Well, hell, anything would be an improvement on the City of Sin. 
Ipswich, actually. Why do you ask? 
Ya nevah come out the way you went in!
I was thinking this exact same thing about the wind farms in northern California, actually. And you really have to be on a back road to see them, IME.
I have vacationed on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard in the past, and I will do so again.
The Cape Wind project will not make me change my mind. If you build it, they will still come…
And with any amount of luck, it’ll be a little less crowded…
Yep. If this was in West Virginia, you’d never have heard about it.
http://www.mtnhome4u.com/windmills.html
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16383
Yes, I know this is a wosh. I’m still upset that they put these things in one of my favorite areas of WV.
But you’re the Coalgoddess. You’re just weird that way.
Hmmm…
You wouldn’t mind the sight of meat grinders in the ocean, and yet you live in a place where there are no fewer than two nail salons on every block.
Gotcha.
Lordy, some things in those links are strange. West Virginians put up with mountaintop removal coal mining, but they bitch about a few wind farms?
I’m not arguing that wind turbines have no downsides at all, and I understand the aesthetic argument some people make against them. If we could magically get unlimited energy with no environmental impact, I’d oppose putting up wind turbines too. But we don’t have that luxury. We’ve got to get energy from somewhere, and we’ve got to take into account the problems of pollution and other environmental damage that are produced by our getting it. (And if we do magically get that free no-impact energy someday, the wind farms will be much more easily reversible than other types of energy production.)
ISTM that most anti-turbine types are not objectively evaluating the pros and cons of wind farms in comparison to other energy sources, but instead just reacting with distaste against an industrial installation that’s new and unfamiliar. (And what’s with the “meat grinder” comparison, by the way? To me the turbines look like pinwheels or upright fans. Meat grinders look like this; there’s no real resemblance at all.)
I was talking about this issue with some co-workers, and they favor wind farms for the most part (as do I, looking at the vids and photo mockups on the Cape Wind site, i don’t see what the big deal is, then again, I like windmills) the only issue they had was with birds getting killed by the windmills…
i don’t see the problem, the windmills would only be killing the stupid birds that were dumb enough to fly into the windmill(s) in the first place, therefore it would make the bird population stronger by weeding out the morons…
I’ll hazard a guess that coal mining probably employs quite a lot of West Virginians, far more than wind farms.
Mountaintop removal mining is an abomination, but people will, understandably, nearly always defend a practice that keeps food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Right, but there’s also the issue of where these different types of power generation get placed.
If the Cape Cod folks were offered a choice between having windmills and having a coal-fired power station sitting there off the coast, they’d probably go with the windmills. But they know that this isn’t the way the choice will be made.
It’s windmills or nothing in that particular location, and they know that if they can defeat the windmills then they won’t have to put up with any power plant at all. It then becomes Someone Else’s Problem.
Many of those opposed to this particular wind farm are not actually “anti-turbine types” at all. They’re “anti-turbine-where-i-have-to-look-at-them types.”
Or possibly anti-turbine-where-i-have-to-look-at-them-while-I-spend-a-bloody-fortune-on-my-one-and-only-vacation types. As I’ve said before, I’d happily put up with them the other 51 weeks of the year.
Sure, but if we disqualify every possible windfarm site because someone doesn’t want to see turbines on their vacation, we may well be left with very few places to put them.
In an ideal world we’d put wind farms and any other type of energy production in places where no-one would have to look at them, or in places that are already so ugly that it wouldn’t make a difference. But as i noted in one of the previous threads on this subject, you can’t just plonk a wind farm anywhere; specific conditions regarding average wind speed and duration have to be met in order to make this type of power generation possible. Not only that, but the place where the power is generated should ideally be close enough to the place where the power will be used to make the transmission infrastructure economically and environmentally viable.
Well… see EddyTeddyFreddy’s comment above:
And I know that these comments were made in jest. However, the intent of my comment was that although Lynn Beach is a wonderful recreation area for the City, I would still sacrifice a certain amount of the aesthetic value, knowing that wind farms were creating clean energy for the area.
And sometimes it’s only one nail salon. Next to a hair salon.
Sorry, my bad. I also forgot to mention the lovely pizza shops.
Do you? Lynn is generally understood to be an armpit. The sorts of folks who summer on the Cape expect human feces and used syringes to wash up regularly on your lovely beach. It’s OK to sully the views in Lynn, because it’s a shithole to begin with.
But not Nantucket Sound, you see. That’s too precious. The real estate values tell the tale.
I live about a mile from the Chesapeake Bay. I wouldn’t at all mind having a row of wind turbines a mile from my house, as long as they were a mile in the opposite direction from the Bay. But put 'em along the shore of the Bay, or even within a quarter-mile of it, and we’ve got an argument.
So I wouldn’t mind having them in my proverbial backyard - so long as they were in the less aesthetically troubling corner of it.
Luckily, that’s just where they put up a huge windfarm in Southern California: just outside Banning, in the San Gorgonio Pass, on the way to Palm Springs. The pass at the base of Mount San Jacinto has a pretty stiff breeze 320+ days a year, and the scenery is butt-ugly. Anything they build there can just make it prettier, IMO.
I don’t understand people who think wind turbines are ugly. I especially don’t understand environmentalists who think they are ugly. Here in redneck Alberta, we put them up anywhere we can. And frankly, I think they’re beautiful. They’re sleek, aerodynamic, and I like the thought that they are there, quietly pulling clean power out of the air. There’s nothing ugly about them.
If I lived in Martha’s Vineyard, I’d be proud to have them off the coast. I’d feel good about the fact that while I’m living large and wealthy, I could honestly say that most of my power needs were being generated by clean energy. And I’m not even a liberal. I would have thought that the people who lived there would be ecstatic, given that it’s a highly liberal area.
Unless of course they are just obnoxious rich people who are only ‘liberal’ when it comes to other people’s money, and ‘environmentalist’ when it comes to other people’s habits. I wonder how big the engines are in Teddy Kennedy’s yacht?
Interstate 580 through the Altamont Pass is a back road? Who knew?
Four lanes each way bumper to bumper in the morning and at night, and this is a back road? Damn dude, what do you consider a major highway? 
