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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

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posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 12:03:00 PM
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The Island of Doubt

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Recent Posts

• Hillbilly wind power at risk in North Carolina
• What the climate campaign can tell us about health care (and vice versa)
• I wish they were right
• What health care and the climate have in common: an enemy
• Jon Stewart explains the climate bill
• Gaps in climate knowledge! Oh no!
• The oceans are in trouble, which means we all are
• Science v. Atheism: the Dalai Lama gambit
• Instead of reading *that,* read *this*
• Down the rabbit hole .. again

Hillbilly wind power at risk in North Carolina

If you pay attention to environmental matters in North Carolina, you already know this, but I'm still catching up on a month's neglect:

The NC Senate voted 42-1 earlier this month to ban most wind turbines from the state's windiest regions. While offshore wind farms are still kosher (for the time being), anyone hoping to take advantage of the some prime kinetic energy in the Blue Ridge Mountains will have some serious lobbying to do. Rarely does anything attract that kind of support. 42 to 1?

The legislation, which amends section 113 of the General Statutes, doesn't come right out and say no, of course. That's not the way legislation is written these days. Instead you first have to read the original 1983 law, which says:

"No county or city may authorize the construction of, and no person may construct, a tall building or structure on any protected mountain ridge."

And then look at the definition for "protected mountain ridges," which is "all mountain ridges whose elevation is 3,000 feet and whose elevation is 500 or more feet above the elevation of an adjacent valley floor."

And then look at the new proposed legislation, which redefines "tall buildings and structures" to exclude windmills, but only "if the windmill is associated with a residence the primary purpose of the windmill is to generate electricity for use within the residence, and the windmill is no more than 100 feet from the base to the turbine hub."

All of which means that if you live in western North Carolina and you want to build a modest little wind turbine for your own home's use, then fine. But anything that might actually make a significant contribution to the state's renewable energy portfolio is prohibited.

According to the Winston-Salem Journal:

The bill was initially intended to set up a permitting process for the generation of wind energy in other counties in the state. It still would do that, but as it made its way through legislative committees, it was supplemented to include the language that would ban wind energy in the mountains.

The reason for the law is the fear of ruining the view. Or more accurately, depressing land values. I understand that. I live in the mountains in question (elevation approx 2100 feet) and have some spectacular views. Before the science of anthropogenic global warming became clear, preserving wilderness was my highest environmental priority. I'm still partial to the BANANA philosophy of Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (although re-developing is OK).

In a perfect world, one that runs on cold fusion, say, I'd object to needlessly modifying a beautiful view, pushing through some roads and electrical grid lines where none existed before, destroying a few acres of habitat, and killing a few birds and bats. There's nothing wrong with "not in my backyard" if you have a superior alternative.

But we don't. Cold fusion is still a pipe dream. Almost all of North Carolina's electricity that isn't generated by nuclear reactions comes from coal. And all of those coal-fired plants have to either shut down or find a way to scrub and store all the carbon from their emissions within a decade or two, or mountaintop views will be the least of a real-estate agent's fears. Replacing that electricity will almost certainly involve a large number of wind turbines, and it doesn't make much sense to build them anywhere but windy spots. Like our mountain ridges.

Among the few drawbacks of wind power are the sound they produce and the strobe-like shadows they can cast when the sun is low on the horizon. No one wants to live next to a turbine that turns the neighorhood into a disco, visually or aurally. Bu that's the great thing about the mountain ridges: almost no one lives there.

So we can either follow in the state senate's footsteps and stick our heads in the sand, or we can face the reality that there is no perfect way to generate electricity. EVERYTHING comes with a price. And at the end of the day, would a few wind turbines on our mountain ridges really be so bad? In fact, I kind of like the graceful lines of a turbine's blades, sweeping around at a leisurely pace, At worst, they're about a million times more attractive that a coal-fired power plant's smokestack, Brobdingnagian plumbing and adjacent coal heaps.

The NC state legislature doesn't get back into session until May (gee, that seems like an awfully long break) so wind power advocates have until then to convince the senators of the error of their ways, pressure the state house to turn down the bill, and convince Gov. Bev. Perdue to veto the legislation if it makes it to her desk.

Also: kudos to Sen. Steve Goss (D-Watauga) for the lone dissenting vote.

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netvibes blog

Netvibes Introduces New Drag-and-Follow Facebook, MySpace and Twitter Widget

With the rapid growth of real-time content and activity feeds from sources like Facebook and Twitter, many people are struggling to keep track of multiple friends and interests that change day-to-day. Today, we launched a novel solution and industry first: drag-and-follow widgets. New Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets now enable users to instantly create new widgets to follow new interests simply by dragging and dropping any feed item to their personalized page.

The first widgets to showcase this new technology include new drag-and-follow Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets. You can instantly create separate new widgets to follow any interesting new conversation, topic or friend they find in your activity feeds, simply by dragging and dropping items onto their Netvibes personalized page. For example, if you find an interesting topic from their Twitter feed, you can click and drag that item to spawn a new Twitter widget to follow just that specific topic.

Here’s how it works:

It should be now easier to extract interesting conversation from your social streams with this functionality. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment. In case you encounter a problem, simply tell us on the feedback page. We’ll do our best to help you.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Meet Netvibes: Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget
2. Netvibes Announces Integration with Facebook Connect, Powering Personalized News Sharing for Millions of Facebook Users
3. Twitter widget update
4. 5 Things you don’t know about netvibes
5. New sharing features, Facebook Connect and more
6. Introduce full customization features : Pimp your netvibes and import myspace and twitter themes
7. Netvibes as a powerful Twitter tool

Tags: drag'n'follow, facebook, myspace, twitter, widget

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 17:25 and is filed under Service update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall

Last year, the number of Americans with a net worth of at least $30 million dropped 24 percent, according to CapGemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Monthly income from stock dividends, which is concentrated among the affluent, has fallen more than 20 percent since last summer, the biggest such decline since the government began keeping records in 1959.

Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, the heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune and the founders of Google each lost billions last year, according to Forbes magazine. In one stark example, John McAfee, an entrepreneur who founded the antivirus software company that bears his name, is now worth about $4 million, from a peak of more than $100 million. Mr. McAfee will soon auction off his last big property because he needs cash to pay his bills after having been caught off guard by the simultaneous crash in real estate and stocks.

“I had no clue,” he said, “that there would be this tandem collapse.”

Some of the clearest signs of the reversal of fortunes can be found in data on spending by the wealthy. An index that tracks the price of art, the Mei Moses index, has dropped 32 percent in the last six months. The New York Yankees failed to sell many of the most expensive tickets in their new stadium and had to drop the price. In one ZIP code in Vail, Colo., only five homes sold for more than $2 million in the first half of this year, down from 34 in the first half of 2007, according to MDA Dataquick. In Bronxville, an affluent New York suburb, the decline was to two, from 17, according to Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.

“We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten,” said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. “Since the early ’80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we’ve entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution.”
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Comments from Left Field

Paul Krugman on Progressive Anger

We get a bonus Paul Krugman column today, because he is subbing for David Brooks, and it’s a must-read. Krugman is “shocked and surprised” that Pres. Obama is “shocked and surprised” by the growing reports of progressive anger with Obama on health care reform.

What is particularly great about Krugman’s analysis is that he puts it in a larger context. Yes, progressives are angry with Obama because of his waffling on the public option, but it’s much more than that:

… [T]here’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.**

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

The signs of progressive anger are hard to deny:

Consider the remarkable, blog-based fund-raising campaign to embolden* progressive House members who vowed a NO vote on any health care bill lacking a public option even if that’s the bill returned from conference reconciliation. If those House progressives adhere to their pledge, that would be an enormous impediment to the White House’s plans — and Kevin Drum astutely notes that the purpose of the fund-raising effort is to force the notoriously hapless, impotent and capitulating House progressives to adhere to their clear commitment (as The Hill put it yesterday: ”House liberals have a history of getting rolled”)**. In just a few days, that campaign has raised more than $300,000. From what I can recall, that is the most prolific single-issue Internet fund-raising since the fundraising bonanza fueled by anger over the 2008 vote by Democrats (revealingly including Obama) to legalize Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program and retroactively immunize telecom lawbreakers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not feeling punked, because he did not have these expectations when he voted for Obama:

Perhaps, I’m just a cynic but I voted for Obama in the primaries, because I thought he was most likely to beat John McCain–not because I thought he was to the left of Hillary Clinton. Obama always struck me as a very talented and cerebral politician, with a left-ish bent. Again, maybe I’m a cynic, but his flip-flops don’t really surprise. Isn’t this what politicians do?

Which doesn’t mean, he goes on to say, that “Not being shocked at Obama’s flip-flops doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t object to them or apply pressure.”

I sensed some of this early on when Obama’s folks kept putting projecting themselves as “pragmatists.” Chris Hayes’ piece in The Nation really put the lie to this idea that all great things flow from the minds of serious, sober-minded pragmatists and dreamy, starry-eyed liberals just get in the way.

But it really hit me yesterday when Obama claimed that health care reform “shouldn’t be a political issue.” Really? Then why did he hand it off to a gaggle of politicians? Why is he even talking about it? Then Obama shouted out Chuck Grassley, who has aided the spread of death panel rumors, as an example of a Republican whose been “working very constructively.” Grassley returned the favor by calling Obama “intellectually dishonest.”

Matthew Yglesias feels that Pres. Obama may have “overlearned” a strategy that helped him win the election.

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Excuse me while I vent slightly. Political punditry is facile at the best of times : which these are not.

* embolden : some poor soul perverted Anguish ( English ) to reflect proper DuckSpeak...quackery and cant. Is this any less pejorative than 'insurgency' ?

** If the White House reuses to take umbrage...then you might wonder if it wasn't complicit! ( Old idea seldom,if ever,acknowledged as a serious concern...by corporate media. )

** House 'liberals' too. It isn't as if they all aren't 'on the take'. Adventures of a Political Bagman : doesn't that have a catchy sound ? Let's ask deLay.

And I tire of questions not asked so as to lend context...to an admittedly sordid topic in which virtue hides assiduously.

Poor Iran

August 21, 2009, 10:44PM

Mousavi says government agents raped detainees

Mousavi, Celebrated in Iranian Protests, Was the Butcher of Beirut

Mir-Hossein Mousavi's Iran/Contra Connection?

Iranian State Media Intensify Criticism of Mousavi, Protesters