I very much like your idea of looking at historic data on energy impacts , and I think it would go a long way toward fleshing out the whole picture. After reading your paper, I sat down for most of a day and compared lifetime production to lifetime permitted area for a bunch of mines all across Appalachia as well as Indiana and Montana. Those data were pretty iffy in the paper, though I trace problems with mine impact numbers back to Keolian’s paper which you cited and not yours. But it would be a real service to the debate to get better numbers out there. And I understand well that it was nearly impossible to track down landuse impact numbers for mines – best I can tell, good published numbers don’t exist. I’m open to any ideas on how to get better data out there.

If the debate weren’t so immediately important to the climate bill, I think I’d have been more intent on improving the science rather than trashing it. But in the future, I hope our efforts will be more in a collaborative vein than a conflictual one. As the one who initiated the hostile tone, I apologize and take responsibility for that.

As far as the issue of counting the direct footprint of wind (the 2-5% number you mentioned) versus the fragmentation effect (the larger numbers mentioned in the paper), I get your point. The number we give in the paper is essentially the number of acres that wind companies will need to get leases on to put turbines up. It certainly is not all lost as habitat for most species, but for a few sensitive species it is effectively no longer habitat. We could have done the calculations without the fragmentation effect, but then for fairness I would’ve also not included the fragmentation effect for geothermal, oil, and natural gas extraction. That would’ve made their footprint (and land-use intensity of production) smaller as well.

In the same way, I think your point that we didn’t look at the spatial effects of coal mining on riverine systems (sometimes far from the point of mining) is a good one. We also didn’t include oil spills, nuclear power meltdowns, etc. I couldn’t find a tractable and realistic way to estimate those effects consistently.

Actually, one calculation I would like to do (which the media has asked me about) is the equivalent historical number- that is, how much total land in the U.S. has been affected by energy production? It’s much harder to estimate this, because of the complexities of bad historical data, site reclamation, etc. Still, it’d be fun to do. And I think with a historical lens coal would probably have the biggest total impact to date. Happy to work on that with you at some future point.

Rob

I appreciate your addressing this issue and want to first say that I’m sorry my criticisms came off as harsh – on re-reading the post it is pretty harsh, despite the attempts toward the end to soften it. But I assure you that I in no way meant to imply that scientific debate should be restricted or that your paper should be “burned.” Neither do I think landuse patterns are irrelevant to the debate on climate.

The point I was making was that the original paper did not accurately portray either the impacts of coal power or wind power and that the assumptions that went into it led to an enormously distorted picture of those relative impacts. While it wasn’t possible to present all the wonky analysis in a Huffington Post piece, I re-analyzed almost every detail of your data and am certain that the analysis would have been turned on it’s head, had you used more justifiable numbers. That, of course, is leaving liquid fuels aside – but everyone already knows those impacts are enormous and unsustainable and those alone would have generated little interest.

For wind, the literature you cited indicated that turbines disturb between 2 and 5 acres directly, which would have been the appropriate number to use if you weren’t considering the effects of fragmentation and avoidance behaviors from coal and uranium mines. On the other hand, if you were considering secondary impacts then that standard should have been applied consistently (instead of only for renewables). Moreover, the NRC study you cited in regard to such impacts for wind turbines would indicate that avoidance impacts were in the range of a 100-200m radius around turbines. If you assume the average turbine is 2MW, that would imply an avoidance area between 4 and 16 acres, rather than 50-60.

If you had used the studies indicating that the impact of strip mining on interior forests in Appalachia was 2-5 times greater than the loss of forest area alone, you would have found that coal’s footprint is greater than that of wind and solar.

Given the widespread coverage of the study, which largely focused on these relative impacts, I felt – and still do – that the concept of energy sprawl has been distorted to the extent that it only harms the debate. My point was that climate advocates would do best to stop using the term, as it would only reinforce the distorted picture of the relative impacts of wind and solar vs coal and nuclear. Those distortions do an enormous disservice to the people I work with whose lives and communities have been devastated by mountaintop removal coal mining. They are working hard to build a vision for a new economy in their communities that, for 100 years, have seen almost no opportunity outside of coal.

But I closed with “burn this blog post after reading” to add dramatic effect to that point, not to imply that the original paper should be burned. I hope that you and others will continue to work to advance our scientific understanding of the impacts of our land-use decisions, but do so in a way that is far more careful in choosing the assumptions that go into your analysis. There is a lot at stake right now for our energy future and any studies like this are going to come under intense scrutiny from people like myself.

Best,
Matt Wasson