The Kennedy family will need to put up with looking at new offshore wind turbines

The hypocritical and short-sighted Kennedy family will just need to get used to the view, for the common good. As reported by Discover Magazine.

The U.S. Interior Department announced new rules today that will allow the first offshore wind turbines to go up along the Atlantic Coast, including the site near Cape Cod that the Kennedy family famously opposed. This was a chance for the Kennedys to step up and do the right thing, but they blew it for years and years. Now the federal government is forcing it on them and I'm glad. Consider what a tiny burden this was on them to look at those admittedly huge turbines in the distance. It's no worse a burden than for any of us to have to look at the gaudy Kennedy compound from a distance. The turbines will be about 8 miles from Kennedy's trophy house in Hyannis Port. In clear conditions, the wind turbines will appear one half-inch above the horizon. They will look like this from the Kennedy compound. We're going to all have to make some sacrifices for the common good if we want to maintain some semblance of our lifestyle. It has continually amazed me that the wealthy Kennedys couldn't have made a good example of themselves by advocating, not stifling, this worthy wind project. How much energy will it produce? Cape Wind's website provides the answer:

Cape Wind will be rated to produce up to 468 megawatts of wind power as each wind turbine will produce up to 3.6 megawatts. Maximum expected production will be 454 megawatts. Average expected production will be 170 megawatts which is almost 75% of the 230 megawatt average electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Where do the Kennedys think they will get their energy if they don't get it from clean wind? In my mind this is a classic case of compartmentalized thinking all bound up in status-seeking power.

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What’s driving George Will’s warped views on environmental issues, including his criticism of compact fluorescent light bulbs?

On issues relating to the environment, George Will’s strategy has been to draw his curve, then plot his data. As of late, he’s been denying far more than climate change; he’s denying the data relating to climate change. It has gotten so bad that he’s been pointing to changes in the weather to attempt to rebut evidence that there are changes in climate, an unfair tactic that even fourth-graders know enough to criticize. Throughout his arguments, Will delights in sprinkling in pointy little reminders that the government is always misguided, as though we should trust in the “free market.” This week, in an article published by the Washington Post, Will has employed all of his favorite forms of paltering in a full-scale attack on compact fluorescent light bulbs. He doesn't like compact fluorescent bulbs for a variety of reasons that he enunciates. Without citing any statistics, he claims that some of those bulbs might not last as long as the bulb life indicated on the package. Because of the existence of mercury in the bulbs, he gripes that we can’t just toss them away in the general trash when they break or cease working. Will also complains that CFL’s are not all-purpose bulbs—they don’t work in hot places with limited airflow. And they take a bit to get to their full brightness. Down with CFL’s!

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Why do women in wealthy societies have fewer children?

I’ve often wondered why women in wealthy societies have fewer children. Melanie Moses (who teaches Computer Science at the University of New Mexico) offers a solution in an article entitled, “Being Human: Engineering: Worldwide Ebb,” appearing in the 2/5/09 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive because evolution by natural selection would seemingly predict that human animals with more resources would have more babies. Moses employs the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE), an approach for understanding the dynamics of flow through networks. It was developed

to explain why so many characteristics of plants and animals systematically depend on their mass in a very peculiar way. . . According to the theory, the larger the animal, the longer its cardiovascular system (its network of arteries and capillaries) takes to deliver resources to its cells. That delivery time, which in turn dictates the animal's metabolic rate, is proportional to the animal's mass raised to the power of ¼. Thus, because its circulatory system works less efficiently, an elephant grows systematically more slowly than a mouse, with a slower heart rate, a lower reproductive rate and a longer lifespan.

Moses argues that this idea that networks become predictably less efficient as they grow has “profound” consequences. With regard to fertility, she starts with facts regarding our energy consumption.

The average human uses up only about 100 watts from eating food, consistent with predictions based on body size. But in North America, each person uses an additional 10,000 watts from oil, gas, coal and a smattering of renewable sources, all of which are delivered through expansive, expensive infrastructure networks.

How do energy networks interact with the reproductive choices of humans?

The decline in human birth rates with increased energy consumption is quantitatively identical to the decline in fertility rate with increased metabolism in other mammals. Put another way, North Americans consume energy at a rate sufficient to sustain a 30,000-kilogram primate, and have offspring at the very slow rate predicted for a beast of this size . . . As infrastructure grows we get more out of it, but must invest more into it, reducing the energy and capital left to invest in the next generation.

Moses disagrees with alternative explanations, such as availability of birth control or decisions to marry later, because these don’t explain decisions to have fewer children in the first place. She also dismisses the idea that “as societies become wealthier, greater educational investments are made in each child to make them competitive in labour markets” because investments in eduction correlate inversely with fertility rates.

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Straight talk about Canada’s oil sands

Would you like to learn the unvarnished story about oil sands, an often highly-touted source of fuel? The March issue of National Geographic has a detailed article on oil sands, focusing on a production facility in Alberta Canada: "Scraping Bottom." It's an already profitable environment-unfriendly carbon-irresponsible way to feed America's often-wasteful craving for fuel. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

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61 degrees

My family is keeping our thermostat at 61 degrees this winter. We decided to bring it down from our traditional 65 degrees in order to save energy. [Note: Late at night at my house, the temperature automatically drops down to 55]. I've put a thermometer in various rooms to check the accuracy of the thermostat. The actual daytime temperature ranges from 59 to 62 in the various rooms. When we are all gone for the day, we manually set the temperature down to 55. When I mention "61 degrees" to people, most of them are surprised; some of them are aghast. Apparently, at least among Americans, 61 degrees is an usually "cold" temperature for the interior of a house in the winter. Over the past couple of weeks, I even heard from several people who keep their thermostats above 70. When you browse the Internet, you will find numerous "authorities" advising you to set the thermostat down to 65 to save energy (e.g., here). Here's an informal survey of quite a few folks. Apparently, even our new energy-conscious President likes it toasty indoors.

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