(no subject)

[commodorified]

Snaffled from ars technica

Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson likes to take current thinking about renewable energy and supersize it. Rather than aiming for 50 percent renewables, like California is, he has analyzed what it would take for each of the 50 states to go fully renewable. It would apparently involve so many offshore wind turbines that hurricanes headed toward the States would be suppressed.

I feel like that's an unalloyed good, am I missing something here?

Comments

[mmegaera]

This whole discussion reminds me of the butterfly effect. I know fuck-all about the validity or not of the butterfly effect, but I can't help but see something like this having serious unintended consequences -- especially to places that had nothing to do with the construction of the wind turbines in the first place, and that don't benefit from them directly. Turning some poor developing nations with nice shorelines into another Bangladesh or something, all because a first-world country wanted to go all-renewable.

I'm all for renewable energy, but this particular proposition seems more than a bit not thought through.

[momijizukamori]

This was more or less my immediate thought - basically we know so little about weather patterns that we can't really make a prediction about effects with any remote degree of certainty (see: the frequency with which weather forecasts are inaccurate)