Sal wrote:
These people talk about how wind turbines destroy the landscape...yet their supporters like Brew think nothing of encouraging millions of dirt bike riders to leave their marks on the same landscape.
go figure!
Sal, I have never stated my opinion on wind power. European nations are generally very pro environment so I figured this article was in line with the topic of this discussion.
PLEASE comment on the subject, not the posters.
Sadly, Bre, sal has shown continualy he is totaly incapable of sticking to the thread and insists on placing his anti-ohv talk anywhere he can. I do not know how this will play out but it impacts a lot of people beyond ohv riders.
what i dont like is that the blm thinks the land is theirs to do what they want. its not blm in a federal agency, meaning its the taxpayers land. they dont own it the people own it. we need to send some people a copy of the constitution. not trying to change the subject but this video has some good comments made by a sheriff in nevada about the blm... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaEKB8pU2Tw
Wind and solar power will never contribute a significant percentage of our total energy needs. That's just a fact, agreed to by most experts. Perhaps 8% is a very high estimate, and most estimates are lower than 8%. Committing huge sums of taxpayer money is simply not a wise investment, and may very well be considered a pay off by the Obama Administration to environmental groups and special interests, who helped considerably in his election. Since this thread was begun, we've all seen the fallout from the Solyndra scandal, which certainly appears to be a payoff for political support, using taxpayer money, which has the added benefit to insiders who invested in such scams. This is what happens when government chooses winners and losers using political criteria instead of science, common sense, and the Constitution as its guide.
It is very much the same with locking up public lands to public access and motorized recreation. Instead of choosing policies on the merits of the competing interests, decisions are made by a largely unaccountable federal agency, bowing under pressure from special interest groups, to the detriment of our most precious commodity, which is the liberty of the American people to influence what happens with their own public lands. When Congress and the Administration get involved, it gets worse. Beyond destroying liberty, precious and scarce financial resources belonging to taxpayers are squandered on the illegal practice of political pandering, disguised as energy policy, land use policy, or a few dozen other supposedly good things our government is doing with trillions of tax dollars it will collect from our grandchildren. Those who support such policies claim to be the smartest people we have. In reality, they are incredibly stupid and naiive. Their policies often have unintended consequences, and some even have the unfortunate distinction of actually making the stated problem worse, not better. The list is long, and I won't belabor the point here. But I think we now have enough experience with environmental lobby preferred policies to understand that they usually end up being a net detriment to society, rather than any stated benefit. I'm all in favor of sensible personal habits which help our environment, and reduce our net impact as a species. But we're tired of having political policy disguised as environmental policy shoved down our throats, watching it backfire on us, spending our grandchildrens' retirement savings to implement them, and locking out taxpayers from their own lands in the process. A little common sense would go a long way here.
Will Cars Ever Replace The Family Horse?Posted by MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN, Wall Street Columnist in At TMV.
Apr 28th, 2009
Everybody likes alternative energy. How could you not like “live” sources of energy from the sun, the wind, the heat of the earth itself, from running water, more than “dead” energy from coal and petroleum derived from rifling the burial grounds of long deceased creatures.
Many economists and other deep thinkers lament, however, that the transformation from dead to live energy sources to power our way of life involves costs so huge that it will only come about very slowly over a great many years, with the dead stuff continuing to power things during this lengthy interval.
A potent seeming argument, this. But it got me wondering. Might not the same kind of argument have been used in the decade or two before the end of the nineteenth century to “prove” that we could not transform the world’s transportation system from horse-based to auto-based?
From this late nineteenth century perspective, consider costs and other factors that might be involved in making automobiles a practical alternative to the family dobbin. First there’s the reliability factor. Horses will get you where you want to go. They had been doing exactly that for thousands of years. Automobiles, well, sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t.
Automotive technology would get better, of course. Everyone acknowledged that. But did you as a consumer or someone whose business depended on getting goods from place to place really want to take a chance with an automobile? Especially since the manufacturers of these contraptions couldn’t even decide yet whether to run them using a gasoline internal combustion engine, steam or electricity. Too many choices here. It would take decades just sorting this out.
And lord, the costs of going from horse transport to auto transport! Railroads were economical because they operated on a limited number of tracks. Try to imagine all the well-paved roads leading to millions of different places that would be needed with an automobile-based transportation system.
Think also about powering this mode of transport. A horse can eat grass along the way. With cars you needed some kind of fuel stations. Thousands and thousands of them. Which in turn would have to restocked again and again with some fueling agent because gasoline didn’t grow on the side of the road.
And while talking about the great new opportunities with cars, one also had to focus on what replacing the horse as basic transportation would mean to existing industries. Next to railroads and agriculture, horse raising was the biggest industry in the country and provided direct and indirect employment for millions of Americans. Would you want companies in this huge industry to go under? Would you want their workers to become unemployed?
Let’s be honest here, these late nineteenth century heavy thinkers would conclude. Automobiles were a rich man’s toy. They would never be manufactured at a cost that would make them practical to the ordinary person. All the numbers and simple common sense made clear that an auto-based culture was a pipe dream. A nice pipe dream, perhaps, but one that must not guide national economic policy.
Such are the arguments that “prove” the automobile would never replace the horse as a basic mode of transport. If you find these arguments persuasive, you will doubtless be persuaded that alternative energy will never replace fossil fuels any times soon.
Since we're barely halfway through the industrial revolution, references to and comparisons with horseless carriages are beyond silly.
Come back and post after the bio-tech revolution allows us to absorb the Q-DUSA (Q for Quantum) Forums via direct Grey-Matter Net, the eventual successor to the archaic (barbaric?) Internet.
Trad should be on his 2nd or 3rd used-NFL body by then. Look for the Pix!! (Then try and get them out of your mind! )
As for Public Land...well, there won't be any left. But damn those GM Gopherus (sic) are tasty!
D-Road...last row, behind the tubers, just past the beets...
Oh...and Merry Christmas to everyone at DUSA!
(It's MY greeting...take your other holidays, made-up or otherwise, and go play somewhere else...)
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