I stand with the trees and watch with the raptors.

Our friends at AWEO.org received a not untypically incoherent letter of complaint recently, which they haved shared with your editor. It came from Alabama, but I do not publish the author’s name, instead encouraging him to stop misdirecting his own energies, both negative and positive.

You could more effectively direct your energies to environmental and health consequences of millions of acres of oceans, atmosphere polluted by nuclear radiation and from fossil coal, and oil burning which is killing entire forests, poisoning sea life, and manifests health conseuqences for hundreds of millions if not billions of populations who can barely breathe in cities choked with pollution.

I stand with the trees and the raptors.

Your ignorance of the inetivable course of humanity in its greed for energy is an outrage. Complaining that governments waste money or that wind power engineering in its inefficiencies and pre-maturity or unsightlyness should be stopped in its tracks; pretending to prevent exploit of secondary 'renewable', in fact inexhaustible, solar wind and wave power would condemn centuries of windmills which have proven their utility and innocence for generations.

Soon the spectre of your poor ignorance will be redundant. Meso-scale changes in global weather perhaps even completely uncorrelated with the burning of dinosaurs and biomass which you prefer to ignore are forecast to endanger significant proportion of global populations living near seacoasts, and diminish those winds which, if properly exploited, might provide some glimmer of an alternative for the energy needs of billions on this planet.

Enjoy the weather.

AWEO replied as follows, and after several days have not received a reply in turn.

You claim to stand with the trees and the raptors, yet you would have the former leveled and the latter decimated to build enough wind towers to provide any meaningful fraction of our electricity needs — and only when the wind happens to be blowing in the right direction at the right speed, and never mind our other energy needs.

Obviously our efforts should be directed at cleaning up and reducing our actual energy use, not at pretending to provide alternatives that remain and ever will remain sideshows at best. But worse, they are sideshows increasingly destructive of landscape and wild habitat, as well as costly wastes of resources.