Texas Town Embraces Wind Energy. Climate Change, Not So Much.
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA 
on 11.28.07
We might not be too keen on the idea to build artificial ski slopes and snow caves there, but it’s not all bad in Texas. We’ve already noted that they are way ahead of California in developing wind power and now, courtesy of NPR, we’ve found a narrated slide show about just how deeply the wind revolution is taking hold in “the Big Country”. According to 65-year-old cotton farmer and wind developer Cliff Etheredge, Texan communities are rethinking their entire attitude to wind:
"We used to cuss the wind. Killed our crops, carried our moisture away, dried out our land. But because of the advent of the wind farms, we've had a complete 180-degree attitude change. Now, we love the wind."
It seems a few years ago, Etheredge noticed turbines springing up around Texas and wondered whether his community of Roscoe, with a population of 1,300, could benefit from the industry. He did some reading, networked with other land owners, and now an Irish company is spending over $1billion installing 640 turbines – enough to power 265,000 homes. It seems that the opposition to wind farms experienced in other parts of the country isn’t a problem here, with locals welcoming the economic boost to a town that was in deep financial decline, as farmer Daylon Althof notes:
"My wife and I talked about this the other day. We were coming in from church, and she said, 'You know, at first I really thought they were kind of trashy looking,'" says Daylon Althof, a farmer who has one turbine going up on his land. "But she said, 'The more I see these going up, they're kind of beautiful because we know what they're going to provide for the economy around here.'"
Interestingly, NPR also quotes wind energy advocates who are still skeptical about the existence of human-induced climate change. Perhaps this is the most encouraging sign of all – when people adopt renewable energy and other green technologies, not because they are saving the planet, but because they just make sense, then we know we are finally getting somewhere. ::NPR::via site visit::
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Many of these climate-change deniers have been bamboozled in other ways too. Many of them are heavily indebted owing to fast-talking machinery and irrigation salespeople. The lobbyists and legislators that everyone pays for take their orders from the a small number of large, solvent, sophisticated land-holders, not the ordinary people. And there will undoubtedly be plenty of sharp Enron-type operators who will take a slice before the ordinary people see a check. 'twas ever thus!
While it is discouraging that they don't get climate change, getting wind farms is a start in the right direction. Regardless of their ideology, their actions are speaking louder than any words could.
Climate Change Deniers? What's the last scholarly paper on climate change you read? What's the last temperature dataset that you actually manipulated? Talk about unquestioning orthodoxy. Fanaticism of ANY stripe is wrong.
I just want to add to my comment above.
I think that a lot of these people have been manipulated by extremely clever and powerful forces. I don't want to re-enforce the regrettable stereotype that these people are somehow less aware or less sophisticated than more cosmopolitan people. I love the rural life and I mourn its passing more than anything.
An Irish company is investing $1 Billion in Texas? Evidence that our refusal to do anything about climate change because it would hurt the economy is hurting the economy.
Good old things to remember -
Save a Watt, Turn me off when I'm not needed.
Give a Hoot - Don't Pollute.
Stay alive, drive 55.
No Blood for Oil.
Is this trip really necessary?
Even numbered plates buy gas today, odd numbered buy gas tomorrow.
Sorry- No Gas
Last I remember, Mars doesn't have big coal fired electricity generating plants but the temperature there is subject to crazy trends.
The Levine posting from yesterday was great.
As far as the article goes. Yes, there are probably great swaths of land which could be used for wind power generation. I wonder what the impact would be over hundreds of acres. I would love to see them 'in my backyard' (or offshore) and I vote.
Yes they represent the cleaner energy we all need. And I think they are usually made in the USA?
Good Luck,
vsk
I've heard from some land owners in southern ontario that say these land-lease arrangements don't bode well in the long run.
Sure they get some $$ and no doubt it's great for reducing energy related pollution...but apparently the owners of the turbines can walk away from the turbine at the end of the lease (20-ish years or maybe 40) and leave the turbine to the owner to deal with.
Odds are they'd leave it in a broken state (as repair costs might outweigh worth down the road)....
Pays to have a lawyer beside you before you sign...granted, one might argue lawyers are the worst ecological pollutant out there! ;)
to the post above me: but why would a company choose to walk away from a a turbine if it is profitable. it's my understanding that it is, and in the long-run if having turbines create more profit than loss, the investment in improvements or repairs would be worth it. after all, if one company doesn't another can. i'm just thinking your critique is premised on the notion that these won't be profitable, which we have no reason to assume.
Maybe the next oil-man we get from texas will be a wind and oil man. Baby steps...
Climate Change Deniers? Nice try, you can't compare us to Holocaust deniers. I'm one of those green power guys who doesn't believe in man-made warming. I run a wind turbine R& D company. Oh, and I'm also a geophysicist.
See if you really know the basics of climate science. Try to answer these: (answers are below so don't cheat)
1. What is the average temperature for all of the Earth's 4.54 billion years? (excluding the first years it spent cooling after formation) If it is different now, how so (warmer or colder)? Why?
2. Where did the atmosphere come from? Has it always had the same composition? Did this affect climate?
3. How far back in time does the oldest ice core sample go?
4. Why is Africa covered in desert?
Answers:
1. Tropical from pole to pole for 95% of geologic time. It is COLDER now than for most of Earth's history. The reason is that we are in a ice age, during which temperatures fluctuate wildly but are on the whole very low.
2. The atmosphere came from the Earth and thus is usually assumed to have a similar composition to what is output by volcanoes. The oxygen component was created not by trees, but by photosynthetic plankton in the oceans. The air used to contain no oxygen and much higher levels of the greenhouse gases H2O, CO2 and CH4. Still, as these gases decreased climate stayed steady. No constituent or combination thereof has been correlated to global temperatures over time.
3. Eight million years. Most ice is in the thousands of years old, not millions, but even 8 million is only 0.18% of geologic time. Whenever you hear about climate research using ice, remember that it is at best as reliable as doing a book report using one tenth (1/10th) of a page.
4. Because the water they would normally have is trapped in continental glaciers and permafrost.
Preventing global warming is deliberate maintenance of the drought, which is causing massive starvation and civil war.
Some very interesting comments Curtis.
What I always wonder is - if we have taken out approx ½ of all the oil and gas reserves (yes that may be wildly wrong), burnt them and put the byproducts in the atmosphere, all in under 200 years....can we say that WOULDN'T have affected the balance of the atmosphere?
Home Grown and Harnessed Green Power.
Good for you, good for me.
Use less energy, live longer.
Good Luck,
vsk
Curtis.
I disagree with your comments on point number 1. The earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. As such, you're including the 0.8-ish billion years that earth didn't have a crust and was completely molten. This might skew your numbers higher.
There wasn't even oxygen in the atmosphere until about 2.8 billion years ago, which is when you (correctly) identified the plankton were creating it.
So you giving us this information and trying to tout your credentials as a geophysicist really is doing a disservice by leaving out crucial bits of information.
Humanlike primates didn't appear until about 5 million years ago, much younger than the oldest ice core sample you stated above. If you're going to talk about man-made climate change, please constrain it to a credible time period.
Curtis -- thanks for some sanity. You could have also thrown in the recent news (just this month from AGU) that they've found the Earth's crust under Greenland is thinner than expected, in exactly the areas where the "accelerated melting" is occurring. ( I know we're not supposed to
talk about the Sun, the Earth's core, or geophysical
cycles in connection with Man-Caused Global Warming,
but I thought this one was interesting.)
I loved the bit about the "Climate Change Deniers". Next,
we'll be accused of being anti-semites for questioning
mainstream climatology. Oh, wait, that happened just
yesterday: Gore compared anyone who doesn't agree
with his view of 'ecological kristallnacht' equivalent to
a holocaust denier. Sheesh. Reductio ad Hitlerum.
So, if the climate is changing (as it certainly appears
to be) what's a prefontal-sporting bipedal mammal
to do?
Why, adapt, of course.
I love these windmills in Roscoe, I hope they
enjoy them in good health for many years.