Very well said. It would seem that you have had an epiphany. There is so much emotion and passion in the discussion that facts are not allowed to carry any weight. The truth of the matter is that this country is no longer capable of making rational decisions. Everything has to be based on what sounds good.
The UN report that the bovine population of the planet contributes more to Global warming than man doesn’t get much ink. The fact that the polar ice caps on Mars doesn’t indicate that the sun output is on the increase. The simple fact that the actual output of the sun has been measured to have shown a slow but steady increase over the past 100 years or so is not allowed to confuse my emotions with fact.
What I like is when these oblivicons say “Yeah! Ethanol!”; they are forgetting that if we were to make all of our surplus farm output into ethanol, 1/3 of the world would suffer from near starvation. You can’t provide fuel and feed the world from the same crop at the same time.
Let’s put wind farms off the coast of Mass. Even though they would not be visible from land, Teddy Kennedy says NIMBY. So many locations we could put wind farms, but we may kill some little birds. The list of irrational choices based on emotion seem endless.
So; let us build refineries, let us drill for oil off shore, let us drill for oil on a total of less than 10 acres out of 200,000 acres of natural preserve, let us build many Nuclear power generators, let us do all of the choices so that we are not only energy independent, but not tied to a single technology for our way of life.
Enough of a rant. Thank you for listening. You said it well in far fewer words. I salute you.
Be well.
I like 90% of your argument. Except the windfarm part.
The Cape windfarm can't generate enough electricity in its lifetime to equal the cost of the fish that can't be caught in the Wind farm's footprint should it be built. When you crunch the numbers, using today's fish and energy prices, job loss, need for retraining, and lost business to manufacturers, boatbuilders, chandleries, etc, (it takes 6 full time jobs to support the infrastructure for one full time commercial fisherman. Between 4 and 5 of those jobs are within the same region as the boat) to the people of Cape Cod, buying the electricity elsewhere is easier on the wallet. Why should 400 fishing jobs (equating to about 2,000 local jobs) and massive economic loss hit the Cape so that a for-profit house full of smelly hippies in the Midwest can look smug and become fabulously wealthy? Electricity on the Cape won't be any cheaper than it is elsewhere.
I believe, personally, that the next question to be asked is whether or not we should create new economic losses and entitlement in the name of crafting policy? If the answer is yes, than there you go, I guess.
We could solve, that, however, by building the farm on the Kennedy compound. Eminent Domain time!