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facts, analysis, exposure of wind energy’s real impacts

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News

“Absentee landowners may be gaining financially from [wind power] development, but the idea that ‘wind farming’ is a compatible agriculture use is more myth than reality in Illinois…. In fact, those Illinois farmers who have leveraged their operations conservatively tell us that they’re not interested in the ‘windfall’ of wind farming.”

The wind industry continues to claim that wind “farming” and agriculture are compatible land uses. Here it is again in a recent letter in the Wall Street Journal by the American Wind Energy Association defending the economics of wind power.

For years, politicians and urban/suburbanites have been treated to heaping doses of win-win business tales of family farmers leasing sections of their crop land for wind development, while working the soil right up to the towers and earning extra revenue to keep the land open.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using real science.

Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Quiz: See how many of the “Mad Men” you know.…

“For every billion-dollar weather disaster identified as being ‘consistent with’ human-caused global warming, there are probably several other potential billion-dollar weather disasters that human-caused global warming averted.”

Last week, the government’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) finalized its list of “Billion Dollar Weather/Climate Disasters” for 2012. They reported 11 such events with the combined loss exceeding $110 billion, making it the second costliest year since their compilation began in 1980.

Since the number of billion dollar weather disasters has been increasing over time, the temptation to point a finger at anthropogenic global warming is too great for many global warming addicts to resist, despite the known problems with the list (for example, the lack of proper accounting for changing population demographics—a factor which explains virtually all of the increase).

It seems folks are extremely creative at coming up with reasons why virtually every weather disaster is “consistent with” human-caused climate change and how things will get worse in the future.…