First, the claim that Cape Wind's 130 giant turbines will produce 468 MW of electricity: That will be the facility’s maximum output. It will actually produce at an average rate far below that, likely one-third, or only 156 MW.
Considering that there is already over 35,000 MW of wind capacity installed in the U.S. (for an average rate of production of 10-12,000 MW), this project hardly represents a game-changing contribution.
And considering that the average electrical load in the U.S. is about 500,000 MW, it will take a hell of lot of such industrial installations to make any meaningful contribution.
And considering that the wind is a fickle resource, those installations will always be in addition to more reliable generators.
Conservation could easily obviate the paltry contribution from wind — and save so many otherwise off-limit areas (coastlines, ridgelines) from development.
April 29, 2010
April 27, 2010
Appalachian Voices supports blowing up N.C. mountains to ram in wind turbines
Appalachian Voices appears to be an admirable conservation group, but in their avid desire to eliminate air pollution, stop mountaintop removal coal mining, and restore Appalachian forests, they too readily embrace the false promises of large-scale wind power. In an April 23 entry on their blog, they defend themselves against the charge of supporting the destruction of the mountains to erect giant wind turbines:
That is precisely the issue: Wind energy is a mature technology, but it has yet to show meaningful benefit. This is underscored by the study they cite, which concludes that wind development could produce a certain amount of energy. What is needed, however, is a study showing that wind has produced a certain amount of energy, and — crucially — that the contribution reduced greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, coal mining, deforestation, or anything.
In fact, studies of existing wind on the grid show little, if any, beneficial effect. Therefore, although wind's roads and clearcutting may be seen as less than those of mountaintop removal for coal, those impacts are in addition to those of coal. Wind does not replace or even meaningfully reduce coal. There is very little, if any, benefit to justify wind's environmental impacts.
Appalachian Voices admits supporting the blowing up of mountains in western North Carolina to ram in wind turbines. Their defense fails, however, because it depends on a false premise.
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism
To imply that wind farms cause the same environmental toll as mountaintop removal is illogical. Wind energy is a proven technology that works, and has a relatively light environmental impact. A study conducted by Appalachian State University showed that wind energy development on a small percentage of North Carolina ridges could produce enough clean energy for 195,000 homes, create 350 green jobs, and have a net economic impact of over one billion dollars.The claim of illogic depends, of course, on the soundness of the asserted premise that "Wind energy is a proven technology that works".
That is precisely the issue: Wind energy is a mature technology, but it has yet to show meaningful benefit. This is underscored by the study they cite, which concludes that wind development could produce a certain amount of energy. What is needed, however, is a study showing that wind has produced a certain amount of energy, and — crucially — that the contribution reduced greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, coal mining, deforestation, or anything.
In fact, studies of existing wind on the grid show little, if any, beneficial effect. Therefore, although wind's roads and clearcutting may be seen as less than those of mountaintop removal for coal, those impacts are in addition to those of coal. Wind does not replace or even meaningfully reduce coal. There is very little, if any, benefit to justify wind's environmental impacts.
Appalachian Voices admits supporting the blowing up of mountains in western North Carolina to ram in wind turbines. Their defense fails, however, because it depends on a false premise.
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism
April 8, 2010
April 2, 2010
Alison Clarkson and School Choice in Vermont
According to reporting by School Choice Vermont, as the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday was reviewing H.782, a bill aiming to consolidate school districts, Representative Alison Clarkson of Woodstock (also representing Reading) "said that we really should be considering consolidation as an opportunity to 'capture' choice kids and bring them back into the system to boost enrollment". (Her recorded comments can be heard in this video from EdWatch Vermont.)
Clarkson's statement is wrong in many ways.
First, the predatory tone. Choice towns have decided to provide that opportunity, not out of malice for the public school system (particularly as most students stay in the public schools -- see the second point), but in the interests of what is best for their citizens. Their students, granted this freedom by the taxpayers of their towns, are not "escapees" to be "captured".
Second, it is short-sighted and ill-informed. Once these few children are forced back into the public school system (where they have already decided they are not well served so that many of them will choose home schooling), enrollment will continue to decline. So, that problem is not at all solved by eliminating choice. Especially as most students from choice towns go to public schools already. In my town's current 8th-grade class, only 3 students out of about 30 are going to private schools: one is going to an expensive boarding school, for which the town will pay only a fraction of the cost, i.e., the student would have gone there anyway; so only 2 students would be "captured", i.e., not given the opportunity of an alternative high school that better serves their needs.
Third, the elitism. Vermont has a unique system in which the students in about 70 towns (13% of the state's students; data from the Vt. Dept. of Education for fiscal year 2010) are able to choose any non-religious high school they want, even in another state, and if it is private, their town will pay up to the state's average public per-pupil spending. As noted in the second point, most students choose the nearest public high school or one that provides bus service to their town. Some choose another public high school that is especially strong in specific areas of interest. A few use the money to help them pay for an expensive private school they would have gone to anyway.
But Vermont's system has allowed the creation of a number of independent high schools that provide much-needed alternatives to the bigger-is-better and too often one-size-fits-all philosophy of the public system. An alternative is thus available to any student in a choice town, not just the children of the rich.
Clarkson, whose sons apparently go to The Groton School in Massachusetts, would deny such educational choice to those who can't afford it. She is simply saying that opportunities beyond the public school system should be available only to the rich.
Finally, the hypocrisy. It was also reported that Clarkson said that we have very good public schools and the legislature should protect them (from people thinking otherwise!). Why don't her sons go to Woodstock Union High School?
There is only harm implied in her comments, not the interests of the educational needs of the children of Vermont.
P.S. Armando Vilaseca, Vermont's Commissioner of Education, who has expanded a directive to find savings in the school system into an attack against school choice, said last year on Vermont Public Radio that he had never heard of anyone moving to a specific town because of school choice. He is clearly unqualified to be in his position, since school choice is prominently touted in real estate ads and many people do indeed choose their town of residence for that reason. Listen to the comments in this highlights video from the April 6 hearing in Bennington (from Rob Roper of EdWatch Vermont).
P.P.S. Vilaseca has also expressed his resentment of independent schools that are not required to provide special education or similar services, which he thinks give them an unfair advantage at the expense of the public schools. Academically, however, public schools are not put at a disadvantage, because such services are provided by dedicated staff so that it is not a burden to teachers or an adverse distraction to students. And economically, "tuitioned" students are not taking resources from the public schools for those services, because their parents/guardians are still paying the same school taxes as everyone else. They are still contributing as much as everyone else to support the non-tuitioned responsibilities of the public schools.
tags: human rights, Vermont
Clarkson's statement is wrong in many ways.
First, the predatory tone. Choice towns have decided to provide that opportunity, not out of malice for the public school system (particularly as most students stay in the public schools -- see the second point), but in the interests of what is best for their citizens. Their students, granted this freedom by the taxpayers of their towns, are not "escapees" to be "captured".
Second, it is short-sighted and ill-informed. Once these few children are forced back into the public school system (where they have already decided they are not well served so that many of them will choose home schooling), enrollment will continue to decline. So, that problem is not at all solved by eliminating choice. Especially as most students from choice towns go to public schools already. In my town's current 8th-grade class, only 3 students out of about 30 are going to private schools: one is going to an expensive boarding school, for which the town will pay only a fraction of the cost, i.e., the student would have gone there anyway; so only 2 students would be "captured", i.e., not given the opportunity of an alternative high school that better serves their needs.
Third, the elitism. Vermont has a unique system in which the students in about 70 towns (13% of the state's students; data from the Vt. Dept. of Education for fiscal year 2010) are able to choose any non-religious high school they want, even in another state, and if it is private, their town will pay up to the state's average public per-pupil spending. As noted in the second point, most students choose the nearest public high school or one that provides bus service to their town. Some choose another public high school that is especially strong in specific areas of interest. A few use the money to help them pay for an expensive private school they would have gone to anyway.
But Vermont's system has allowed the creation of a number of independent high schools that provide much-needed alternatives to the bigger-is-better and too often one-size-fits-all philosophy of the public system. An alternative is thus available to any student in a choice town, not just the children of the rich.
Clarkson, whose sons apparently go to The Groton School in Massachusetts, would deny such educational choice to those who can't afford it. She is simply saying that opportunities beyond the public school system should be available only to the rich.
Finally, the hypocrisy. It was also reported that Clarkson said that we have very good public schools and the legislature should protect them (from people thinking otherwise!). Why don't her sons go to Woodstock Union High School?
There is only harm implied in her comments, not the interests of the educational needs of the children of Vermont.
P.S. Armando Vilaseca, Vermont's Commissioner of Education, who has expanded a directive to find savings in the school system into an attack against school choice, said last year on Vermont Public Radio that he had never heard of anyone moving to a specific town because of school choice. He is clearly unqualified to be in his position, since school choice is prominently touted in real estate ads and many people do indeed choose their town of residence for that reason. Listen to the comments in this highlights video from the April 6 hearing in Bennington (from Rob Roper of EdWatch Vermont).
P.P.S. Vilaseca has also expressed his resentment of independent schools that are not required to provide special education or similar services, which he thinks give them an unfair advantage at the expense of the public schools. Academically, however, public schools are not put at a disadvantage, because such services are provided by dedicated staff so that it is not a burden to teachers or an adverse distraction to students. And economically, "tuitioned" students are not taking resources from the public schools for those services, because their parents/guardians are still paying the same school taxes as everyone else. They are still contributing as much as everyone else to support the non-tuitioned responsibilities of the public schools.
tags: human rights, Vermont
March 26, 2010
Excerpts from Dominion by Matthew Scully
Realism is seeing reality. And the two hardest realities are life and death. We share with animals in the fellowship of both, and there never was a better reason to be kind and merciful than the leveling death which will find us all. (p. 46)
• 'Killing "for sport" is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself ... [but] the killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, "Something that wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that Denies."' (p. 77, from The Modern Temper (1929) by Joseph Wood Krutch, as quoted in A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (1993) by Matt Cartmill)
• I know that vegetarianism runs against mankind's most casual assumptions about the world and our place within it. And I know that factory farming is an economic inevitability, not likely to end anytime soon. But I don't answer to inevitabilities, and neither do you. I don't answer to the economy. I don't answer to tradition and I don't answer to Everyone. For me, it comes down to a question of whether I am a man or just a consumer. Whether to reason or just to rationalize. Whether to heed my conscience or my every craving, to assert my free will or just my will. Whether to side with the powerful and comfortable or with the weak, afflicted, and forgotten. (p. 325)
• Meat is today a luxury item, large-scale livestock farming an irrational and inefficient enterprise, and the suffering it inflicts morally untenable. It will not do to say, with writer David Plotz in the online magazine Slate, that "Calves are adorable, but veal is delicious. ... God gave man dominion over the beasts of the earth [and] if an animal has economic utility, we should farm it." That is not a serious argument. It is an excuse for evading serious argument, for doing what he pleases and getting what he wants, the whims of man in their familiar guise of the will of God. Nor is it any answer to say, with Judge Richard Posner, that the law should be neutral and let corporate farmers answer to "consumer preference" alone. When the law sets billions of creatures apart from the basic standards elsewhere governing the treatment of animals, when the law denies in effect that they are animals at all, that is not neutrality. That is falsehood, and a license for cruelty. (p. 389)
• If we cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the animals and ourselves, then we should not do it at all. (p. 391)
• Kindness to animals is not our most important duty as human beings, nor is it our least important. How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph -- bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair. (p. 398)
• Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
March 23, 2010
The 3% Nonsolution
A common figure for annual health care spending in the U.S. is 2.5 trillion dollars (according to the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS), it was 2.34 trillion dollars in 2008 and projected to have been 2.47 trillion in 2009 and to be 2.57 trillion in 2010).
The "historic" health care bill just signed into law has an estimated cost of just under 1 trillion dollars (938 billion). But that's over 10 years. So make it 100 billion dollars annually, or about half the cost of the crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus, the bill will represent less than 4% of the country's health care spending.
Small change indeed.
Especially as HHS projects total spending to increase to almost 4.5 trillion dollars by 2019.
This "monumental" reform bill will represent less than 2.7% of the next 10 years' health care spending.
Its only significance is criminalizing not having insurance and forcing people into private "coverage". A cruel mockery of care, this is blatant extortion on behalf of corporate profits.
The "historic" health care bill just signed into law has an estimated cost of just under 1 trillion dollars (938 billion). But that's over 10 years. So make it 100 billion dollars annually, or about half the cost of the crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus, the bill will represent less than 4% of the country's health care spending.
Small change indeed.
Especially as HHS projects total spending to increase to almost 4.5 trillion dollars by 2019.
This "monumental" reform bill will represent less than 2.7% of the next 10 years' health care spending.
Its only significance is criminalizing not having insurance and forcing people into private "coverage". A cruel mockery of care, this is blatant extortion on behalf of corporate profits.
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