Wind farms are useless, says Duke
 

Wind farms are useless, says Duke - Telegraph


"It emerged last year that electricity customers are paying an average of £90 a year to subsidise wind farms and other forms of renewable energy as part of a government scheme to meet carbon-reduction targets."


Makes me wonder how much Americans are paying out to subsidize
our renewable energy schemes (and green jobs)??

When I look at this $700,000 house in Lexington, I wonder how many
people living from paycheck to paycheck, kicked in for that PV.?.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/us...&smid=fb-share

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...0slot/R057.jpg

Maybe the Duke feels that way for a reason:

While they are opposed to onshore wind farms, the Royal family stands to earn millions of pounds from those placed offshore.

"Two-thirds of the country’s wind turbines are owned by foreign companies,
which are estimated to reap £500million a year in subsidies."

Wow! That's gotta hurt..

The old Duke has the NIMBY pretty bad.. We have the same kind of people
living down in Cape Cod. They don't want to see anything on their ocean, but nice sail boats..
Cape Wind :: America's First Offshore Wind Farm on Nantucket Sound

Our local grid guys NStar have green power on their menu, if you
want to pay extra money per kWh.. :rolleyes:

Yeah, I hot an email about that a couple months ago.

Pffft.

But a lot of this money we are talking about, tax payer money, is certainly doing good. A lot of the work I do is entirely funded by govt. money and it only goes to low income families.The house I just finished up on today has been a really moving experience for me. I believe I have mentioned why elsewhere. We;re not giving tax breaks to the rich (the only people who can afford PV) on PV. We're giving those who struggle to keep warm in the winter a way to be more comfortable and use less costly and destructive and nasty fossil fules.

We were a low income family for many years. Now that we are retired, we are again. :o
Guess maybe I'll have to look into getting some of that free taxpayers money
before the Conservatives take over the government next year.. ;)


It's kinda funny, they don't have any means testing for a lot of the handouts..
I hear we are giving away millions in unemployment checks to people
who have adjusted income levels of over one million bucks.

Plus, there are the millions we are giving to that same category of rich folks,
who are collecting SS checks (& disability etc.).
I hope those rich people don't collect more than they paid in..

If I won the lottery for millions of bucks, I can't even imagine a reason
to apply for unemployment payments etc.. That just seems nutty to me.

I'm not sold on the whole redistribution of wealth idea.
Especially when we are borrowing a LOT of that wealth from China.

It just seems nutty to for the government to be putting our grandchildren
in debt so deep, they won't even be able to keep up with the interest payments.

I see plenty of renewable energy systems go in without any tax dollars and the ones that do get tax dollars are making good use of it.
I also see people driving SUV's and big trucks that are filling their gas tanks with gasoline that is cheap because my tax dollars are keeping it cheap, I don't like that I'm paying for the waste of other people and would rather my money go to solar and wind, but solar and wind are also easy to pick on because we've been suckers for so long keeping gas and oil cheap, it's really sad how dumb we are.

I don't think that people in general are "dumb", but more distracted.
They are busying paying attention to all kinds of other things,
and hoping the federal government is doing their jobs, per the Constitution.

They think our system has been set up to work, without the people needing to act as 24-7 watchdog.
Making sure that we aren't being robbed blind.. :eek:

But, the truth is starting to come out. We are being cheated.
And now people starting to come to the realization that times have changed.
We will all have to start paying attention to the day-to-day operations
of the federal government.
Our federal employees have run amok. Gone off their rockers.
So, we are just now starting to bring things back to some semblance of normal.

The same craziness has happened in some states too, as their populations are starting to realize.
The people of America have a lot of work ahead of them. It's going to take years to clean up the mess.

I think that the real genius of the conservative movement is that it has motivated it's base to vote for policies that are against it's own interest.

It is perfectly reasonable that a wealthy conservative would favor legislation that would cause wealth to migrate upwards, but it take real cunning to convince people who are struggling to get by, to favor the same legislation. "Useful Idiots" might be a fair term in this case.

It seems that the mechanism is to use a person's sense of outrage (which is usually justified) to convince that person to favor policies that that are ultimately not beneficial to that person, but only beneficial to the wealthy (which is misguided).


There is a very interesting report that was recently put out by the OECD, which is a consortium of industrial countries. This report addresses 'social justice', and looks at things such as access to employment, wealth distribution, access to education and childhood poverty, etc.

The Report can be downloaded here.

The report has lots of graphs, so it is easy to see what is really going on.

Pretty sobering how countries with much smaller economies are succeeding at making life better for it's people, on the whole.

It is pretty amazing how far, as a country, we have fallen. Not only are we not the best, we are uncomfortably close to the worst.

And all the while, we have more millionaires and billionaires than any country in the world... that should be comforting if you are a millionaire or a billionaire.


-AC_Hacker

Useless Insulation...
 

As long as we're on the topic of useless green efforts, here's a dandy insulation calculator that will calculate the optimum amount of insulation, assuming a loan was taken out for upgrade, etc.


Pretty thorough.

-AC_Hacker

Self-interest is one of our problems. Millions of people are just looking out for themselves.
They could care less if their grandchildren are going to suffer, they want their 'Free' stuff right now. Today!

They don't mind if the cash comes from China or some taxpaying family that's living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Why do their(taxpayers) kids need a college education? When I need that new Chevy Volt!!


"Useful Idiots" and Suckers.. Yeah, that's what the slackers call us taxpayers.
Who can blame them? We have been giving them a free ride,
and we have been neglecting our responsibility to our children.

We should have kept an eye on the government. All the signs of derangement(?)
have been there for years now. And we had our heads in the sand.
Too busy with our own concerns to worry about a few nutcases in DC or the Statehouse.

Now, that inattentiveness is coming back to haunt us. And not in a good way.

When I read about "Project Gunrunner" and realize that my taxpayer dollars
were deliberately spent by my government to assist in the murder
of innocent people in the US and Mexico, I'm disgusted beyond words.
This is what the government is doing with my money???
My government has put the blood of hundreds on my hands..
I'm depressed just thinking about the final body count..