Busted blades not a big deal

Burning Fossil Fuels Is the Real Accident

By Hans Scholl / Climate policymaker

NOT a tragedy...

All technologies in our modern lives have occasional accidents, or malfunctions. Sometimes this causes damage or even unfortunate loss of human life. 

Planes, cars, and trains crash; freight ships sink, or take entire bridges down blocking Baltimore Harbor for months; freight containers are lost overboard and pose hazards to other ships; and two of the space shuttles were lost with their crews.

The Exxon Valdez caused a huge oil spill polluting the Alaskan coastline, and the accident at the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig killed 11 workers and a million seabirds and flooded the Gulf of Mexico with 200 million gallons of oil. Modern pharmaceuticals and surgery have known side-effects and risks.

THIS is!

The normal response after an accident is to perform a thorough investigation into the root cause, and then take action to eliminate that cause and prevent similar accidents from happening again, as is being done after the recent loss of the turbine blade at the Vineyard Wind offshore wind facility off Nantucket.

What is not normal is to single out offshore wind technology and suggest a moratorium as an appropriate action after one malfunction. 

Nobody demands to abandon planes, cars, trains, container ships, oil tankers and rigs, or space flight because of occasional accidents. We take our medicines and undergo surgery, despite the risks.

However, there is one technology — the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas, and gasoline) — where every use leads to an accident: generating and releasing greenhouse gases that pollute the atmosphere, creating a heating blanket and overheating the Earth that lead to extreme weather, storms, flooding, and sea level rise and destroying the things we love and knowingly harming our children and future generations. 

A root cause analysis into the failure of this technology has been done, as early as the 1960s, and leads, with the vast majority of scientists agreeing, to only one solution: stop burning fossil fuels and instead move to cleaner, safer, and cheaper alternative energies and technologies.

Wind energy is one of them. Embracing offshore wind will allow Rhode Island to move toward 100% green energy by 2033, one of the biggest contributions our state can make toward assuring that future generations can prosper and live in a healthier environment.

Hans Scholl, Ph.D., is a Barrington resident and a member of Climate Action Rhode Island and the Environment Council of Rhode Island. He works with the General Assembly and communities on climate and resilience policy and action.