Maggie's Farm

Gringo ... wind power, when used on the old fashioned personal basis of having your own windmill, can be helpful. Used as today, on a heavily subsidized, hugely expensive 'wind farm' it is not practical. Since the turbines only begin to operate when the wind reaches a certain velocity, it doesn't operate in a light breeze, as the old farm windmills used to do. And when the wind reaches a certain higher velocity, [I think that it's 55 miles per hour, but don't hang me if the number varies slightly] then the turbine automatically shuts down to avoid damage to the machinery. This makes a mockery of the stated electric production statistics the manufacturers give. As the old song says, "sometimes the wind don't blow, baby." And then where are you -- hoping your connection to more traditionally produced electricity will save you. Your actual power production statistics by wind turbines are considerably lower than what the activists tell you. Wind farms are a typical green deception, like so much of what the Liberals advocate. So is solar power, which would require that vast areas of land would be devoted to solar panels. "And sometimes the sun don't shine, baby." And the land the solar panels occupy is unusable for anything else.

In a soberly realistic world, wind and solar power simply don't perform dependably enough. Water power is more dependable, but not available in large parts of the United States. Nuclear power, used by most of Western Europe to produce the major portion of their electrical needs, is hated by the Greenies because it is efficient and effective. They start crying about Three Mile Island [a non-crisis crisis from many years ago] and fail to recognize that Europe has been producing and using nuclear-produced electricity since the last quarter of the last century with no nuclear accidents.

Lastly, at least fifty per cent of our electrical generating facilities in this country are powered by coal -- and America has the world's largest deposits of coal. It'll take hundreds of years to use up our coal deposits, at which time, if we are as intelligent as we always have been, we will have developed other efficient alternatives.

So, by any logical definition, this is not an immediate crisis. It's a "manufactured" crisis.

As far as the oil spill in the Gulf is concerned, it is a tragedy for the states adjacent to it. But it can be solved, and it will be solved. The economic damage wreaked by our foolish Administration in shutting down all drilling in the Gulf will be far more long-lasting.

Let me ask you a question; would you swear off all flying by commercial jets because one of them crashed?

Marianne

vikingTX, you are my new hero. You are so right! It's ironic that the 'greenies' don't realize that all of what we call fossil fuels, are yesterday's green energy.

Marianne