Your story on the proposed wind farm in Idaho provides an excellent case study on the environmental challenges of replacing much of our nation’s energy infrastructure with renewables (“The fight over a windswept landscape,” December 2021). While renewables are great at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, they are not immune from numerous other environmental issues, and they are particularly challenged with issues like land use and viewscape.
Given the enormous amount of fossil-energy generation that must be replaced, it is unlikely that there is enough land that is both suitable for energy production and free from environmental impacts; difficult choices will have to be made. This discussion needs to be a national conversation, not a project-by-project one.
Neil Snyder
Evergreen, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Letter: Wind’s challenges.
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