We encountered these wind turbines two days ago on Aruba’s northeastern coast where the trade winds hit hard. There are ten of them, huge things visible for miles across this desert geography, giants on the landscape when you are up close and personal. Ten more are being built and once they are functional, they will generate 36% of the island’s electrical needs. Aruba gets it. Wind is their friend – so is solar power, for that matter, but wind seems to be the direction in which they are moving. But we in the U.S. we’re still talking about, unbelievably, more offshore drilling for oil–in spite of the massive spill, in spite of the fact that all the oil in the Gulf would power the U.S. for merely one year, and that is, if it was all used in the U.S. It’s actually sold on the open market.
Oil lobbyists, meanwhile, whisper that those wind turbines are a monstrosity, a blight on our environment. We found them somewhat alien, creatures from the future–possibly. Yet majestic and stoic. Maybe like other technologies they will be replaced by smaller, more powerful versions over time.
There is a synchronicity coming up in this post, but not quite yet. People are puzzled and disgusted with what seems to be happening on the gulf – which is nothing. According to an article in huffingtonpost, BP is still controlling everything, including media access to the damage. The estimate of oil gushing from this disaster has risen from 1000 barrels a day to 40,000 and that’s probably a low ball figure. One expert figured this disaster was the Exxon Valdex happening every 7 to 10 days.
We Americans pride ourselves as being the best and the brightest, a frankly arrogant assessment on where we are right now with the Gulf catastrophe. Even if BP capped the gusher now, this instant, the devastation will extend for decades. Ways of life are already ruined and those ways of being will pass on into history – or, centuries from now – into myth. Maybe the synchronicity in all of this is that it’s British Petroleum–as if the Brits are finally retaliating against their rebellious colonists for dumping tea in Boston Harbor, spurring revolution and independence. Yet, now, neither country is independent of the addiction to oil, and BP has nothing to gain by their disastrous and criminal lack of preparation for such an accident.
To our readers in the UK, we aren’t blaming you. The blame here lies in greed, in capitalism gone bad, in a system so incestuous that the U.S. is now virtually run by corporations whose bottom line is always profit. It’s the result of eight years of efforts to keep government off the backs of business, and allow self-regulation to do it’s thing…and it has.
If an island like Aruba, with a population of 100,000, can generate 36% of its electricity from 20 wind turbines, what might we accomplish from electricity generated from wind, solar, water? Can we change our paradigm? Can corporations act responsibly in the public interest? Can government effectively regulate those corporations that only seek only obscene profits? Can we become one happy island of sustainability?
Well, didn't they kill the electric car?
Great juxtaposition.
Now the NASA administrator is saying NASA's attempt to get energy and clean water from growing algae in sludge is a bad idea. The administrator left his job as a Marathon Oil with a a mega payoff. Marathon has a competing clean energy project.
I don't know if it was urban legend, but I have always heard that the oil companies kept high gas milage cars off the market by hook or by crook even threatening bodily harm for cutting into the bottom line.
Ray
Good one, Gabe!
ha, you know I never really made the connection between the clean energy being generated by the dawn-sun-drenched windmills I shot in this video with the dirty oil auto being consumed by an engine fire at the end of the video, til now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uE30TVcEo
(shot in Iowa as the sun came up during a 20-hour "stop only for gas" roadtrip from Hobbs, New Mexico to Minneapolis MN)
Ed – there are synchronicities in mass events and the gulf is definitely a mass event. As much as most of us would like to separate life from politics, it's not possible. These days, the two are inseparable. What is happening in the larger world is a reflection of what is happening internally, for each of us.
the planet's little creatures re-claiming what is theirs – one way or another – and this way, on the towers!! i see the same thing in maryland and virginia – wonderful to see!
wv=goadom – go, adam!!! from the beginning?
Ray, that is such an astute comment. Beauty, or lack thereof, is in the eye of the beholder. I think watching an old mill-wheel slowly turning, spilling water into the pond below it, is one of the most peaceful sights in the world, and the wind turbines look like giant kites, spinning against the background of the sky and reflecting the prisms of sunbeams. There are many eagles nesting among the tops of the satellite towers not far from here, and somehow those enormous nests make the metal towers much less ominous and gives us something positive and pleasing to see. Beauty is out there, if we don't move too fast and miss it.
cjc
As to the looks of windmills, as long as my dad was farming there was a windmill. Before electricity came to the farm we had one for power and one to pump water. When Dad retired my brother moved the tower behind the house to use it as a CB/TV tower before cell phones and satellite TV.
I've seen the modern windmills along the Mediterranean coast of Spain and the Baltic Coast in Germany and Denmark. They weren't in populated areas. Where there was a town near the water the windmills were on the cliffs above and did not interfere with the view. I personally like the looks of the windmills. The ugliness in in the eye of the beholder/oil or coal producer…
Ray
This post expresses everything I've been feeling. Thanks.
Mike – great info and I agree with you about karma. I actually dislike the word becomes it implies an eye for an eye kind of thing. But as far as families, countries, nations having "karma" (till we come up with a better term, you're right on. And Iraq was never about WMds.
Your possible haven in texas sounds good, gypsy. It'd be great to have a self-sustaining home. Soalr panels, windmills, anythng other than oil.
Debra – didn't see that on huffington. But how funny!
A while ago, HuffPo ran this spoof:
"BREAKING: Large Air Spill At Wind Farm. No Threats Reported. Some Claim To Enjoy The Breeze."
https://current.com/1mm104c
The past couple of days on all the news media outlets, there were "breaking news" alerts that BP has agreed to "come up with some means of accelerating" the control of the spill before the Obama visit to the site tomorrow, and will have an answer by tonight…Sunday. Excuse me, but if there is a way to accelerate it, why haven't they done it yet? Why wait until another visit from the President? Doesn't compute.cjc
One correction it isn't 'British Petroleum', it hasn't been so since 1998. It's just 'BP' and nearly 50% of the shares are owned by US residents and corporations. They also employ more people in the US than anywhere else.
BP is, however, run from the UK and is on the UK stock exchange – as that is where it originated.
Unfortunately oil and large corporations do rule the world. Greed is everywhere and causes all sorts of problems, even wars – was Iraq really about weapons of mass destruction?
'Brits are finally retaliating against their rebellious colonists' that made me smile! It's not the Brits it's more likely karma.
I don't see karma as simply an individual thing, it also applies to families, areas, countries and so on.
In Britain, for example, areas are being 'taken over' by immigrants, their ways adopted. Is this because of what we (I'm English) have done similarly to other countries in the past? Could be. Every action causes a result.
At the moment oil is a major player – most people, for example, seem to want to run cars, without paying too much at the pumps.
Perhaps it's about time 'we' came up with a viable alternative – a new source of energy. And maybe a new way of life.
An interesting post! 🙂
i am simply moved beyond words at this post, trish and rob – it just resounds within my very soul – it is all too rarely that mere words generate with such purity and truth as do these – brilliantly said! would that it could be on the front page of every major newspaper and flashed across the screen of every television –
love the windmill photo – they are so architecturally beautiful – like giant sky sculptures –
a few weeks ago i received several photos from a relative i've never met of some family property in north carolina – sounds so much like cjc's own story above – the centuries old farmhouse still stands in a wooded area close to a running brook and across the way is the family's large mill run by a single big waterwheel – and i thought about how totally self-sufficient their lives were – and how sad that in our "progressive" times we are so the opposite – how we are so totally "dependent" –
my son in texas is buying a few acres of land out in the middle of nowhere – and is going to put a self-sufficient house on it – and there's room for a small little cabin for moi! i may consider!
OOPS! That should have been "corn MEAL", not corn "mill". Shaky old fingers here!
appropriate WV: flupp FLUB!!
cjc
The above Anon wasn't from cjc. Thanks. I did, however, post a comment that didn't go through, (due to some computer-glitch issue), about the wind turbines making so much sense. They are cost effective, and although the elitist Big Corps grumble about them being "blights on the scenery", they don't grumble about the metal monsters that are scattered everywhere: the TV and cell phone towers. If the original comment goes through, I apologize for this repeat. I counted no less than 222…that's right, 222….satellite towers during the 25 minute drive from our home on the beach to our son's home south of us down U.S. 1. I also mentioned that I can remember when wind mills were used for all kinds of things on farms, and that my MIL bought her corn mill from just such a farm until 1997. That mill continues to be in use, and isn't a tourist site. It's a working farm. I suspect Mother Earth herself may send us back to the basics. They worked for our parents and grandparents. They would work for us. Our lives of, and dependence upon, sophisticated electronics may well be snuffed out in near future. Speaking of my MIL, her house is on the side of a N. GA mountain, and my BIL lives there. The water comes into the house from a small "catch-reservoir" higher up on the mountain that is spring-fed, and gravity brings it into the house. Simple. Wonderful. Basic. And as effective as powered water supply. Best part, it's FREE. cjc
It's ironic that a vocal segment of Americans have been rebelling against big government, painting it as fascist, taking over everything. Now some of those same people are shouting, 'Where is the government? Why has Obama allowed this catastrophe to continue?
The problem isn't government over-running corporations. It's the other way around. Wake up Tea Party folks. (Probably not too many here. 🙂