Via Ezra Klein, Robert Gibbs on the Republican budget counter-proposal:
There’s one more picture of a windmill than there is of a chart of numbers.
Here are the GOP windmills.
Notice something? This isn’t a photograph. Actual wind farms are far more widely spaced to reduce wake turbulence; a typical offshore spacing is 5 rotor diameters (say 400m) within rows and 14 rotor diameters (say 1100m) between them. Why invent an unrealistic image?
Normally this would be done as an attack. But the GOP’s rather obscure point here is that Senators Kennedy and Kerry are NIMBY hypocrites on renewable energy because they oppose the plan for a wind farm offshore from Nantucket, which Republicans presumably support. Gotcha! And so what?
You would think the GOP would look for a photo that made such farms look striking and futuristic rather than boring and ugly. In about 30 seconds (hint: type “offshore wind farm” into Google Images) I found a whole raft of them; if photos could generate power, the problem would be solved by now. A typical example:
Ezra Klein comments on the GOP proposal:
It reads like what would happen if The Onion put together a budget.
I disagree. The Onion is a professional operation.
