"Tom Littleton" wrote in message
news:HSbWh.52$Rd.43@trndny08...
Wolfie,
Are you seriously suggesting that the voting public surrounding Lake Erie
is going to sit idly by and allow the entire surface to be covered by
little wind generators??

Hm.....well, I admit that it SOUNDS kinda like me. But no, I think not. If
it were really me, it would be BIGASS wind generators!

I suspect you would see significant opposition to even a fraction of that
proposal.

Whatever transpires in the next few decades (we should live so long!) we
will see more than merely significant opposition to any and all of it.

Meanwhile, energy is the most addictive drug of them all.......and there's
more people coming to the party every day.....around the world. Any way you
cut the pie, we need a much bigger pie.....NOW!! For the foreseeable
future, wind power is the only viable adjunct to conventional fossil fuel
burning electrical generation. Fission is dead. Hydro is dead. Biofuels,
fusion, solar, wave, tidal, fuel cell, temperature gradient and a host of
others are stillborn. The trouble is that none of them.....or their
adherents.....has quite figured that out yet. They will. That leaves black
holes. I don't know **** about black holes.....except that they are (well,
we HOPE they are) too far away to do us a great deal of good in the
immediate future.

Wind.....not just air mind you.....is the element we live in. Without it we
are dead. Well, and light.....we need that too.....um......and water For
the past billion years or so, life has evolved in the presence of and as a
direct product of.....wait for it.....water, wind and sunlight (o.k., yeah,
and some trace elements and ****). What I propose is that we take the
course of least resistance.....and, not so incidentally, maximum gain. We
allow the three elemental elements to do what they do best.

Water is, literally, the "stuff" of life. Since the recent discovery of
deep-water geothermal vents we have learned that "THE" requisite element for
life is liquid water (well, that and a few niggling micro-nutrients). But
water is also an extremely (which is to say, fatally) hostile element for
air breathers to work, play, or otherwise conduct business in. Our best
course of action is to keep it clean, let it flow, take an occasional sip,
and wade at the margins while fishing.....and leave it alone to do what it
does best.

Sunlight is the engine, or, more literally, the fuel, that drives the whole
mess. Naturally, it would occur to some bright lass or lad somewhere that
being virtually limitless, it is the obvious choice for us to look to as a
source of supply for our own energy needs. But, bright as it is on those
clear, cloudless summer days, sunlight is tenuous.....diffuse. After all,
occasional melanomas notwithstanding, we go out into it (as we have for a
couple million years) without being immediately blinded or roasted. It
really isn't much good for boiling water. What it IS good for is
photosynthesis (a process which, for our purposes here, may be defined as
something which does us absolutely no good for our purposes here.....unless
we want to grow **** just to burn it.....which is EXACTLY what got us into
this ****ing mess in the first place!). Let the sunlight do what it does
best, grow living things, decompose some of the leftovers, and keep the
engine running.

Wind.....ah, the wind!.....the gentle zephyr and the raging gale! What the
hell is THAT good for? Well, for a start, think "grass." Grass? Yeah,
grass.....as in corn, wheat, oats, rice, barley, blue stem, bunch, etc.,
etc., etc. (I'll bet a shiny new nickel that most of you didn't know that
grasses are second only to the orchids {which, except for the vanilla
extracted from one particular type, are thoroughly useless.....in practical
terms} in the number of terrestrial plant species worldwide.......and second
to none in worldwide distribution and sheer bulk). So? So, grasses are
what we eat.....and what what we eat eats. And grasses (for the most part)
don't exist without wind.....they are typcially wind pollinated. So? So,
what wind does best is MOVE THINGS. Things like grass pollen.....things
like tumbleweed.....things like double-wide trailers.....things like a pall
of filth hanging over a densely populated urban area.....things
like......yup, generators! And the best thing about it is that sunlight
guarantees that the supply is limitless, and free, and that it is readily
(which is to say, universally) available, and that we cleared the basic
technological hurdles centuries ago (yes, literally), and that it occurs in
what is, for air breathers, a congenial environment, and that......IT
ALREADY DOES EXACTLY WHAT WE ARE HOPING IT MIGHT SOMEDAY DO FOR US!!! Not
all that bad, thinks I.

Lake Erie? Chernobyl.....Three Mile Island.....Hanover.....Pleasant
Prairie.....Point Beach.....West Virginia.....acid rain.....Exxon
Valdez.....North
Slope.....Iraq.....Venezuela.....Suez.....Bush.... .China.....India.....Russia.....,
......, .....

Tom
p.s. That NIMBY thing is pretty much a human constant.

So is death.

Wolfgang