, and rigs are now located on the continental shelves of 53 countries. In the United States, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management manages nearly 2,300 active oil and gas leases with some 55,000 wells across 12 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. Nearly 60% of these wells are permanently or temporarily abandoned, posing serious environmental risks in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans.

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency opened a series of civil rights investigations into state agencies in Louisiana to examine whether permits granted in the highly polluted industrial corridor, known, tragically, as Cancer Alley, have violated Black citizens’ rights.

One investigation is examining whether the state’s health department violated the rights of Black residents and schoolchildren living near a neoprene facility “by allegedly failing in its duty to provide parish residents with necessary information about health threats.”

The neoprene plant, operated by a Japanese chemical company, is the only location in the United States to emit the pollutant chloroprene, listed by the EPA as a likely human carcinogen. Residential locations and an elementary school around the site often record levels of chloroprene well above the EPA’s lifetime exposure guidance levels.

Cancer Alley, along the banks of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, has some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations. The racial makeup of the area is 55% white and 40% Black, compared to state averages of 64% and 32% and national averages of 75% and 12%. The area’s poverty rate is 18.6%, compared to the national average of 11.1%.

In parts of Cancer Alley — think Allens Avenue on steroids and amphetamines — ProPublica has estimated lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times what the EPA deems acceptable.

Since 1947 some 1.7 million U.S. wells have been drilled by hydraulic fracturing. These fracked wells have produced more than 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The use of this method to extract fossil fuels exploded about two decades ago.

The use of fracking is particularly widespread in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It requires an enormous amount of water, as much as 5 million gallons per well, and routinely uses toxic chemicals, including methanol, benzene, naphthalene, and trimethylbenzene.

Fracking has been linked to a growing array of health problems, including childhood cancer, the premature death of elderly people, respiratory issues, and endocrine disruption. About 25% of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, according to scientists with the Endocrine Disruption Exchange.

The fracking boom in North Dakota has led to thousands of accidental releases of oil, wastewater, and other toxic fluids, according to a ProPublica investigation. Fracking wastewater is so toxic that it can’t be reused for other purposes, so the water used in the process is permanently removed from the water supply — a serious problem in drought-prone areas.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System stretches across what had been 3,500 acres (5.5 square miles) of pristine Mojave Desert. The facility’s construction destroyed habitat for threatened desert tortoises and killed rare plants. It took 36,000 cubic yards of concrete, 7,500 tons of steel, and 1,200 miles of cable to build.

“A rare and unusual type of solar power plant that concentrates sunlight in California is accidentally killing up to 6,000 birds every year, with staff reporting that the birds keep flying into its concentrated beams of sunlight, and spontaneously bursting into flames,” is the lede to a 2016 ScienceAlert story.

During the past two decades, Scotland has clear-cut some 17,000 acres (26 square miles) for land-based wind energy development.

Rare-earth metals are critical components of wind turbines. The control center of wind turbines is the nacelle, which contains large amounts of copper and rare-earth elements. For every ton of rare earth produced, the mining process yields 28.7 pounds of dust, 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters of waste gas, 75 cubic meters of wastewater, and a ton of radioactive residue. Rare-earth ores are often laced with radioactive thorium and uranium. Processing rare earths also requires huge amounts of carcinogenic toxins such as sulphates, ammonia, and hydrochloric acid.

China produces 85% of global supply of the 17 chemically similar elements crucial to smartphone, camera lens, and magnet manufacturing, and half that output is from the city of Baotou. The city’s rare-earth enterprises produce 10 million tons of wastewater annually. This toxic water, containing selenium and mercury contamination and a host of other nastiness, is pumped into tailings ponds, which can breach and pollute soil and nearby waterways.

Toxic mining sludge is typically impounded behind huge earthen dams that can fail. A dam collapse in 2015 near Mariana, Brazil, destroyed two villages, killed 19, polluted water supplies for 400,000 people, and released nearly 12 billion gallons of toxic waste into rivers and streams, according to a U.N. report.

“Entire fish populations — at least 11 tons — were killed immediately when the slurry buried them or clogged their gills,” according to the 70-page report.

The world’s largest iron-ore mine is in northern Brazil. The open-pit mine is estimated to contain about 7.2 billion metric tons of iron ore, plus gold, manganese, bauxite, copper, and nickel. The Carajás Mine is a clear-cut wasteland in what used to be part of the Amazon rainforest. Every year some 2,400 square miles of forest around Carajás are bulldozed, mostly to make charcoal used for smelting iron ore, according to the book Bright Green Lies.

The Carajás Mine and other iron ore mines in the Amazon basin have displaced tens of thousands of Indigenous people. A 2022 policy brief by the International Federation for Human Rights noted the high levels of air pollution associated with the area’s mining and the industry’s use of forced labor and child slavery.

Two mines (Tilden and Empire) in Marquette County, the largest county in land area in Michigan and the most populous county in the Upper Peninsula, extract 20% of U.S. iron ore. The massive diesel dump trucks used in the industry can weigh up to 400 tons and have 1,200-gallon fuel tanks that are routinely filled twice a day.

Near the Salton Sea in California, a company plans to build a data center to support artificial intelligence that would cover land the size of 15 football fields and require power that could support 425,000 homes.

If we want to save the planet, and keep turbines out of the ocean, we can’t be using industrial energy to fuel industrial capitalism. If we don’t want to change our devouring ways, we can’t keep punishing already-marginalized communities with the unhealthy consequences of our greed. It’s only fair, to humans anyway, to more equitably share the pain.

Note: Most ecologists believe biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate, with up to 150 species going extinct every day, according to scientists working with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. With nearly a million plant and animal species currently under threat, the ripple effect of the extinction of a single species can affect countless others, disrupting vital ecological functions and leading to the collapse of entire ecosystems.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.