Syjel’s Recent Comments

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  Goals

  I actually met Cathy Zoi, the CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a few months ago. Unless they've changed their direction since then, she was very much focused on the realpolitik of climate change. She described their strategy this way:

  There exists scads of polling data showing that the vast majority of Americans are concerned about climate change and want the government to do something about it. Kaibosworth is very right that the issue fails to register in open-ended polls, but that doesn't mean that Americans don't care. It just means that there is a greater sense of immediacy for most people about issues like the Iraq War, health care, and the economy. The goal of the ad campaign is literally to get climate change on that open-ended polling map, because until that happens, we're not going to make any major political progress.

  The Alliance is having these top-dollar commercials made not just to get people to conserve energy, but to drive home the connection between turning on the lights and emitting greenhouse gases. In other words, they're trying to make climate change more relevant to people's daily lives. If the public is thinking about it, they're more likely to mention it to a pollster.

  Here's an example that they've been testing in some areas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op-DyH4gyLU. On Gore group will launch climate marketing campaign posted 1 year, 8 months ago 4 Responses

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  Fact Check

  A) According to Jim Gordon, the CEO of Cape Wind Associates, the project is expected to cost $1.2 billion. Not $1.7 billion. It's expensive, but then it's also the first one of its kind in the US (the project off Galveston, TX is still in the testing phase, though there's a good chance it'll go up before Cape Wind). In a few years, once we have a legitimate offshore wind industry in this country, the costs will come down just like they did in Europe.

  B) Cape Wind is financed entirely by private investors (minus the 1.9 cents/KwH production tax credit). The economics clearly work out or they wouldn't be moving with the project in the first place. Compare this to nuclear. It's a mature industry and, even so, we stopped building reactors in this country when the government stopped offering them low interest loans. The market refuses to touch nuclear without a government safety net.

  C) There has been one fatality in the history of modern wind power. It was an engineer out in the Pacific Northwest last year. Remind me how many people died in Chernobyl? I'm not saying that's likely to happen, but let's not spin the facts here.

  We should all be happy this industry is finally making some headway. It's worked in Europe to the point that England and Denmark are each shooting to produce 50% of their electricity with mostly offshore wind. It's high time that we start taking  some initiative ourselves. On Draft EIS for Nantucket Sound wind project is positive posted 1 year, 10 months ago 35 Responses