Order The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers at Amazon.com for the low price of $12.95. My blog readers can receive it at a special discount. Go to this site, Wizard and enter the code 7PBGMXNC. The book is an excellent gift for learning persuasion – for any audience.
To get an automatic email reminder of every new post, send your email address to lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com. Make the subject Notify Me. I will not sell or distribute your email information.
Sometime around 1990, I was driving my rental car up the mountain road from Oakland, California to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This was my first visit on a secret collaboration with LLNL. Awed by the landscape, I was amazed that anyone could ever visit this beautiful area and not fall in love with it. Although I was pressed for time, I slowed to admire the verdant mountain slopes ablaze with yellow and red spring wildflowers and an early morning sunrise. Then, over the next hill, the skyline belched and barfed the ugliest sight I had yet beheld. I found that instead of scenery, a cancer was eating the vital organs. The skyline was blotched with ugly. I no longer wished to stay. My desire was to leave and never return. Humans had destroyed the beauty of nature and of California. For the next visit to LLNL, I sent one of my subordinates. The memory has lingered, lo, these twenty years hence.
A few years ago, we were motoring through Spain, weaving down from the glorious Seville to the coastal Malaga and threading the Mediterranean coastline. We watched the locals parasail in the Alboran Sea, drifting as high in the air as I have even known, and then droping down so low as to seemingly ski across the frothing waves and spraying foam. We took time to frolic along the beach, change into dry clothes, and drive back up into the mountains toward the spectacular Granada. Around the hill I turned and there they were, again. The zombies. The ugly monsters were ravaging the Iberian coastline, now, poking out our eyes so that we could no longer enjoy our mountain view of the parasails, or the sky, or God.
Three months ago, we flew to Seattle, rented a car and drove the spectacular ten hours to Glacier National Park. (There is no finer park in the entire US than Glacier). On the way, across the interim range, there the scabs appeared again, blocking our vision, destroying our very image of nature, repose, and expanse. I moaned a verse better sung by Willie Nelson and Lacy Dalton,
This Land that I travel, Once fashion with beauty,
Now stands with scars on her face.
And the wide open spaces are closing in quickly
From the ways of the whole human race.
Yesterday, I found myself traveling across Texas from Dallas, northwest on US 287. This four-lane divided highway wanders up to the Red River and then parallels it for a distance of more than 100 miles before it splays into what is called West Texas. Day by day, flatbed tractor trailers rumble along this thoroughfare, each carrying a giant dagger, a turbine blade 90 – 120 ft. in length. The trucks are headed out to the expansive west Texas, some to the panhandle region, and some beyond. Three of these blades will be joined to a hub. The tri-spoked hub will be mounted on a 200 foot pole that will permit the entire monstrosity to stretch 325 feet into the air, rotating, destroying any semblance of horizon. These mechanical egrets stand and gawk, each generating about a 1 megawatt of electricity.
The term, “West Texas,” once conjured visions of wide open spaces. Once conjured.
The largest wind farm in the US (rated by power output) is the Roscoe (Texas) Wind Farm in which over 400 land owners agreed to construct 627 wind turbines and share in the royalties. These three-armed beanpole cobras extend across four counties and 100,000 acres, an area considerably larger than Manhattan. All this to generate 780 MW of electricity.
If you want something uglier, try the Altamont Pass Wind Farm in Central California where thousands of much smaller turbines litter a much prettier landscape like so many Coca-Cola cans thrown out the car. Altamont Pass “boasts” 4,930 of these ugly flailing creatures. These certainly give a squalid context to “meet me at the pass.” More like, “Meet me at the eyesore.”
Thirty-seven states have wind farms. Drugged by political correctness and intoxicated with anti-carbon propaganda, the US is cluttered with these mistakes. And what do you get for it? If you took all the wind power in the entire US and looked at the proportion of power it delivers on an annual basis, all the wind turbines in the US provide us with the equivalent of only 6 days of electricity the entire year, 1.6% of the total US energy use. (Source: Energy Institute of The University of Texas). The “cost” in terms of ruining our landscape is far, far too great for so miniscule a payoff.
We have cut off our face to spite our nose.
There are much cheaper and better (less carboniferous) means of providing electricity, ways that do not violate every spot of open ground. Aesthetics should be part of our concern, also.
My prediction is that in less than 25-years we will wake up, come out of our intoxication and view these wind monstrosities with the same distain that we now view the mine tailings in Colorado or the open pit coal dredges of Pennsylvania. In 25-years, the Greenpeace sheep, the people campaigning to erect more, now, will be campaigning then to tear them all down. They will use taxpayer dollars, of course, and probably want to recycle every windmill. Why not avoid this problem, now? Windmills are ugly personified.
It does not matter with what ferocity the green-politico-eco-liberal winds currently blow, it is not worth the destruction of our landscape.