Green Loser of the Week

Fierce competition for this week’s Power Line Green Loser of the Week Award.  It might have to be a group award for all the wind power wind bags, for lo—it turns out that wind power may cause global warming!  So says a new study out in Britain, reported in The Telegraph (“Wind farms can cause climate change finds new study”):

On huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.  Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.

That would be the wildlife that isn’t driven off by the construction and footprint of the wind mills themselves (wait—you didn’t think wildlife was only disturbed by oil and gas wells, did you?), or the winged wildlife chopped up by these Cuisinarts of the Sky.  Brilliant.

As I like to remind people, there is only one form of energy that doesn’t have an environmental trade off of some kind: the bicycle the Professor built Gilligan on the Island.  (And even that deciwatt generator might be said to be banana-powered.)

But President Obama is making a bid for Green Loser.  After getting enviros upset by neglecting to mention climate change at all in his obligatory Earth Day message, he made up for it by promising in an interview with Rolling Stone—freakin’ Rolling Stone!!—that he was going to make climate change an issue in the fall campaign. Obama says “I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.”

I suspect this is the last you will hear of it, unless Mitt Romney has the wit to press the issue on him.  Even Joe Romm, the Luca Brasi of the green mafia, says, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

By the hands-down winner of PL’s Green Loser of the Week has to go to the Earth Day revelers who trashed a park in San Francisco’s Marina district last week.  Cleaning up your own trash for little people I guess; you know, like those icky Tea Partiers who always clean up after their Klan rallies.

UPDATE: Allright, so it appears this version of the story is wrong–that it wasn’t an Earth Day gathering, but just some regular San Franciscan slobs.  Wait–I thought everyone there was supposed to be so much more consciousness-raised than schlubs in the red states?  The point that Tea Party rallies still wump tush on San Francisco park-goers still stands.

Besides, I’m perfectly happy to give the Loser Award to the runner up, Barack Obama.  Yes, I know, we’re all losers with him in office. True, that.

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