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Texas Tells Cape Wind "You're Not First Yet"
longacre writes "Cape Wind is making headlines for being the first offshore wind farm to earn federal approval, but it still has plenty of legal hoops to jump through before groundbreaking. Texas, on the other hand, requires no review — state, federal, or otherwise — to build wind farms off its shore. Texas energy expert and Popular Mechanics senior editor Jennifer Bogo talks to Texan energy leaders who are confident they will beat Cape Wind to the punch for the distinction of having the first functional US offshore wind farm. 'I was about to write a press release to congratulate Cape Wind for getting their approval,' says Jim Suydam, press secretary of the Texas General Land Office, 'and let them know when they're done jumping through hoops up there they can come build off the Texas Coast.' Despite its reputation as an oil-addicted, non-environmentally-friendly, conservative state, Texas's existing land-based wind farms actually produce four times more electricity than California's."
almost no one burns oil for electricity anymore, they burn coal. i don't know why all the fucktards above are talking about oil spills. it's not related.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Conservativism excludes suddenly building 50,000 nuclear plants today because we just discovered a new reactor design, replacing our coal power with solar, and putting up tons of wind farms; just to find out that nuclear plants have some unexpected flaws even in the new design that we don't know how to handle, solar power is about 3.2 times as expensive as we thought since the panels last 20 years but after 3 years they're at 30% of their original operating efficiency, and wind farms draw their energy from weather patterns and thus have drastic impacts on the global climate.
Everyone seems to want to implement their brand new idea today, now, and replace all this old junk that's worked for years but has known serious flaws. Every time someone decides they should replace the power grid, or cars, or our economy (regulatory laws) with something much better they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should emit some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skull until they achieve enlightenment. Replacing our dirty coal and oil plants with something entirely different might be a good idea; the stopgap of upgrading the equipment to be clean-running is an immediately good idea, though, and much better than pulling the plug on the mass scale and putting something new and trendy but only vaguely understood in place.
Forward-thinking is completely useless and even dangerous without forethought; forward-thinking should only be done in a controlled, thought-driven manner that encourages constant thought and constant review of prior ideas until we've refined them enough to drop them in on a small scale. Once things go smoothly on the small scale, we can start cautiously implementing them on a larger scale, going back and fixing things as we discover issues and rolling the changes into continued deployment. Yes, it takes 50 years instead of 5; if this matters, you did something extremely wrong.
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Aren't solar panels produced through highly toxic methods?