by Dennis T. Avery (NAPSA)—Greenpeace rang in the New Year with a huge video playing over New York’s Times Square telling Americans to spend a trillion dollars on windmills. Greenpeace wants to adorn our 7 \ a =) @ . landscape with 300,000 huge windmills each 250 feet high to generate 12 percent of our elec- tricity by 2020. The catch is that the windmills won’t replace the need for conventional power plants. There are—after all—lots of times when the wind doesn’t blow. The windmills will simply be an ugly, expensive, add-on to our powergrid. Greenpeace says the windmills would create lots of jobs. They would. Unfortunately, the trillion dollars spent on windmills—and thousands of miles of new power lines to connect them—would be taken from more constructive uses of taxpayer money, such asfinding a cure for cancer or rescuing Social Security from bankruptcy. For Greenpeace, however, the windmill idea represents policy progress. Twenty years ago, they mainly wanted fewer humans, living in mud huts with noelectricity. Now, Greenpeace brags that on windy nights in western Denmark, windmills provide 50 percent of the electricity generated. But nobody needs much powerat night in western Denmark. Since electricity can’t be stored, most of the windmills’ output is exported—at a loss—to neighboring countries. A bigger criticism of the windmill campaign is that Greenpeace thinks it will prevent global warming. The eco-activists still don’t understand Mother Nature’s powerful cycles. The cycle in the earth’s temperatures is much longer: about 1,340 years according to the latest research. History tells us about the Medieval Warming (950 to 1300 AD) and the Little Ice Age that followed (1800 to 1850). History also tells us Jesus lived through the Roman Warming (200 BC to 400 AD) that wasalso followed by anicy age. Now, Dr. Gerard Bond of New York’s own Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has analyzed iceberg debris in deep seabed cores from the North Atlantic. The cores show nine mild global warmings, alternating with nine harsh global cold spells, in the last 12,000 years coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. Greenpeace is talking about 325,000 megawatts of wind-driven electricity for America alone. However, when a wind firm applied for the permits to build an offshore wind farm in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound, everyone from the Sierra Club to Sen. Teddy Kennedy rose in protest. “Not here,” they said, though the Nantucket shoals are one of the few places in the United States where an offshore wind farm makes sense. Does Greenpeace dangle the windmills we haven’t yet seen and learned to hate to prevent approvals for clean-coal and nuclear plants that would produce our electricity at much less financial and environmentalcost? Let’s send this radical ecoactivist group back to its drawing boards in Amsterdam andtell it to look for a better solution. e Dennis T. Avery is a Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank.
