Category Archives: Energy Tough Love Blog

Energy Tough Love Blog – A weblog from Community Energy Systems

Helen Thomas And Energy Policy – I found a massive void

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I know what it is like when Steven Hawking discovered Black Holes. Helen Thomas was a journalist for 55 years. The dean of the Washington Press core. The author of several books and a columnist for the Hearst Press Organization. To top that off – She IS Lebanese or more properly of Lebanese extraction. She is also very outspoken as a result about the middle east. You would expect that the word oil or the word energy would have been penned by her at some point. However I spent 2 hours looking and this column on the auto industry was all I found. There were thousands of articles about her “anti-semitic” remarks and her resignation. Even articles about politics but nothing else and I wouldn’t  have even found this is if it wasn’t for the nice gentleman at Slate.

http://www.slate.com/id/2080034/

It is not even really on topic because she doesn’t even mention CAFE standards or electric cars. But it is all I got.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/19067580/detail.html

Obama Tough On Automakers, Workers

Wall Street Higher Priority For President

Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama seems to be more interested in propping up Wall Street than saving the car companies and the auto workers in Detroit.He displayed his “get tough” side when he laid down the law to General Motors and Chrysler, whose restructuring plans had displeased the White House auto task force.The president gave the car makers a choice of coming up with tougher plans or face bankruptcy. GM was given 60 days to produce a plan for Obama, who has never ran a company, and Chrysler was given 30 days, with a threat to end its federal aid unless it merged with Fiat, the Italian automaker.

Bailout funds were Obama’s price for their concessions.Although he has allowed a few financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers to go down the drain in the current economic crisis, the administration’s financial advisers said other banking houses were too big to be allowed to fail

If only the Obama administration also had said that the thousands upon thousands of jobless auto workers and suppliers were too important to be allowed to drift into poverty.The bankers and big investors are taking big bailouts while the blue collar workers are left out in the cold. So what else is new? In an extraordinary government intervention, Obama forced Rick Wagoner, GM’s chief executive, out of the company as a symbol that times were changing, dramatically.Though he was picked to take the fall, Wagoner won’t go hungry. His retirement package at G.M. is reportedly worth more than $20 million as he heads out the door.

In rejecting General Motor’s proposed make over, Obama’s auto task force said GM had been “far too slow” to adapt and needed a more aggressive restructuring blueprint.Obama, who wants it both ways, said GM ’s proposed plan wasn’t tough enough but that he was “absolutely confident that G.M. can rise again.”The White House’s handling of the auto situation raises the question of whether the government has a role in dictating to business in a free society. In my opinion, the current state of the economy calls for more regulation of banks and businesses, if only to save them from their own rapacious stupidity.

If the Obama administration has its way, GM will have a new look. The giant company would have fewer models, brands and dealers. Thousands more jobs would be cut and more concessions will be asked of the thousands of bondholders and the United Automobile Workers union.

The 100-year-old once-mighty GM may be reduced to producing only Chevrolets and Cadillacs. Its European division may have seen its last days. James Womack, chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute of Cambridge, Mass. — a company that promotes efficiency — declared: “The old GM is dead and that needs to be said.”

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More tomorrow.

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Joe Klein And Energy Policy – He is Pro Nukes

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I think this idea is terrible until we solve the storage problems, the contamination in production problems and the energy deficit problems. Still i said this meditation was all about what “leftist” columnists think.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2027941,00.html

A Bipartisan Energy Solution: Nuclear Power

By Joe Klein Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010

Yes, yes, I know that the idea of an Apollo program to make America energy-independent has been proposed so often that it’s become a cliche. Inevitably, such proposals collapse into arrant tree-huggery and eat-your-peasitude. A tax on fossil fuels, often camouflaged as cap and trade, inevitably lurks in the background. And yes, yes, I’m in favor of such a tax, but the public isn’t, and the Republicans certainly aren’t, and Kennedy never imposed a moon tax. But there are aspects of a clean-energy program that Republicans can support. Republicans are in favor of national security, which is where the Operation Free tactics may be of great use. And Republicans like nuclear power.

When Dwight Eisenhower wanted to build an expensive, national superhighway system inspired by the autobahns he’d seen in Germany during World War II, he proposed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. If Obama wants to get a major stimulus program through the next Congress, he should propose the National Defense Nuclear Power Act. And make it big: a plan to blast past the current financing and licensing quagmires and break ground on 25 new nuclear plants between now and 2015. (See why Obama’s nuclear bet may not pay off.)

Some environmentalists still see nuclear power as unclean, though their argument has been wilting over time as France and Japan, among others, have proved the safety and efficacy of such power and climate change has emerged as our most pressing environmental problem. There will be those who argue, correctly, that given the current abundance of natural gas, nuclear power is too expensive — but it won’t be in the future, and the price can be dramatically reduced if the government provides direct, no-interest construction loans rather than loan guarantees. The coal companies won’t like it either. After all, a robust nuclear-power program will have more impact on domestic coal than on foreign-oil consumption. But who cares? The program would be wildly stimulative: 25 new plants could produce more than 70,000 construction jobs. Nuclear energy produces about a fifth of U.S. electricity now; this could raise that figure closer to a third. And the loans will be paid back, over time, by utility customers.

The National Defense Nuclear Power Act isn’t the comprehensive energy plan we need. It’s classic eat-your-ice-cream governance. But it’s a start. And we need to get started.

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More tomorrow.

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Paul Krugman And Energy Policy – California and what can be accomplished

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It is so basic – save money on energy and there is more to spend on other things.

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http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/02/paul_krugman_co.html

Friday, February 23, 2007

Paul Krugman: Colorless Green Ideas

Now that the scientific debate over global warming is all but over, Paul Krugman looks at what we can do limit greenhouse gas emissions:

Colorless Green Ideas, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it.

Aside from a few dead-enders on the political right, climate change skeptics seem to be making a seamless transition from denial to fatalism. In the past, they rejected the science. Now, with the scientific evidence pretty much irrefutable, they insist that it doesn’t matter because any serious attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions is politically and economically impossible.

Behind this claim lies the assumption, … that any substantial cut in energy use would require a drastic change in the way we live. To be fair, some people in the conservation movement seem to share that assumption.

But the assumption is false. Let me tell you about … an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle centered on automobiles and single-family houses.

The name of the economy? California.

There’s nothing heroic about California’s energy policy… [T]he state has adopted … conservation measures that are … the kind of drab, colorless stuff that excites only real policy wonks. Yet the cumulative effect has been impressive…

The energy divergence between California and the rest of the United States dates from the 1970s. Both the nation and the state initially engaged in significant energy conservation after that decade’s energy crisis. But conservation in most of America soon stalled…

In California, by contrast, the state continued to push policies designed to encourage conservation, especially of electricity. And these policies worked.

People in California have always used a bit less energy … because of the mild climate. But the difference has grown much larger since the 1970s. Today, the average Californian uses about a third less total energy than the average American, uses less than 60 percent as much electricity, and … emit[s] only about 55 percent as much carbon dioxide.

How did the state do it? In some cases conservation was mandated directly, through energy efficiency standards for appliances and rules governing new construction. Also, regulated power companies were given new incentives to promote conservation…

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More tomorrow.

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Chuck Todd And Energy Policy – What does the President think

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So this isn’t exactly what Todd thinks but you can sorta tell by the questions he asks, where he is on energy policy.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38277607/ns/msnbc_tv-the_daily_rundown/

Chuck Todd interviews President Obama

Chuck Todd sits down with President Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., exclusively for NBC News

TRANSCRIPT

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — CHUCK TODD: Mr. President, thank you very much.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Great to be here, Chuck. Thank you.

CHUCK TODD: All right, let’s start with why you’re here. It’s another groundbreaking for one of these battery plants, an attempt to show some positive results from a stimulus program that is being received a little more skeptically by the public now, even as opposed to where things were 15 months ago. Why the difference?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well — the — the first thing to know is specifically what’s happening here in Holland, Michigan, but also all across the country. You know, when we came into office, America counted for about two percent of the advanced battery markets for electric and hybrid cars.

And what we did was, we said, ‘Look, let’s put up $2.4 billion that has to be matched by private dollars.’ And now you’ve got nine advanced battery manufacturing facilities already up on line. Ultimately there are gonna be 21. And we expect that, by 2015, we are going to have about 40 percent of the market in advanced battery technology.

And — and that’s going into, by the way — couple of the cars that we saw today — the — the — the Chevy Volt, as well as the Ford Focus. So this is an example, I think, of what our economic strategy has been from the start. We had a disaster on our hands. We’ve been able to stabilize the economy and prevent the freefall.

Instead of 750,000 jobs a month being lost, we’ve now gained jobs in the private sector for five consecutive months. But, we’ve still got a long way to go, and so, not surprisingly, the American people who are out of work or still struggling to pay the bills, they still wanna see more action when it comes to jobs. And I don’t blame them. But what I do wanna point out is the very specific things that are being done as a consequence of some [unintelligible] that were taken by Democrats last year.

dotty dot dot

The other thing that — the main thing that keeps me up at night right now is we lost eight million jobs. The month I was sworn in, we lost 750,000 jobs. We’ve regained about 600,000 this year so far, and if we stay on pace, hopefully we’ll gain several hundred thousand more.  But making up for that eight million is still gonna be a challenge.

And that’s gonna require us tapping into the new sectors, like the clean energy economy where there is growth to be had. It also means that we’ve gotta start selling more than we’re buying, which is why I’m emphasizing export growth so much. But, look, nobody in the White House is satisfied with where we are right now. What we absolutely are convinced of, though, is that we’re on the right track. And I think that the statistics bear that out.

CHUCK TODD: You know, in your remarks in Holland, you seem to also make a political argument about the other side saying that they, you know, weren’t for these plans. What do you [unintelligible] tell the person who may have voted for you, can’t find a job or got laid off since you took office? Why they should still keep the Democrats in charge? Because they’re not feeling any of the positives yet.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Look, if somebody’s out of work right now, the only answer that I’m gonna have for them is when they get a job. Up until that point, from their perspective, the economic policies aren’t working well enough.

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More tomorrow.

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Cynthia Tucker And Energy Policy – Nukes are too expensive

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This was supposed to be a post about Rick Sanchez. I have been using a list of “leftie” journalists and Sanchez’s was the next name on the list. But he poses an interesting problem, he spent most of his time on television so I could find nothing about him in print. He does have a book out but I do not have a copy of it and could find no one who actually quoted extensively from it on any subject. I even tried Youtube and Bing hoping to get video of him talking about the environment. After an hour and 1/2 I gave up. So here is Cynthia Tucker whom I like alot.

http://blogs.ajc.com/cynthia-tucker/2010/02/23/why-do-savannah-nuke-plants-deserve-taxpayer-money/

Why do Augusta nuke plants deserve taxpayer money?

12:44 pm February 23, 2010, by ctucker

UPDATE: As some of you have pointed out, the nuke plants are near Augusta. Thanks for the correction.

Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss were happy to claim credit for the Obama administration’s announcement that it was guaranteeing loans that would help build nuclear reactors on Georgia’s coast. But it’s an odd thing for the two Republicans, who usually argue that the government ought to stay out of private industry.

In fact, economists might argue that the huge government subsidies are little different from the bank bail-outs and bail-outs for the automotive industry.Liberals and conservatives have argued against the federal guarantees. From the WaPo:

Nuclear power plants “are simply not economically competitive now, and therefore they can’t be privately financed,” said Peter Bradford, an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School and a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “There are many cheaper ways to displace carbon, and there are many cheaper ways to provide for electric power supply.”

Jack Spencer, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a supporter of nuclear power, warned: “Loan guarantees do not a nuclear renaissance make.” He said the guarantees would “perpetuate the problems that have plagued nuclear energy for 30 years: the regulatory structure and nuclear waste [disposal] and too much government dependence.”

William O’Keefe, who heads a science-related think tank in Washington, doesn’t think the loans are such a good idea. From the WaPo:

If private companies are unwilling to risk their capital on new nuclear plants, why should the taxpayer take on part of that risk? The answer is: We shouldn’t.

The U.S. taxpayer has been subsidizing nuclear power since its inception, and it has yet to achieve its potential. Some of this is the fault of government policy, but some of it is just plain economics. The cost of a new nuclear plant has been estimated to be on the order of $4 billion, with some estimates being over $10 billion when cost overruns are taken into account. That makes the cost of nuclear-produced electricity very high.

The Obama administration is promoting nuclear power because it does not involve CO2 emissions. But that is only one criterion, and it should be judged on a cost-benefit basis. How much would new plants coming online over the next two decades reduce the climate change risk? And are there more-cost-effective alternatives for reducing that risk? There is growing evidence that the risk of climate change has been exaggerated, and that certainly weakens the case of the administration.

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More tomorrow

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Howard Fineman And Energy Policy – The right wing loves coal

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The Left wing hates coal.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36132029/ns/politics-howard_fineman/

Obama’s energy challenge is coal, not oil

45 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants

By Howard Fineman

msnbc.com msnbc.com
updated 4/14/2010 10:09:22 AM ET 2010-04-14T14:09:22
ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama touched off a new environmental skirmish with his decision to open vast new areas of the American coastline to offshore oil drilling. But as loud as that battle is going to get, it is nothing compared with the real energy war to come.

I speak, of course, of the Coal War.

Forget whatever else you hear about energy policy, the real fight — and the real political problem — this year in Congress will be how to deal with our nagging reliance on the most abundant component of our carbon-based patrimony.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about offshore drilling, wind power, natural gas, and energy conservation … but the short-term drift of history still dictates a heavy reliance on the dirtiest and deadliest of all fuels: coal.

The big question in the energy bill — if there is one — is how and whether Congress will ask the American people to pay for the cost of controlling the environmental consequences of that reliance.

At its core, the president’s energy vision calls for switching our transportation system from oil to plug-in electricity. But 45 percent of all electricity in the country is still generated by coal-fired power plants. In other words, we run the real risk of merely replacing one polluting and increasingly scarce fuel, petroleum, with an abundant but even more environmentally troublesome one, coal.

An energy bill that, among other things, would tax pollution caused by burning fossil fuels was passed by the House last year. It’s gotten nowhere in the Senate. Obama’s drilling announcement was designed to get the Senate’s attention — and garner some Republican support.

But opening up offshore drilling prospects is politically, the easy part. I think the president can get that piece of the puzzle.

The hard part is going to be convincing senators from coal-producing and/or electricity-exporting states to go along with any sort of carbon tax.

States with power plants that generate electricity from coal read like a roster of presidential swing states. Among them: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and North Carolina. And other states with major coal commitments include: Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Wyoming.

Getting 60 votes for some kind of carbon-pollution tax, even if it’s in the most attenuated “cap-and-trade” form, will be next to impossible.

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Go read the rest. It is pretty good. Everyone have a great weekend. More next week.

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Christiane Amanpour Chats With A General – Candidly or not

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This speaks for itself, but is this leftist?

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/gen-hugh-shelton-bush-administration-offic

October 25, 2010 03:00 AM

Gen. Hugh Shelton: Bush Administration Officials Pushed to Go to War With Iraq ‘Almost to the Point of Insubordination’

This Week’s Christiane Amanpour talked to former Joint Chief Chair Gen. Hugh Shelton about the rush to invade Iraq by members of the Bush administration which he described as “almost to the point of insubordination.” Color any of us that were paying attention at the time not surprised by this latest revelation. The PNAC crowd surrounding him in the White House were pushing to invade Iraq long before Bush was selected by our Supreme Court to be president or becoming members of his Cabinet.

AMANPOUR: Let’s go back to when you were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and even slightly afterwards, when President Bush decided to go to war in Iraq. You talk about it was based on faulty intelligence and indeed on lies and deceit, but you also say something about insubordination. You say, for instance, during meetings, “some people were kept on after Bush had tendered his opinion and issued an instruction based on that opinion. Yet certain strong-willed individuals seemed to disregard him and forge ahead with their own agendas, almost to the point of insubordination.” That’s a very strong indictment.

SHELTON: Well, there was a very strong push in those days for us to go into Iraq, and there was absolutely no intelligence, zero, that pointed toward — pointed toward the Iraqis. It was all Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. And yet there was an element there that was — that was pushing to go into Iraq at the same time.

AMANPOUR: But what do you mean by insubordination?

SHELTON: The fact that the president says himself, we’re not going to do that right now, let’s focus on Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Yet below the surface, we still had the sentiment that said, let’s keep planning for Iraq just in case we can convince him that we can go.

AMANPOUR: And you think they could have convinced him?

SHELTON: Not at that time. I think that, as President Bush told me at Camp David, you know, I just don’t see it. You know, we may go get Saddam and take him out, but it will be at a time and place of our choosing. It won’t be as a part of the Afghanistan operation. He got it from day one. When he was briefed by the CIA…

AMANPOUR: So you’re saying he was pushed into it?

SHELTON: I think eventually that that same drumbeat continued, and Afghanistan, remember, was going very, very well. The drumbeat back here in Washington was still pushing, coming out of the Pentagon, let’s go to Iraq, let’s get — take him out. And he finally said, let’s go. We walked out on the limb before we could build a coalition of the — either the United Nations or NATO, one of the two.

AMANPOUR: You’re very — you have some harsh words about then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Is he part of the group that you are targeting here?

SHELTON: Well, I personally like Secretary Rumsfeld, but he was part of the group, he and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, that continued to push to go into Iraq. And I think that’s been documented on a number of occasions.

And making me wonder how much this interview was edited, I transcribed the portion of the video above. It’s not included in ABC’s transcript. The portion below however, is in ABC’s transcript but missing from the video.

AMANPOUR: But you also say that in terms of dealing with defense secretaries that Secretary Rumsfeld was more in the (INAUDIBLE) mold, which you said was, you know, based more on sort of heavy pushing and on those kinds of relationships.

SHELTON: And those were my observations. I’ve had the opportunity to work for a number of secretaries of defense while I was in Pentagon. And, for example, Secretary Bill Cohen, great team-builders, tremendous leader, (INAUDIBLE), made you want to do things because they were the right things to do and because we all pulled together to get it done.

But the leadership that Secretary Rumsfeld brought was totally different.

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More tomorrow.

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Hendrik Hertzberg And Energy Policy – Seems pretty neutral to me

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What struck me the most about the posts and the material the right wing columnists produced was how consistently it was industry biased and really right wing sentiment. What is striking about the left wingers is how balanced they appear. Of course as far as I am concerned Ted Rall is the biggest lefty around in print and he made NEITHER list that I have been using. Never actually heard of this guy but then I don’t get out much.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/03/22/100322taco_talk_hertzberg

Some Nukes

by Hendrik Hertzberg March 22, 2010

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There has always been something intuitively disproportionate about nuclear power plants, which, like coal-fired ones, use steam turbines to generate electricity. Converting mass to energy by atomic fission in order to achieve temperatures normally found only on the surface of stars like the sun and then using that extraterrestrial heat to boil water—well, it smacks of (to borrow a term from the nuclear dark side) overkill. To be fair, boiling water by burning black rocks made of petrified vegetable matter from the age of the dinosaurs is a little strange, too. And nuclear power plants have one great advantage over the fossil-fuel kind: they do not emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is hastening the world toward climatic disruption and disaster.

President Obama, in his State of the Union address, after talking up innovations in battery technology and solar panels, said, “To create more of these clean-energy jobs we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Last month, he backed that up with a federal loan guarantee of $8.3 billion to build two new reactors near Waynesboro, Georgia. And in his budget request for 2011 he has asked for $46 billion more. The applause

for his State of the Union line was louder on the Republican side of the aisle than on the Democratic, and his words and actions have prompted loud grumbling from environmental organizations. But global warming has punched some holes in the green wall. Such founding fathers of the environmental movement as Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Patrick Moore, an early stalwart of Greenpeace, now support nukes. James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a climate-change prophet, favors the so-called fourth-generation nuclear systems, which would substantially reduce the amount of nuclear waste. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is another supporter. So, within limits, are liberal senators like John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. And so is President Obama.

“We were hopeful last year—he was saying all the right things,” Erich Pica, the president of Friends of the Earth, said after Obama’s loan-guarantee announcement. “But now he has become a full-blown nuclear-power proponent—a startling change over the past few months.” Actually, Obama has been a nuclear-power proponent ever since he was a state legislator, but in the context of an energy regime that underwrites conservation, promotes renewables like wind and solar, and, crucially, puts a price on carbon. Nuclear power plants are unbelievably expensive to build, but once they are up and running the electricity they generate is cheap to produce. In the United States, coal plants (there are six hundred of them, as against a hundred nuclear ones) get a kind of subsidy, too, and it’s huge: the right to dispose of their most dangerous waste by sending it up the chimney, free of charge.
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Please see the rest of article for a great summary of the past and a largely noncommital ending. More tomorrow.

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Neil Steinberg And Energy Policy -New Technologies bring new complaints

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The internet can be such a frustrating place. I thought that because I had put up about 15 right wing pundits views about energy policy that I should put up some left wings views as well. So I searched for something like “10 most left wing journalists” in America and I came up with this site.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/huston/100723

Now this piece listed number two and I had to futz around to find number 10 which he listed as Neil Steinberg who works for the Chicago Sun Times which is of course here.

http://www.suntimes.com

I googled up Neil Steinberg for energy policy and found a great article by him but it was filed as a PDF file in a Wisconsin Utility hearing docket. I can’t copy a PDF file and I always like to give original citings but I could only find a weird copy of it in a weird place so here it is. It was originally titled:

Winds of change inevitably get the hot air stirring

and was dated April 10th. The text is not credited here:

Progress never comes without complaint. Everybody wants perfect cell phone service — there are more than 4 billion cell phones worldwide, two for every three people — but nobody wants a cell tower near them. Earlier this month in rural Maryland, neighbors turned out to protest the zoning variance needed to put a cell tower on farmland, even though most would barely see the top of the tower if it went up. “We will be fighting it every step of the way,” one said. Of course they will. People still fight cell towers, just as they fight skateboard parks, mosques, research centers, halfway houses — almost anything new and nearby. They no longer complain about streetlights — but they once did. More about that later. Not in my ocean. Naturally, the rich folk living on Cape Cod opposed the idea of a wind farm off Nantucket. When gazing out to sea, reflecting on the splendor of their lives, they might see the turbines and be vexed. So it is a minor miracle that the federal government decided to go ahead with Cape Wind anyway, after only nine years of study and discussion. “This is the final decision of the United States of America,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced this week. Needless to say, that was “Gentlemen, start your lawsuits,” to those aghast at the idea of seeing 130 giant white turbines on the horizon.Instead of discussing the nation’s overdependence on foreign oil, and the bad things that flow from it — from increased terrorism to global warming — I will tip my hand: I think wind turbines are beautiful. I first saw some, unexpectedly, out an airplane window while landing in Copenhagen a few years back — the Middelgrunden Wind Park, 20 turbines in the sound between Denmark and Sweden. It was a stunning sight, and even more stunning to learn that they provide 4 percent of the electricity consumed by Copenhagen. Denmark derives 20 percent of its electrical power from the wind. Meanwhile, the United States, once a world leader in technology and not without windy places, generates only about 0.8 percent of its electricity from wind power. Last summer, driving through Minnesota, the boys and I were surprised and delighted by the huge wind turbines flanking the highway. Yes, passing by something is not the same as living next to it. But if what people wanted next door were the deciding factor in history, we’d still be churning butter with a stick (you might think, “Yes, I’d love that!” but then you aren’t considering that half your children eating that butter would have died of whooping cough before age 2 — you can’t reject progress for its ills while thoughtlessly accepting all the good). Denmark, Minnesota and Cape Cod are windy places. Chicago is also a windy place, and to our credit, Mayor Daley at least says he is open to the idea of turbines in Lake Michigan. Evanston is considering them as well. Heck, why not — we already have to look at Gary on a clear day.’Cold, unlovely, blinding star’Once upon a time people believed in the future. Their lives were hard, and they accepted inconveniences if they thought things might improve in the long run. That didn’t mean they weren’t frightened or they didn’t complain.When opponents of Cape Wind worry that the wind turbines will kill migrating birds, destroy tourism, imperil navigation, whatever, we have to remember that every technological development in the history of the world has been met by a chorus of concern. Take the simplest advance — gas lamps on public streets — something we look upon now with only nostalgia and affection. Not so when new.” An attempt to interfere with the divine plan of the world, which has preordained darkness during the night-time,” a newspaper in Cologne fretted in 1816, after that city installed gaslight. Electric lighting brought even more revulsion.” Horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of London’s new electric light. “A lamp for a nightmare!” . Casting illumination upon a city’s nighttime doings would be, he said, “a horror to heighten horror.”Arc lighting at Paddington Station moved the St. James Gazette to protest in verse: Twinkle, twinkly little arc,Sickly, blue uncertain spark; Up above my head you swing, Ugly, strange expensive thing! In America, we despaired at what the unleashing of all this electricity might mean. The constant electric light would cause blindness, or “photo-electric ophthalmia. ” The demon of electricity surging around helter-skelter would change the weather. “All the floods, hurricanes, cyclones and other atmospheric disturbances taking place in the heavens and upon earth are due to the work of electric lighting companies,” a Southern minister announced.  Incredibly, the telephone was even more ominous than electricity. The social order would crumble. The constant ringing would drive men insane. There was also the peril of disease being spread over telephone lines. “Well, I suppose I must risk it,” a “wealthy well-educated and fashionable” Chicago matron decided, telephoning a household where there was scarlet fever, first having a servant makes sure “the sick children aren’t in the room where the telephone is.” Although, looking over past dire predictions about technology, I have to admit: sometimes they’re accurate. One of the big fears about the telephone was that it would make our intimate details become public knowledge.”We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,” a British writer speculated in 1897.It wasn’t “soon” — it took 110 years. But yeah, that sounds about right.

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I do not normally put up the whole text of something but in this case I had no choice. More tomorrow.

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