Amon and Inherit, just goes to show you can’t trust anyone just because he/she has a downhomey-but-adventurous name. Boone Pickens. What a moniker. What a letdown. However, the Ogallala aquifer is worth learning more about.

Remember, Amon, you can tell people anything when they’re laughing.

folk:  “But, hell, i don’t worry about it, why should you.”

u got a “way” about u that makes me chuckle.  i’ll keep on picking my spots…and thx for the encouragement

It just goes to show that the wind power was just icing on the cake T.Boone Pickens is REALLY pushing: wide-spread fast-and-loose domestic natural gas development as the answer to foreign oil.  Clearly, he wants the pols so scared they lift all development controls and pollution restrictions, and, if he’s lucky, they’ll subsidize it with MORE taxpayers’ money as well!

Thanks, Boone.  It’s good to know you were just another phony after all.

The UK’s Energy and Climate Change secretary has just opened an inland wind farm on the borders of Kent and East Sussex. He believes that projects such as this will not only help fight global warming, but will help create jobs and bring the country out of recession.

Gosh, Amon, that’s fiendishly clever.  You should write more, you have something interesting to say.  Don’t worry about the details, I don’t. 

Of course there is always the possibility, I suppose, that the more you write, the less useful the writing.  But, hell, I don’t worry about it, why should you.

Folktruther, am glad to hear about the Netherlands project. Trust the Dutch to continue benefitting from their above-land-level sea, which would have long since destroyed a less resourceful culture. The San Diego financing solar cells with house sales plan, also smart. I don’t know. Maybe communaly we can take advantage of some of these ideas (economies of scale?) even now. A lot of people are out of work, a lot of people need somewhere decent to live ... where is it written that we have to wait for the government to organize us?

You know, Sepharad, I think they did put some kind of wave dohicky in the water near the Netherlands, where they have a whole bunch of turbines in the sea.  There is a great many in Livermore, to take the smell off of tne nuclear bomb laboatory there.

there was a guy in San Diego who built a whole bunch of houses, half of them with solar cells on top, giving buyers a choice.  They could finance the cells with the house.  there is no reason why new houses couldn’t be built with solar cells, but there is no way to coordiate and implement such a communal plan in a neoliberal economy.

google “boone pickens ogallala aquifer” to get some idea of what the boonster is up to here. tis late at night and i’m in no mood to research it, but the story goes something like this:

t boone has acquired land in texas on which the windmills will be built.  he has also acquired some land on which the transmission towers will be built to get the electric power to population centers.  some of this land is above the ogallala aquifer…a massive body of water that stretches from south dakota to texas.  this aquifer came into existence after the last ice age and gets replenished at a VERY slow rate.  texas law has something like a “capture” clause enabling the owner of land complete capture right to all minerals, water,etc. beneath his land.  the boonster could suck out much of the aquifer (kinda like what the kuwaitis were doing to oilfields that straddled the kuwaiti/iraq border) and sell the water to drought-striken metropolitan areas in texas.  the path he would use would run along the transmission lines for electricity generated by the windmills.

smells like 25% green and 75% greed

There are some pretty big wind farms in parts of California, and would imagine many more in the plains’ states, in some of which, I recall, people go a little batty because the wind never stops blowing. Seasonal desert winds too. (In southern New Mexico, there were many ranches where the windmills actually powered most of the operation.

Another constant phenomenon that could be harnessed is the power of incoming waves. Lots of coastlines.

Although there are many solutions to our power problem, I tend to agree with the gloomier posters that so far Obama isn’t throwing enough money in the right direction.

While the US is persuing the solution that Anarcissie has outlined, the Chinese are building seven new wind farms, each bigger than any that has been built before.  And they are setting up giant solar cells in the Gobi desert, which is kind of the New Jersey of China.

That’s because the party controls the billionaires (so far) rather than the billionairs controlling the economy.  It is certainly not socialism, but it is a far better kind of capitalism than neoliberal capitalism.

The assumption here is that energy is something that must be centralized; if it isn’t big and profitable it’s not viable. I think about the cookstoves of India that run on cow chips; the small windmills you can install on your roof to power CFL lights, energy conservation via weatherproofing and double-glazed windows, the use of plastic bottles to sanitize water; hybrid cars. They won’t solve the problem by themselves, but the more individual steps taken, the smaller the overall carbon footprint.

The energy giants will do their best to dictate the terms of the debate; entire options will be dropped—just like health care—but in time the problem will solve itself, at our expense. As is always true, the People will end up picking up the pieces and living with the mess.

Capitalists will not invest in things that will take such a long time to start showing profits.  Historically, if such projects are to be done, government has to get in it.

Come on, Obama is solving the problem.  By continuing the disastrous monetary and regulatory policies of the last 30 years, and the soon-to-be-disastrous attempts of the Bush administration to save the rich from the consequences of these policies, he is leading us to the next crash, which will be bigger than the previous one.  This will sharply reduce the use of petroleum by its chief wasters, the American people.  The price of petroleum will then go down, enabling India, China, Brazil, Russia and so on to gas their move to whatever they’re going to move along to, probably something including alternate sources of energy.  The bankrupt, impoverished U.S. will bring its armies home so we can fight one another instead of a bunch of dirty foreigners.  Clean air, clear skies, blood in the streets—what more could anyone want?

Its the economy of course. The way our government throws billions around is not as important as the way they consistently throw it in the wrong directions.

At the risk of sounding like a pedant I will repeat that the Obama administration is nothing more and certainly nothing less than Bush 2.0.