It was a massive flatbed truck, flanked by smaller vehicles brandishing “oversized load” banners, carrying a huge white thing.
I think the first one I saw was in Ohio. But I know that by the time I passed Grand Island, Neb., I’d lost count.
What was it? At first, it looked like it could be a replacement for the Swords of Qādisīyah — that giant crossed-blades sculpture in central Baghdad.
And then, the aha: It was a propeller blade for a wind turbine, a really big one.
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I’ve seen plenty of wind farms, but I’d never seen the blades being transported for construction. Last week, I saw a lot of them.
Why? Because they were on the road, and so was I. My eight-year-old daughter and I were on a summer adventure. We drove more than 2,000 miles from Washington, D.C., to, eventually, Steamboat Springs, Colo. (Don’t worry, I did most of the highway driving.)
Something about seeing all those turbine propellers made me think of wartime mobilization, like FDR’s ramp-up during the Lend-Lease period or Josef Stalin’s decision to send Soviet heavy industry east of the Urals.
The comparison isn’t completely daft, either. The notion that we should move to a war footing on energy has been a reigning cliché of U.S. politics ever since Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office energy crisis address in 1977. “This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war’ — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.”
Ever since, we’ve been hearing that green must become the new red, white, and blue.
It’s difficult to catalogue all of the problems with this nonsense. For starters, the mission keeps changing. Is the green-energy revolution about energy independence? Or is it about fighting global warming? Or is it about jobs?
For most of the last few years, the White House and its supporters have been saying it’s about all three. But that’s never been true. If we wanted energy independence (and I’m not sure why we would) or if we wanted to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil (a marginally better proposition, given that Canada and often Mexico supply the U.S. with more oil than Saudi Arabia), we would massively expand our domestic drilling for oil and gas and our use of coal or carbon-free nuclear. That would also create lots of jobs that can’t be exported (you can’t drill for American oil in China, but we can, and do, buy lots of Chinese-made solar panels).
As for the windfall in green jobs, that has always been a con job.
For instance, Barack Obama came into office insisting that Spain was beating the U.S. in the rush for green jobs. Never mind that in Spain — where unemployment is now at 21 percent — the green-jobs boom has been a bust. One major 2009 study by researchers at King Juan Carlos University found that the country destroyed 2.2 jobs in other industries for every green job it created, and the Spanish government has spent more than half a million euros for each green job created since 2000. Wind-industry jobs cost a cool 1 million euros apiece.
The record in America has been no better, Obama’s campaign stump speeches notwithstanding. The New York Times, which has been touting the green agenda in its news pages for years, admitted last week that “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show.” Even Obama’s former green-jobs czar concedes the point, as do other leading Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles.
Perhaps the most pathetic part of the war to green America is how unwarlike it really is. The New York Times also reported that California’s “weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry,” a direct sop to labor unions. And afterward, the inflated costs made the program too expensive for homeowners.
Green jobs, like shovel-ready jobs, proved a myth in no small part because President Obama is eager to talk as if this green stuff were the moral equivalent of war, but he’s not willing or able to do things a real war requires.
What we’re left with is not the moral equivalent of war but the moral equivalent of a quagmire. A very expensive quagmire.
Like in the movie "Patton" when the General says handcarts in the frozen snow are appearing in his mind (He is comparing Hitler's fall to Napoleon’s retreat from Russia, you know, the reincarnation bit) I keep seeing the old broken windmill that is always creaking and slowly turning to denote a dead or dying town in all western movies or television shows.
The question is: What are we going to do with all this junk when we finally grow up and stop all of this guilt nonsense about carbon energy? I guess we could clean all the feathers and bird guts off of them and melt them down for beer cans. (I’m assuming they are made out of aluminum) And why haven’t the evil corporations covered them with advertisements? I think the spinning props would look pretty cool if they were painted up to look like Camel Filters.
My favorite is 'experts say'. It's the most abused of all lefty obfuscations. Particularly on the occasions when the 'experts' are neither named nor shown, as is so often the case in lefty media. A few months ago I briefly glanced at an NBC story about the poor performance of public schools, [I thought, an astonishing admission for the left-leaning network], as usual the gist of their story was to shift blame to anyone other than Teachers and Unions and the Democrats they endorse. Of course the reporter landed on insufficient funding as the root problem, and when Brian Williams asked his underling, "Do the experts agree on this?" She blithely replied, "All the experts I spoke to agreed with me." No experts were shown, named, quoted or credentials provided. With that, the piece abruptly concluded. To this day, I don't know whether I was more amazed at the mind boggling childishness of their lazy deductions, at the obvious attempt to spread lies, or at the incredible unprofessionalism of it all.
Jonah, Jonah, Jonah. You know when the Democrats talk about an energy program, the point is not to create actual energy. Here, let me translate a few Democrat phrases for you:
Energy program: A stylized fantasy involving windmills, rainbows, fairy dust and sops to a few unions. Any actual energy produced is ancillary.
Family planning: Killing fetuses.
Jobs program: A raise for federal employees, extension of unemployment and war on any entrepreneurs and businesses that can actually create jobs.
Peace process: A way to empower enemies while getting a lot of allies killed - and condemning allies for it.
War: Retreat - or a way to empower enemies while getting a lot of our soldiers killed and apologizing to our enemies for it.
Health plan: A (real) war on medical innovation. Similar to family planning with old white folks and registered Republicans playing the role of the fetus.
White: The new black.
Black: You must be racist.
Hope this helps the next time you are forced to listen to the president or establishment media engage in DemSpeak.
The problem with the so called “green energy” is Physics. It is rather very simple to understand that green energy it is not going to work at the present moment and that it is not an efficient source of energy.
Take the following simple equation: Energy Efficiency = Energy Output/ Energy Cost.
From the above equation it is easy to deduce that Lower Energy Output and higher Energy Cost would lead to lower Energy Efficiency. Higher Energy Output and lower Energy Cost would lead to higher Energy Efficiency.
If you take wind power its Energy Output (Watts) is lower than that fossil fuel power and for certain it is must more expensive to build and produce than fossil fuel power. Therefore wind power is much less efficient than fossil fuel power. Also wind power is totally depending on constant and strong stream of “wind” to generate power and if this does not exist than there is no power.
Similar analysis can be done for solar power and the conclusion would be that solar power is much less efficient than fossil fuel power.
Again, it is just Physics not politics and Physics wins all the time.
Green Energy with it current form and technologies has failed and Physics has won, it is a matter of majority of people realizing it, they are beginning to realize it, and they would fully be realized in few years.
Nice bit of writing Jonah I like how you turned the "moral equivalent of war" bit into the "moral equivalent of a quagmire" Very nice. Yes, this subject is where conservatives should pounce all the time when the Dems claim they believe in science and Republicans do not. If they are so big on the science they would drop this green jobs meme in second.
Like so many other words that liberals kidnap, "green" has been relegated to a curse word in my estimation and I can't even stand to see anything green, even my grass, without feeling revolted.
I hear ya. Look at my moniker, red. I use it because my real name is a shade of red and now red is being taken back, red state.
Someday we will take green back. For now think, "Lean Green Fighting Machine".
The Green Revolution continues apace. The EPA will be shutting down 18% of coal burning power plants over the next 3 years. Yes, many of these are older and were grandfathered in by Congress in 1971; however, what will be replacing them? Texas refused to grant permits for a half dozen coal burning power plants in 2005. These plants were to provide power to the new natural gas pumping stations going online. The rolling back-outs in Texas during peak energy usage (both in Winter and Summer) are a result of the Green Revolution. The massive wind farm projects in Texas of the last decade do not provide even a fraction of the energy needed during peak usage.
Now, extrapolate that across the entire United States. What is happening in Texas will soon be happening in other parts of the US in coming years. You cannot replace something with nothing, which is what Obama and his Green minions at the EPA are doing.
And there is even more bad news. The EPA has declared war on nitrates. What it did to CO2, it intends to do via nitrogen. Nitrates can be found in both agricultural products and in sewage systems. If the EPA gets its way, farmers may have to cut back on its consumption of nitogen based fertilizers, and waste water treatment systems make have to be re-vamped. Besides being in the dark,and being cold you may also go hungry (which is okay with the First Lady, as she believes we are all too fat). The science of nitrate contamination is about as dubious as the science of carbon based Global Warming.
Power and control...the lessons of history are on display again. This time, literally, power is being used to control the masses, based upon control of the message - climate. Egad, when are the tools of idiocy going to learn that all the money in the world will not change what nature is hell bent on doing. If an ice age begins, adaptation is the only solution, not trying to find the worlds' thermostat...which doesn't exist!!!
Lastly, I find it ironic that most environmentalists are aethists, yet have a God complex, in that they believe they can alter the worlds' climate with a stroke of their policy pen...pathetic.
Jonah -- My husband and I were on a cross country trip, but we did the southern route. We were in some small town in Oklahoma and drove by this sculpture. We stopped to take a picture. It was only after we read the sign that we realized it was a giant blade from a windmill. It was truly beautiful, and Oklahoma has all that "wind sweeping down the plain," but geez, what a mess wind energy (and solar) is for the landscape and for the critters and for the taxpayers.
When I was a boy, my cousins and I used to camp at an indian cave that was located in a canyon near Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. I recently had the opportunity to drive through there...that ancient, old cave and the surrounding area was destroyed to make way for a wind farm. Green my hairy white tush.
I work at an IRS building in Dallas Texas. Right out side my office there is a three story parking lot where the installed some solar panals on the roof. After they spend 6 months building them we notices that the panals are in the shade of the building for 10 hours of the day.
Apart from the "moral" aspect of this argument the plain physics of wind powered electricity should be telling us, not now.
In the National Review print edtion a few years ago someone much brighter than Mr. Obama examined the wind power effort by Denmark. (Psst Mr. Obama, Denmark is not one of the 57 states it is a little thumb of land jutting out into the North Sea on Europe's northwestern coast.)
The North Sea can be quite rowdy. Anyone taking a ferry from Hull England as an example to say Rotterdam, Nederlands will have an opportunity to experience significant wind. I've done it three times, it can be exhilirating to say the least.
In short, while the North Sea regularly has ample wind to generate plenty of electricity it simply could not be counted on to occur between 8 to 5 or whenever peak demand exists. The best the Danes were able to do was 18 to 20% of peak demand and that only on days when the "most" wind occurred on cue. The Danes effort was an all-out government effort to establish wind as a major power source and they poured disproportionate amounts of funding into it. They eventually abandoned the goal of wind as a primary source.
Why? Because primarily storage technology does not yet exist to "even out" peak generation versus peak demand. Electricity doesn't idle when not used, it has to "move". (That's an oversimplification but illustrative.)
If we had the storage technology worked out the Chevy Volt wouldn't go "dry" after 40 or 50 miles or whatever the limit is.
Storage is the big technological hurdle but the big investment hurdle is the new grid that would be required to displace energy generated in North Dakota and send it to Texas for example. The current grid will not accommodate the higher voltage transmission necessary for electricity to be "sent" that far.
A better approach would be to use the experience of the US Navy. They have operated and maintained nuclear generating plants in ships for decades. Why not get big by going small?
Take the Navy design and individually power all the small towns (locally) in America that are beyond the current reach of wind power. Thus leaving the big towns to obtain power either from large regional nuclear plants supplementing natural gas/coal/hydro production.
"Green" is probably the biggest scam in the history of the world.
Economics and physics will win in the end, and more and more people (voters) are figuring it out. Articles like Jonah's help (we can't have too many debunkings.)
I found the MSNBC reaction to Perry's climate change comments interesting. They insisted "most people" would react with horror at his anti-science attitude; actually polls show most Americans agree with Perry. The last thing they want to do is have a genuine debate about it (now shut up and drink your liberal kool-aid.)
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