A Rhode Island company plans to begin construction in 2014 on the Atlantic coast, of the US’s first offshore wind farm.
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” Thomas Edison.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
A shalom course for power boats?
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And a new Olympic sport is born!
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I won’t demonize it but I’ll point out that it costs a lot more money per killowatt and actually more lives (?!?) per killowatt than any normal power source.
I won’t go into the environmental impact because I don’t have the data for offshore wind farms, only for terrestrial ones.
On the other hand, if this is the same farms that the beach residents were complaining about, they just need to shut up as their specific complaints are ridiculous.
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Wind and solar are still very much in develpment stages, but that hasn’t blinded nations around the world from forging ahead to help the technologies mature and become more cost efficient. And no private company is going to do that without gov’t help. I think this is exactly the kind of thing that we should be investing in. It’s our future.
Sure, with wind, you’re right that they do have a biggg carbon footprint and that is one of the things that needs to be addresssed. But what’s the cost (carbon, human,, wealth) of our endless oil wars and how does that compare? Even WWII – the Japanese were very motivated after we embargoed their oil imports.
The beach residents? Screw them. Perhaps they’d prefer some nice clean quiet oil rigs off their pristine shores?
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I have no problem with this farce as long as it is privately finanaced. But to get back to Edison. Great man, sometimes incredibly wrong . He favored DC over AC electricity .
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And of course Alan, when he was wrong – which no one else is, ever – it was because he was probably a ‘liberal’..
His friend and neighbor was Henry Ford, a famous Nazi sympathizer and the money behind “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. But in spite of that, the two men found plenty of other stuff to challenge their wonderful minds. They were not ‘enemies’ as they would be expecteed to be today.
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Private financing will never happen. Don’t forget it was the Federal Govt that electrified half this country. We once understood what investment in the future meant.
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Great man, sometimes incredibly wrong . He favored DC over AC electricity(Alan)
So true, though it does make you wonder where we are wrong. 😉
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You know the old saying TFT: “History is written by the winners”
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A Rhode Island company plans to begin construction in 2014 on the Atlantic coast, of the US’s first offshore wind farm.
I’m fine with this if:
1. They get no more and no less of the subsidies that oil gets. Breaks for manufacturing etc.
2. They are subject to the same laws that allows penalties and lawsuits for killing birds that oil has to abide by.
3. We measure thses guys and watch how well they do.
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Hey pino – sounds perfectly fair; give ’em help and hold them to standards . . . but that penalty for killing birds thing is new to me!
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but that penalty for killing birds thing is new to me!
So, it’s against the law to kill birds. And VERY against the law to kill endangered ones:
Here HuffPo describes the crimes and over here is the double standard.
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The oil companies kill birds when they’re careless and their tankers spill. That’s quite a different thing from windmills just operating as they’re designed to operate. Do airlines have to pay penalties for birds they kill in flight?
I agree with accountability, but let’s compare apples to apples.
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The oil companies kill birds when they’re careless and their tankers spill.
Thou dost protest too much.
They had to fight in court to plea down the charges for 12 birds – ducks mind you. Meanwhile the wind turbines are killing 70 golden eagle and 2,400 raptors. And that’s just in one farm.
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Birds are going to die.
But it will pail in comparison to the number of sea creatures that have lost their lives due to the oil companies over the last 90 years or so.
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Great point Sam !
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Yep.
And the manner of death will be somewhat less atrocious. I have seen those gulf pictures, and that is just…evil.
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It’s about time.
We are about 50 years behind Europe.
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Birds will pass away sadly, as Sam stated. Its either a species of birds that live and migrate out in the middle of the ocean, or we continue to drill our green ball hollow till we shake out all possible oil and coals. Oh, America.
-Sharone Tal
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Welcome Sharone and it’s nice to hear from someone in the biz. I sometimes think that our mindless and destructive pursuit of fossil fuels has an equal – our destructive demand for beef, for MacDonalds and such, incentivizing the destruction of the world’s rain forestss as we clear cut for new grazing land.
Maybe we deserve whatever we get.
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