Gulden, Wayne
The Sierra Club of Canada (SC) has long been a vocal opponent of nuclear and fossil fuel electricity generation … and were an early and fervent supporter of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, which set up the framework to install and pay for large amounts of renewable energy. As the Ontario government has placed some of the resulting wind projects in Important Bird Areas, executive director John Bennett has come under increasing criticism for his apparent indifference to the inevitable deaths and destruction of habitat of some of Ontario’s iconic and even endangered species. In response to his critics he gave a couple of interns the task of writing a report to buttress his support of wind energy.
The result, “The Real Truth About Wind Energy: A Literature Review on Wind Turbines in Ontario” [1], was published June 10, 2011.
Summary
This entire report, with its “Real Truth” emphasis, makes a mockery of any concept of truth. The Sierra Club started out to write something, anything, that justified their continuing support of wind energy in Ontario. They then went out looking for supporting references, or at least references that could be made to appear to support their justifications.
In passage after passage, 51 of them, I showed where their research was incomplete, biased, sloppy, even borderline fraudulent. And after preparing this miserable excuse for a report, they then have the gall to present it to the world as the “Real Truth about Wind Energy”. The quicker this report dies the better, and not just because it is pro-wind- energy. The Sierra Club could be a valuable resource in protecting – really protecting – our environment, but not given its current behaviour. The longer this farce continues the higher the risk that the Sierra Club will find itself increasingly irrelevant, and that would be a shame.
Download original document: “Critique of The Real Truth About Wind Energy [2]”
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/documents/critique-of-the-real-truth-about-wind-energy/
URLs in this post:
[1] “The Real Truth About Wind Energy: A Literature Review on Wind Turbines in Ontario”: https://docs.wind-watch.org/sierra_club-wind_report_0.pdf
[2] Critique of The Real Truth About Wind Energy: https://docs.wind-watch.org/sierra-club-critique-gulden.pdf