Tag: wind power

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

crossposted then reclisted at Agent Orange

Recently, Jerome a Paris and afew from the European Tribune published a piece in New Scientist on why having sufficient wind turbines in an energy portfolio has been observed to lower energy prices to consumers.

After tweeting that article, I started to receive tweets with links to the anti-wind conservative echo chamber, including The American Thinker, and the Oil-money founded and partly funded Cato Institue.

The piece I am looking at today is a brilliant example of the echo-chamber shell game: how you fill up the echo chamber with outdated, irrelevant, or partial and misleading facts so that there are “facts! facts!” that can be cited in social media, complete with demands “answer the facts!” by those who either are pushing a line for strategic reasons or have been taken in by the argument.

Entitled “Wind Energy’s Ghosts”, the information in the piece is familiar to anyone who has participated in online discussion of wind power or renewable energy in general and has encountered the oil or coal industry sponsored and inspired pushbask.

Oh, no you don’t!

You’re not doing that!

Not-In-My-Back-Yard!!!  

This is perhaps one of the most natural of human reactions.

Sludge plant? I might poop but don’t put that upwind of me.

Oil Refinery? I’ll drive as much as I want but don’t let that cancer-causing behemoth ruin my view or threaten my kids’ health.

Prison? Put the bums away, far away from me.

Not-In-My-Back-Yard!!!

Natural and understandable doesn’t make NIMBYism right or correct.

Yesterday was the anniversary of some mammoth multi-state dust storms.  Robert Geiger (AP) wrote on 4/15/35:

Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains.

The name “Dust Bowl” stuck, first coined on today’s date 74 years ago.  The rains didn’t return until four years later.  When the dust settled in April 1935, scenes like this were repeated throughout the high plains region.

Crops were ruined.  Farms produced nothing.  Livestock died en masse.  There was no one to sell to.  People abandoned them in droves, with little more than the clothes on their back to show for many years of hard work building their homesteads.

The 1930s Dust Bowl is often referred to as a natural disaster.  But that’s not quite right.  Human activities, en masse, had everything to do with it.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.

                                                                                                      — Emma Goldman

California is FINALLY getting it!!  

Lyrics are from Loreena McKennit’s Mummer’s Dance

When in the springtime of the year

When the trees are crowned with leaves

When the ash and oak, and the birch and yew

Are dressed in ribbons fair

Spring = Solar lawnmower

The Enviromower, which we observed back here, was conceived in Australia and is also sold throughout Europe, the UK and New Zealand. And in North America, except there it goes by the name of Neuton. It’s a battery-powered electric mower. As we buy accredited 100% Solar GreenPower from our energy utility, our Enviromower is, in essence, powered by the sun.

The battery is a sealed unit of two linked 12V lead-acid type batteries. It can be removed from the mower, or left in-situ to be recharged. This takes about 12-16 hours. (I originally had my eye on the 36V Bosch Rotak LI with its lithium ion batteries, which are said to charge in one hour! But these mowers seem to be only available in Europe.)

However, from my perspective, the red coloured Enviromower Eco 500 can handle a standard suburb yard with aplomb. It cuts grass very well. It gives a clean, even cut, albeit a little narrower (35.5cm or 14″) than most petrol mowers. Three modes of mowing are possible: attaching the included grass catcher, using the included rear deflector to let the clippings fall behind the cut, or the included mulching plug. This latter attachment keeps the clippings next to the blades, so they’re sliced and diced fine enough to fall down as useful nutrient for improved lawn.