How in the world is a zero emissions engineering marvel dystopian?! You know what the long terms effects of cooling towers are? If feels more humid down wind!
Because they look like large outlets of coloured air.
Coloured air coming out of an something is the default way of depicting air pollution.
Even if it is just water vapour, it has a big enough shock factor.
People have a serious bias towards what they can see. They can see protesters but they can't see pollution. Effective protests are hard to ignore. So they see protesters as a bigger problem than polluters.
If grown as a crop I can see that. But taking from forests changes the forest permanently. I see your point, I guess I'm taking issue with what I associate with a renewable resource when talking about energy. That is is "green" and not bad for the environment.
Saying trees are carbon capures so its carbon neutral just seems crazy to me. Burning wood emits more carbon dioxide than coal for every unit of electricity produced.
The older the tree the more carbon it can store, which is in its wood. Mature as in 35-75 years. Cutting down mature trees out of forests and planting new ones isn't carbon neutral. But I can see an argument for planting tree plots in already cleared land to get a system set up for rotations.
Not a defender of them but they have specific plantations for growing the fuel just for this. So the idea is that it's a closed loop. Carbon is captured from the air as the trees grow and then that very same carbon is burnt for energy generation. So no extra carbon is added to the atmosphere when you consider the whole cycle.
Compare with coal and gas where carbon is dug up from under the ground and added to the atmosphere and never removed again.