Hey hey hey! Blue state lefty here living so close to the ocean that I can smell the tide when it's low. I hate big cars, gasoline, Republicans and petroleum wars. I also live in a selfish fantasy bubble within which my wealthy neighbors and I up and down the coast are digging our heels in to make sure we don't have to live like the urban and third world poor whose coastal views have been contaminated by overcrowding, industrialization, transportation of goods and the general detritus and filth of the 21st century.

Most of us aren't Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. We're middle-class people with kids in public schools and a mortgage and car payments to make. We don't care what our 2-acre minimum lot size commute 40 miles into the city every day lifestyle is built upon. All we care about is that when we flip the damn switch, the light comes on.

Somewhere far away people are dying to keep our oil flowing. Yeah, Bush sucks - I hate him, too. We fielded the best we could find - perhaps the greatest man ever to emerge from our elite prep schools. Thank you, John Kerry, for representing our interests so boldly in Washington and throughout the rest of the world. Now please go away.

Windmills are cool. They remind me of big pinwheels. I saw the ones in Altamont once and was enchanted with them. Thank god they're hidden way over there, though, because here in the summer I want to sit on the beach with my goddamn fried clams and look out over water that's blue without any confusing spinning things to make me dizzy. Mexicans live in Altamont - not in Duxbury, Hyannis, Yarmouth, Dennis or Harwich. If we can keep the Mexicans out we should certainly be able to keep those greedy industrialists from building any spinning shit that might get in our way.

We get our power from oil which comes to us on big ships. Every once and awhile one of them runs aground somewhere and lots of fish and seagulls die. Fortunately we keep those ships away from our beaches here. I'm not sure that I could enjoy the beach if I thought there might be oil there.

I've seen the filthy cesspools that get created when lots of poor people live on top of one another. Delhi, Bombay, Chongqing, Shanghai. They can't help it, though, right? I mean, if they could, they'd all live like we do on Cape Cod, too. We must protect this lifestyle for ourselves at any cost!

The 21st century has barely just begun and we've already comfortably buried our heads in the sand. I sure hope we can keep it up!

Welcome to the flipside of our President's assinine contention that reducing greenhouse emissions and signing the Kyoto agreement will "cripple American business." The good summer citizens of the Cape, the Vineyard and Nantucket have a nifty website filled with impassioned pleas for the birds and the fishermen and the specialness of the area and Oh, please! Are we five years old?

Clearly, it has occurred to neither camp that if half the country is under water, and what's left is afflicted by drought or further climate change that neither the health of the economy or the quality of the summer experience in coastal Massachusetts is going to mean much.

I count on "Conservatives" to embrace stupid NIMBY positions, but when I see my more distinguished liberal brethren do it I want to line them up and bitchslap them into the middle of next week.

No blood for oil. And no blood for your goddam view, either...

There's oceans of oil offshore nearly every US coast from the Malibu beauty of SoCal to the Libertarian Neal Boortz hell on earth of Naples, Fla to the Carolina shoals. But no one wants those unsightly wells because they're afraid that waterfront property values will be hurt by a few drilling rigs 20 miles out. Well I say screw that and screw them. If there was oil underneath the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC then we should get it there before worrying about a bunch of violent crazies over there blowing each other up.

I urge people do spend some time doing some real research on industrial wind farms in general and specific proposals. I used to wonder how anyone could oppose a wind farm on any legitimate grounds- it always came down to NIMBY complaints which is pretty easily argued against. But the more I read about the issue, the more complicated it became, and the more many of these developments start to look like subsidy scams playing on the hot public marketability and political advantage of anything that can be in the slightest way sold as being 'green' and 'renewable,' and all of the long-term costs will be externalized by the developers (who will no doubt be long gone with full pockets when the biggest costs do become apparent). I do feel that it is possible that some of these off-shore developments might have the wind density to make sense, but many other projects, like ones proposed, planned or already built in parts of upstate NY just don't add up. I am for wind power at least in theory, but I'm not for getting sold a bill of goods by so-called entrepreneurs smelling big subsidy money. In so many cases industrial wind-power is just a 'feel-good' bandwagon issue. Our problems are not going to feel good to solve- we need to confront population growth and energy consumption that has surpassed the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet as well as the notions of perpetual growth on which our entire economic system is based. There will be no clean and easy way to solve those problems.

I'm setting sarcasm aside for the sake of this letter only:

If you haven't seen it, check out this beautiful collection of photos about off-shore wind farms.

http://thrillingwonder.blogspot.com/2007/01/wind-power-in-stormy-waters.html

If we have actually passed the point of no return toward long-term climate change, as some scientists contend, my concern is what impact this will have upon wind energy and wind parks. As on example, if the Gulf Stream changes or stops, would this not have an effect on offshore wind patterns? How powerful of a hurricane are these wind parks able to withstand? Category 5+? How about 5 of them a year?

Is anyone thinking about these issues?