Book wish

"From mescaline to mesclun: The decline and fall of late-20th-century counterculture"

Turbines now junk after 19 years

A Kansas correspondent sent this dramatic photograph that a friend of his took on a recent trip to Hawaii. It's some of the turbines installed in 1986 at South Point, Hawaii. Note the dripping oil and missing blades, and that many of them are turned in the opposite direction of the rest. This is the future!

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

The folly of daylight savings time

Courtesy of David Roberson, here are excerpts from a Boston Globe opinion piece by Michael Downing about the folly of daylight savings (or summer) time, during which our clocks are turned forward one hour so that there is more daytime to shop after work. In the new energy bill, DST will be start a month earlier and be extended a month longer starting in 2007.

The idea of falsifying clocks to delay sunrise and sunset times came to New England from old England. British architect William Willett noticed people were sleeping through sunrise. In 1907, he published "The Waste of Daylight," which inspired Germany, then Great Britain and the United States, to shove ahead their clocks during the First World War, hoping to conserve fuel.

It didn't work. It did work for Boston department store magnate A. Lincoln Filene. He knew evening sunlight encouraged working people to shop on their way home. Filene was chairman of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, which produced the influential 1917 study, "An Hour of Light for an Hour of Night." This became the basis for the national daylight saving campaign. Filene predicted a boon to the health and morals of the nation, and he outlined ten specific benefits for farmers. Each one was at odds with the experience of actual farmers.

Filene claimed that produce harvested before sunrise retained dew, making if fresher and more appealing at markets. Farmers knew crops could not be harvested until the sun had dried that dew. Filene predicted farmers would enjoy sleeping later, but they rose earlier than ever with one less hour of light to get their dairy to cities. Filene said animals preferred to work in the cool darkness of morning. Farmers said roosters did not wear watches.

Congress repealed daylight saving in 1919, despite intense lobbying from the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, professional baseball, and golfers. ... In 1919, defying Congress and pleasing merchants, New York City passed a local ordinance to save daylight. Soon, Boston sprang ahead, and many cities followed. State legislatures, however, resisted the clock change on behalf of rural interests. Indeed, in Connecticut and New Hampshire, you could be fined up to $500 if your clock or watch displayed fast time.

Massachusetts was the exception. In 1921, our lawmakers passed a statewide daylight saving law -- the only one in the nation for more than a decade. This distinction did not please Bay State farmers. They sued the state, demanding a return to Standard Time and compensation for financial losses.

The case was ultimately settled by the US Supreme Court. In 1926, the farmers lost on both counts. The majority opinion was delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a native of Boston.

Now, Congress promises we will save 100,000 barrels of oil every day. "The more daylight we have," reasons Congressman Markey, "the less electricity we use." Unfortunately, Congress can't increase the amount of daylight we have. Moreover, during the first week of November 2007, Americans won't see the sun until sometime between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. We will have to turn on lights and squander our saving before it accrues.

In truth, even in midsummer, the oil saving doesn't add up. Most of our electricity is made with nuclear power and coal. And Congress has known since 1919 that daylight saving does not save a single lump of coal, though it does increase gasoline consumption by encouraging Americans to get in their cars and go shopping in the evening. ... When Congress extended daylight saving from six to seven months in 1986, ... [t]hat month was worth $350 to $550 million in additional sales to the golf and barbecue industries.

Not only roosters don't wear watches: Our own bodies are not simply "reset" to another time system. The annual leap "forward" essentially tells your body to wake up an hour earlier than it is used to. In northern states in March, most people would have to wake hours before dawn. Productivity at work and school plummets every spring because of this folly. And with darkness coming an hour later (by the clock), it is harder to make up the lost sleep to help the body readjust. Any gains for retailers are easily overwhelmed by the stresses put upon every worker and student.

Not to mention, it's unnatural. It's bad enough that we ignore sunrise and sunset in slavish year-round obedience to the clock's schedule. Then going and messing with that clock twice a year just to further manipulate the masses (to the masters' own loss, even) is diabolical. Or just plain stupid.

categories:  anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Shall I Compare Thee to a Freaking Cow?

Common Dreams published an essay by Andrew Christie yesterday about the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) pointing out that exploitation and abuse of animals is akin to slavery, child labor, and concentration camps and why people are so outraged by such an obvious comparison.

... The larger lesson of Darwin (there are no superior species, only differently adapted ones) has not yet sunk in; instead, we are still ruled in every way that matters by the medieval Great Chain of Being, on which we placed ourselves one rung below the angels and far above all other manner of beaste, most low, foule and uncleane. When a black man in New Haven sees images of his ancestors and a cow side by side, equally mistreated and commodified, he is conditioned to see only the comparative sullying of his godliness, not the cruelty that is the lot of sentient beings who have no rights. He fears he will be cast down by the implication that the lot of the oppressed should be raised up.

Historically, he is not alone. That was the deepest fear of his ancestors' owners in the antebellum South. It was the fear of men confronted by women's suffrage. It was the fear of our founding fathers, the white male land owners who, in drafting the Constitution, struggled to find a way to exclude the rabble from too much participation in the democratic experiment, the better to keep the levers in the hands of the right sort of people while giving the others just enough by way of social rewards to keep them controllable.

Changing those paradigms were (and are) hard fights, but the animal rights movement is fighting 10,000 years of cultural conditioning and the tendency of the disenfranchised, in the words of Howard Zinn, to fall upon each other "with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country."

Thus the good people of New Haven recoil, the NAACP shouts at PETA, and the pundits trot out safe, predictable outrage, using generations of conditioning to studiously miss the point. It's a fight amongst ourselves on a deeper level than usual. It misses not only the fact of our increasing disenfranchisement but the dysfunctional ways in which the disproportionately distributed wealth is produced by a system that is impoverishing the Earth and our ethical sense alike. One of that system's most fundamental control measures persuades people that in their visceral rejection of the truth PETA is laying down, they are standing up for their dignity and humanity, when, in reality, they are defending a system in which commonality of suffering is not on the agenda, the members of only a single species have any right to life, liberty and freedom from harm, a chicken is of value only as a sandwich, and the idea that a chicken might be of value to the chicken is an idea that must not be thought.

categories:  animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism

Tom Gray spins with the wind

Thomas O. Gray, Deputy Executive Director and Director of Communications of the trade group American Wind Energy Association, wrote a letter to the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, pointing out, "Wind energy emits no air, water, or global warming pollution; it uses no water; and it requires no mining or drilling for fuel."

Neither does a dead log. And despite the cost and ecologic impact of wind energy the electricity output is not much different.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Nuclear power vs. conservation and global warming

An opinion piece by Mark Hertsgaard in last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle is entitled "Nuclear energy can't solve global warming: other remedies 7 times more beneficial." The following comment was posted at Sam Smith's Undernews.

This same argument is even more applicable to industrial-scale wind power. Two billion dollars, presumably for about a 1000-MW nuclear plant, would get at most 2000 MW of also heavily subsidized wind power capacity. But whereas the nuclear industry boasts that their 1000-MW plant will produce an average of 850 MW, the wind industry claims that their 2000 MW of turbines will produce an average of 667 MW. In reality, the nuclear plant may provide an average of 750 MW and the wind plant less than 260 MW (according to U.S. Energy Information Agency data). And not to diminish the huge negative implications of a radioctive plant, the nuclear plant is in a single location over a few square miles at most. Two thousand megawatts of wind power would require about 100,000 acres, over 150 square miles (see www.aweo.org/windarea.html). Further, the wind plant's output is highly variable and unpredictable, requiring the continuing and more inefficient (thus more polluting) use of other sources to compensate. Much of the time, as in Denmark, which must dump almost 85% of its wind plant output, turbines produce well when there is no demand. And (again, not to diminish its very serious problems) nuclear power has proved itself in providing roughly 20% of our electricity, whereas the practical potential for wind power is no more than 5%. Two billion dollars can easily save that amount and more, without industrializing our rural and wild landscapes. Or it could buy 2000 MW of giant intrusive and destructive wind turbines that might provide less that 0.1%.

If nuclear power is a boondoggle whose pursuit detracts from actually solving our energy issues, then that is even more the case with industrial wind power. It's true that wind turbines are nowhere near as dangerous and poisonous, but unfortunately they also don't produce much electricity (let alone other forms of energy) so you'll still have as much "dirty" sources as ever.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

"Wind is on its way [out] as a powerful resource"

Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, August 7, 2005

Paired with an opposition piece by Lynn Korinek of Wisconsin Independent Citizens Opposed to Windturbine Sites, Michael Vickerman writes in his support piece (Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, August 7, 2005),

"wind power, with current federal tax credits, is now less expensive than natural gas-fired generating units. It makes no economic sense for utilities to burn natural gas at any time when wind power is available.wind power, with current federal tax credits, is now less expensive than natural gas-fired generating units. It makes no economic sense for utilities to burn natural gas at any time when wind power is available."

According to Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group ("The Environmental Case for Wind Power in Wisconsin," July 2005), only 2.9% of the state's electricity comes from oil and natural gas. 72.3% comes from coal, and 21.7% from nuclear. Nationally, about 15% of our electricity comes from natural gas, 20% from nuclear, and over 50% from coal.

I have seen this argument before, that with subsidies wind power is now economically competitive with natural gas. Natural gas is then lumped in with coal and oil (the latter is an insignificant source of electricity which would be unaffected by wind power) for the claim that wind power will clean up the air. But natural gas is relatively clean; coal, especially the bituminous ("brown") coal commonly burned in the midwest, is the main source of polluting emissions from electricity generation.

So wind power is now being touted for displacing the one source that was actually making inroads against coal.

And because people want to believe that ever-larger wind turbine technology will actually do what the salesmen claim, coal continues to burn as much as before -- but now without any effort to make it cleaner. In fact, wind power advocates have mocked the talk of "clean coal" even as smokestack scrubbers in existing plants and new coal gasification plants, or simply switching from bituminous coal to anthracite, have actually made the air cleaner -- to a degree that all the giant turbines dreamed of by the industry would never be able to achieve.

categories:  wind power, wind energy