... you see those monster bird and bat killing wind turbines as "progress." I see them as high energy industrial consumer economy litter. Why are they there? So some consumer can feel good about their energy "choices."
I don't see them as choices, I don't see them as progress. They are progress the same way 19th and 20th century people saw smokestacks as progress.
If your wind and solar utopia doesn't work, and if it's rejected by the high energy industrial "consumer" market, adding gas to the power mix is not the answer.
My observation has been that anti-nuclear activists frequently become shills for the "natural" gas industry. I have very deep connections within the California anti-nuclear community 'seventies and early 'eighties. People I saw naked deep. People who could summon Helen Caldicott with an airline ticket, motel room and generous expenses.
The largest industrial projects on the planet today concern the extraction and distribution of natural gas. There are enough natural gas reserves to destroy what's left of the natural environment we humans inherited, and to destroy our own high energy industrial world economy.
Personally, I've lived on many levels of this world economy, from dumpster-diving semi-homeless person living in a garden shed to affluent person who can buy a new car on credit. (My wife and I are sort of in the middle now, thanks to astonishing medical debts for random shit that fell out of the sky and student loan debts for our kids we can't always pay. Life in the U.S.A., our favorite second world perpetually developing nation, top dog banana republic of the banana republics, with nukes.)
If you want to do some speculative math, calculate how much natural gas Ivanpah will use before it is abandoned.
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