The other day we recommended some excellent and free educational resources. Now here’s one that’s been right under our nose but we were unaware of until just now: iTunes U. Interesting courses from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Don’t be surprised when the $550 billion in student loans created during the education bubble run into trouble.
This was advice from a senior government official about what to do: if you hear that the government plans “putting something in place that’s going to make it harder for you to farm, contact USDA. Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about. My suspicion is a lot of times they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.” A reporter took the advice:
Wednesday, 2:40 p.m. ET: After calling the USDA’s main line, I am told to call the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Here, I am patched through to a man who is identified as being in charge of “support services.” I leave a message.
3:53 p.m.: The man calls me back and recommends in a voicemail message that I call the Illinois Farm Bureau — a non-governmental organization.
4:02 p.m.: A woman at the Illinois Farm Bureau connects me to someone in the organization’s government affairs department. That person tells me they “don’t quite know who to refer you to.”
4:06 p.m.: I call the Illinois Department of Agriculture again, letting the person I spoke with earlier know that calling the Illinois Farm Bureau had not been fruitful. He says “those are the kinds of groups that are kind of on top of this or kind of follow things like this. We deal with pesticide here in our bureau.”
“You only deal with pesticides?” I ask.
“We deal with other things … but we mainly deal with pesticides here,” he says, and gives me the phone number for the office of the department’s director, where he says there are “policy people” as well as the director’s staff.
4:10 p.m.: Someone at the director’s office transfers me to the agriculture products inspection department, where a woman says their branch deals with things like animal feed, seed and fertilizer.
“I’m going to transfer you to one of the guys at environmental programs.”
4:15 p.m.: I reach the answering machine at the environmental programs department, and leave a message.
4:57 p.m.: A man from the environmental programs department gets back to me: “I hate to be the regular state worker that’s always accused of passing the buck, but noise and dust regulation would be under our environmental protection agency, rather than the Agriculture Department,” he says, adding that he has forwarded my name and number to the agriculture adviser at IEPA.
On Thursday morning, POLITICO started the hunt for an answer again, this time calling the USDA’s local office in Henry County, Ill., where the town hall took place.
9:42 a.m.: Asked if someone at the office might be able to provide me with the information I requested, the woman on the phone responds, “Not right now. We may have to actually look that up — did you Google this or anything?”
When I say that I’m a reporter and would like to discuss my experience with someone who handles media relations there, I am referred to the USDA’s state office in Champaign. I leave a message there.
10:40 a.m.: A spokeswoman for the Illinois Natural Resources Conservation Service calls me, to whom I explain my multiple attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to retrieve the information I was looking for.
“What I can tell you is our particular agency does not deal with regulations,” she tells me. “We deal with volunteers who voluntarily want to do things. I think the reason you got that response from the Cambridge office is because in regard to noise and dust regulation, we don’t have anything to do with that.”
She adds that the EPA would be more capable of answering questions regarding regulations.
Finally, I call the USDA’s main media relations department, based here in Washington, where I explain to a spokesperson about my failed attempts to obtain an answer to the Illinois farmer’s question. This was their response, via email:
“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”
Finally, this: “The response — eventually — from a USDA representative was that “the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction,” but rather the Environmental Protection Agency.” So the reporter followed up:
Thursday, 3:37 p.m.: I call the EPA’s main number, where the operator connects me to someone else. When I explain that I would like to find out information about regulations concerning noise, dust and water runoff regulations and their possible effects on Illinois farmers, I am told that Illinois falls under “Region 5” and given their number.
3:41 p.m.: At the regional office, I am transferred to somebody that deals with “clean air.”
“Have you gone through our website by any chance?” the person asks. “Our online information is very useful. Just in general practice, it’s good.”
I said I was hoping to get some information over the phone and am given contact numbers for two people: one that handles “compliance enforcement” and someone else that works with “water compliance.” I call both numbers and leave a message.
3:50 p.m.: Then I call back the regional office, explaining that both people were not at their desks.
“Normally Friday is not a good time — a lot of people don’t work on Friday,” the same person from earlier says. I mention that today is Thursday, to which they respond: “A lot of people take Friday off, but some people take Wednesday or Thursday off, too. And I know it’s the end of the summer, but people grab the opportunity to take a vacation before school.”
The person gives me two more people’s contact information: one who is an “environmental engineer” there, and another one who is at the “air and radiation division.” Both of them are also not at their desks, and I leave messages.
4:46 p.m.: I hear back from the “environmental engineer,” who tells me I should speak to the person at the air and radiation division, with whom I left a message earlier.
5:27 p.m.: The person from the air division calls back, who explains he wouldn’t be the best person to talk to about water and noise regulations, and because noise regulations are not federally enforceable, the Illinois EPA would be the place to call.
As for dust regulations, he says he would just need to know what kind of dust the farmer was talking about. “Without knowing what kind of source he’s talking about, it’d be pretty hard to generalize what requirements there are,” he says, adding that he would be happy to speak to the farmer from the town hall.
5:38 p.m.: At the end of the day, I ask EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan for a comment on our experience with calling the EPA to follow up on USDA’s response to Thursday’s story. This was his response via email:
“Below is an update on farm dust — while we do have statutory authority on noise pollution, I’m not aware of any pending rules or standards on that. “Farm dust: This is a myth the Administrator has debunked personally on several occasions. While EPA is mandated by the CAA to review air quality standards for pollutants like farm dust every five years, and that review is currently ongoing, we have no plans to put stricter standards in place. That review, at Administrator’s direction, has involved extensive outreach to farmers and ranchers”
Of course this might be a truthful response. But consider that it came after the first embarrassing story, and that it was a spokesman’s belated response to a reporter whom he knew was going to write another story embarrassing to the administration and to the government generally. Please remind us why it’s a good idea to give any more power or tax dollars to these buffoons.
Some guy said some things:
The economy’s changing, and the days when, just because you’re willing to work hard you can automatically find a job, those days are over. The truth of the matter is that everything requires an education. I don’t have to tell the farmers here, you guys, you’re looking at GPS and have all kinds of equipment and looking at all kinds of markets around the world. It is a complicated piece of business and you’re engaged in it. It’s not just a matter of goin’ out with a plow in a field.
And that’s happened to every industry. When I go to factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and quiet they are, because, you know, what it used to take a thousand folks to do now only takes a hundred folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is that businesses have gotten so efficient, you know, when was the last time you went to a bank teller instead of using an ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online.
A lot of jobs that used to be out there requiring people now have become automated, and that means, us investing in our kids’ education, nothing is more important
Observations: (a) so the solution to joblessness has to wait until today’s kids become tomorrow’s workers a decade or two from now — how vapid and ridiculous is that? (b) this guy’s not responsible: he inherited the ATM problem from Nixon and Ford; and (c) the degree to which this guy knows nothing about American business and technology of the last hundred years is truly scary.
This ad appeared in August 1981. 140 million eh? Adding smartphones to other PC’s, the total is more like 3 billion today. As for “distribute this American technology to the world,” well………. The tone of the ad is annoying, given that Apple was such a pipsqueak at the time. But things seem to have worked out rather well for the company. Can’t imagine how things will look in another 30 years.
A former senior politician:
what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!…When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again…There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!…It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it
The lad is upset that no one seems to be paying attention to the planetary emergency. We have an idea about where this fellow might better use his righteous anger: make him ambassador to Syria.
Holman Jenkins in the WSJ:
All economic crises begin differently — this one began in housing — but eventually they morph into the same old crisis of forgetting what works. Think about the last big crisis of faith in American capitalism in the early 1980s. The panic was eventually crystallized in dueling Harvard Business Review articles by George Gilder and Charles Ferguson…
Mr. Gilder championed the then-emerging Silicon Valley paradigm. He quoted technologist Carver Mead: “We depend on the innovations of the citizens of a free economy to keep ahead of the bureaucrats and the people who make a living on control and planning. In the long term, it’s the element of surprise that gives us the edge over more controlled economies.”…
Mr. Ferguson, an MIT-based consultant, argued the U.S was dooming itself to vassalage unless Washington brushed aside small, poorly-funded entrepreneurs and concentrated regulatory favors and subsidies on giant firms like IBM, AT&T, Digital Equipment and Kodak.
Funny guy, Jenkins. The four companies he named have either disappeared or have been so thoroughly restructured or downsized that they bear little resemblance to their 1980′s incarnations.
The downgrade of Treasury debt by S&P crystallizes many of the strange happenings of the last two and a half years into a single event. Way back in 2009, over 70% of Americans already were “mad as hell” both about the wasteful spending in Washington and the media’s complicity in, and cover-up of, this scandal.
A majority of Americans knew that the $800 billion “stimulus” was a bad joke. They knew that giving insurance to 30 million additional people couldn’t possibly result in the promised lower costs. And they were disgusted with an establishment media machine that aggressively marketed the lies and defamed the majority that were on the other side of the debate.
Back in 2009 we explained that the deficits planned by this government were simply unfinanceable. There wouldn’t be enough foreign demand for Treasury debt at acceptable interest rates, and that taxing the rich at 100% wouldn’t do the trick. Moody’s had already warned the US about losing its AAA rating (and has kept doing so), and by the fall of 2009, The Economist was on board as well. Yet in 2010 the NYT was urging increased spending and opining that “the downgrade will never happen.”
In the fall of 2010 the electorate shouted Stop! at the top of their lungs, but even quite a few GOP senators refused to listen. Meanwhile, the media reacted predictably, accusing the majority of bad motivations on a wide variety of issues.
Suddenly it’s 2011. The government’s reckless spending has become a front page issue. The administration’s representatives in the media turn up the rhetoric even more on those who insist on tough debate and firm lines in the sand on spending. It’s a genuine and deep conflict of visions of the proper role of government; nothing could be more appropriate to have a fight about, but the name-calling only escalated.
And now there’s the downgrade. The “more spending” crowd has nowhere to go. Well, there are tax hikes of course, but that’s rhetoric more than reality. Spending is at least 80% or 90% of the problem even in a world with some tax hikes. But if that’s what the media has to work with, we’ll expect to see more about corporate jet owners and billionaires in the days to come.
Right now, we’re reflecting on the utter strangeness of the last two and a half years. The government should have been occupying itself with clearing the way for job growth and better finances, as we’ve outlined in detail many times in this space. Instead, the government piled on more and more regulations and added trillions of dollars of superfluous and counterproductive spending.
In a sense, time is the only commodity we possess on this planet, and we’ve just wasted a precious two and a half years of it on utter nonsense and worse. Disgraceful.
We encourage you to get acquainted with Khan Academy and Tech Guy Labs. They are a window into how university education will be likely changing due to technology. Salman Khan is a polymath who delivers hundreds, if not thousands, of fascinating mini-lectures on all sorts of subjects. We’d wager that more than 80% of college courses aren’t as chock-full of knowledge and as succinct and well-delivered as those of Mr. Khan.
If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.
There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?
Would you see this. HT: IHTM
NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”…
Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is “not much”). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds…The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted
In other news, the polar bear population has quintupled, and the scientist who said the population was shrinking has been suspended from his government post and is being investigated for misconduct.
Consider the remarkable changes of the last 130 years:
Some signal facts of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.
Mostly it is because perhaps more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and perhaps 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.
We are at the end of an era; soon, there will be no one in America who remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights; for our purposes here, we’ll include the children and grandchildren of these men and women as participating in a chain of continuity to those old days. One of our favorite quotes from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.
It is even worse than that. The transistor was invented in 1947 and patented shortly after, and since that time devices of all sorts have been getting smaller, smarter and less mechanical. There is another loss happening because of this, and Americans — including us — have no idea what it means for the future, though we think it is, on balance, bad:
A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with.
To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even easily open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ’57 Chevy.
We hope we are not romanticizing a world we have lost; it is common enough, as well as wrong, to excessively mythologize the past. Today’s technology provides far greater health and wealth to a vastly larger world population than existed in those other times. We love refineries, steel mills, job shops, machine tools and oil rigs, but we are not suggesting, like Mao, a steel mill in your back yard or some form of return to a isolationist’s vision of a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is fit and proper to understand such things.
We hypothesize that, to some extent, the microchip culture we have now, where miraculous tiny things just somehow work, without moving parts, has produced a form of magical thinking in our country. (We also blame the Hollywood Utopians for this too — their creations often seek, not to mirror or enhance reality, but to create rather harmful alternative realities, but that is another matter.) Americans complain about gas prices, but they don’t like refineries, and they oppose oil drilling in godforsaken wastelands; yet somehow the gas is supposed to be readily available at low prices: this is but one example of a sort of magical thinking that seems to us very unlike the way Americans thought in 1854 or 1947.
We think it is urgent for our future that Americans understand and teach our young people about the enormous developments that have happened since the nineteenth century. So far, such efforts seem to us to be largely centered on self-congratulatory sociological claptrap, where the current generation, with all its diversity, change, and hope, thinks itself superior to all those who have come before. Such flummery is also as destructive as it is common.
In some small way, we think that standing on its head the thinking of Charles Eliot is what is required today. Harvard President Eliot was a great educator and thinker who changed the classical curriculum to make it more suitable for fast-developing America, through increased specialization. (Eliot began teaching at Harvard in that year of 1854, by the way.) We quote him via an unusually well-written entry in Wikipedia:
“As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? — although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”
We agree with Eliot of course that the modern world needs specialization, but it needs anew the inculcation of a general understanding of and feel for the development of our technologies and businesses and how we came so far as a people so fast. There is no argument for Americans’ being as cut off from the world of 1854 or 1947 as they are today; only harm can come from such ignorance.
Today those who style themselves the most learned among us often live in a bubble we sometimes characterize as the university/media/political complex. Their dire predictions are often downright silly. However, they hold these views not only with a fervent passion, but with the conviction that they have the right to impose their fatuous and expensive notions on the rest of us. Like the ancients, we Americans have to return ad fontes, for if we forget the past we leave the future to the fabulists and utopians. That would be a tragic outcome for both America and the world.
A report from a couple of sources on a UN document that reads like it’s from outer space:
The United Nations (UN) on Tuesday warned that humanity is coming close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, urging a greater and faster technological revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe.”
The UN’s yearly report titled “The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation,” underlined the importance of scaling up clean energy technologies…”Business as usual is not an option,” the report concluded….
Two years ago, U.N. researchers were claiming that it would cost “as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade” to go green. Now, a new U.N. report has more than tripled that number to $1.9 trillion per year for 40 years…That works out to a grand total of $76 trillion, over 40 years — or more than five times the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States
It’s been 50 years since the Kanamits appeared at the UN. We thought it was fiction at the time, but maybe the aliens actually took over back then.
Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe“, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”
As if CFL’s were any kind of answer. It’s really become very annoying that these smart people with advanced degrees, who have never worked a day in their lives outside the political/university complex, think they are entitled to run other people’s lives.
One of the great issues of our time is how to undo the damage inflicted by the political/media/university axis. But how do you undo religious beliefs?
and other oddities. Must be summer.
the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers –- whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores…its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back. In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students
This abuse was hidden. Other abuse occurs in plain sight. Revolting.
As part of its effort to combat the economic recession, the federal government pumped nearly $80 billion in direct investment and tax credits into the clean energy sector, catalyzing an unprecedented industry expansion. Solar energy, for example, grew 67 percent in the United States in 2010. The U.S. wind energy industry also experienced unprecedented growth as a result of the generous Section 1603 clean energy stimulus program. The industry grew by 40 percent and added 10 GW of new turbines in 2009…The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity, the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable…we need a comprehensive energy innovation strategy to develop, manufacture and deploy riskier but more promising clean energy technologies that may eventually compete with fossil energy
Oh, we get it. We need smarter subsidies for things that don’t work and are uneconomic. Apparently it’s true that common sense is uncommon.
The Guardian reports on another AGW government policy:
Australia’s population of wild camels, the Financial Times reveals, may soon be shot in order to earn carbon credits under the country’s forthcoming emissions trading scheme. Each one of the creatures is estimated to produce a tonne of carbon dioxide a year –- about the same as a 7,000km flight
Question: if the camel was also the pilot of the plane, what would the emissions be? And what about the methane? What a ridiculous world we have.
Reuters reports on a new environmental study (HT: BC):
World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third…A peak in temperatures in 1998 coincided with a strong El Nino weather event…Natural cooling effects included a declining solar cycle after 2002…”It has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008,” said the study…
Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming…The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution…A U.N. panel of climate scientists said in 2007 that it was 90 percent certain that humankind was causing global warming.
We get the feeling that we’re going to be seeing ever more arcane explanations as the darn facts seem not to fit the theory as well as first thought. Remind you of anything?
There are sensible ways to solve energy problems, and then there’s this. Telegraph:
if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.
We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day…
it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose.
The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency -– thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.
But on the plus side, wind farms kill fewer birds than cats do.
