Archive

Archive for the ‘energy’ Category

Nevermind that pesky reality

June 21st, 2010 No comments

I’ve seen this falsehood-as-fact repeated enough times that I thought I’d mention it. In the most recent Gazette, a letter to the editor stated that the BP oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf was the fault of liberals and environmentalists. The rationale for that bizarre statement is that protests of land-based drilling has pushed it out to deep water. This is so frighteningly mis-informed that it simply staggers the mind.
.
People are drilling in the Gulf and elsewhere because THAT’S WHERE THE OIL IS. As a self-proclaimed environmentalist I would stop ALL drilling land based and otherwise and mandate a switch to green technologies. Ocean based drilling is no more palatable to me than land based. But all that is beside the point. The fact remains that environmentalists have nothing to do with the Gulf spill. That disaster is all about the oil industry, lack of proper regulation, and an environmentally disastrous form of energy – fossil fuels.

Categories: energy, environment Tags:

The Bumpkin plan

October 22nd, 2008 7 comments

One of the blogs I follow is Representative Dan Bosley’s blog. Mr. Bosley is the chair of the the committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. He recently had a post about windmills on farms in New York.

This reminded me of an idea I had while back so I posted the idea as a comment on Mr. Bosley’s blog. Here it is:


I would love to see state and federal land opened up to be used by private citizens to erect windmills.

Most of MA does not have sufficient wind for wind mills. According to this wind map, there is sufficient wind in parts of western, central, and coastal MA. My area lacks sufficient wind.

How about a program where I could buy a windmill on state or federal land and get the money generated for feeding the energy into the grid? This would put private dollars to work immediately to reduce our greenhouse emissions.


Mr. Bosley replied:


bell bump, That is a very good idea. It would combine private investment with a government program to promote renewable power. Let’s see if we can make that work.

Now this isn’t horribly different from Pickens’ plan except that it encourages average citizens to pour money directly into the problem.

Like many of us, I would love to use alternative energy – but the one of the best forms – wind – is not available to me. I don’t care if my windmill is in my back yard, on a hill in western Mass, or in the middle of a desert in Arizona. There are potentially millions and millions, maybe billions of private dollars just waiting to be used to solve our energy and environmental problems.

Categories: energy Tags:

Switch to our mobile site