Letter To Senator Patrick Leahy

This morning I found an e-mail from Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy in my mailbox. It was just a mass mailing asking readers to mobilize against the construction of a pipeline and warning of climate change. I’m a native of Vermont.

One last look at Vermont before the turbines come. (Photo credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

I remember visiting Washington back in 1982 and actually dropping by his Washington office out of the blue (back then you could do that) but he was out to lunch, or something.

Anyway I thought I’d send him a reply:

Dear Senator Leahy,

With all due respect, climate always changes. Just 12,000 years ago the Green Mountain State was buried under at least a mile of ice. Thanks to climate change, it isn’t so today.

Concerning today’s climate change, global temperature hasn’t risen in over 10 years, and many scientists say it won’t rise for another 30 or 40 years because of cyclic solar and oceanic activity. You haven’t heard?

To understand climate, it first helps to know that it is a heck of a lot more complicated than just the straight line equation: CO2 regulates the climate and weather. To tell others that it is that simple is a disservice to the public. Why not talk to scientists from the other side? There are many. You haven’t done so yet? Seems to me it would be the responsible thing to do.

It really is time for you to retire, Mr. Leahy, and to let fresh ideas and open minds back into the Senate. Vermont thanks you for your service, but you’ve been in the Senate far too long.

Sincerely,

Pierre Gosselin
Native of Vermont

PS: I made a trip up to Crystal Lake last summer – nice wind turbines up there on the surrounding mountains. And I hear such a landscape-beautification is in the works for Lowell Mountain too.

 

14 responses to “Letter To Senator Patrick Leahy”

  1. Edward

    “he was out to lunch, or something.”

    Sounds like he’s been that way [‘out to lunch’] all his life.

  2. DirkH

    “I made a trip up to Crystal Lake last summer – nice wind turbines up there on the surrounding mountains!”

    I don’t think that a warmist on a mission to save the world understands your sarcasm, Pierre. For them, wind turbines are indeed much more beautiful than a gas powered plant; as they instinctively recoil at the sight of a smokestack, even if only H2O and CO2 come out of it (which, for us, are the most harmless chemicals, but for them, two evil greenhouse gases – although most warmists in fact do not even know that water vapour is a GHG, and the ones that do don’t try to push water vapour reduction regulations; another inconsistency in their brainless position).

    Thinking about it, writing a letter to such a position, where would you start? When he’s a warmist, you have to assume that he knows absolutely nothing, and start arguing from there…

  3. Ed Caryl

    No, Pierre, you didn’t waste your time. And the fact that you posted your letter on your blog will guarantee that the good senator will see it, one way or another. Someone he knows will call his attention to it, and your hard copy will be found. There is about a 10% chance he will actually do a tiny bit of research, which beats nothing. It is the constant drumbeat, the endless drip of facts, that will eventually wear away the warmest position.

    1. Edward

      I think that is well said.

  4. R. de Haan

    Great response Pierre.

    Maybe you can send him this ink as well
    http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/my-new-hero-myotis-sodalis-shuts-down-wind-farm/

  5. Bob in Castlemaine

    A pipeline which no doubt would/will transmit a Gzillion times more energy than would carpeting all the mountains in Vermont with useless ugly wind turbines, along with their associated transmission lines. Not to mention that, with judicious routing, no-one would even be aware of the pipe-line’s existence.

    As I drove to nearby Clunes last evening I had the sunset silhouetted Waubra Hills unavoidably fixed in my vision through the windscreen. This once beautiful vista across the volcanic plains of Western Victoria is now vandalized by these 19th century anachronisms.

    No Pierre, I don’t think you have wasted your time by highlight the great useless ugliness that’s being forced on us.

    1. DirkH
      1. Bob in Castlemaine

        Don’t know the lie of the land there Dirk, but presumable we’re looking at a loan which will help ensure that the OWS protestors pay more of their welfare benefit toward their cost of power?

        1. DirkH

          Yep. Higher energy costs hit the poorest hardest.

  6. Ulrich Elkmann

    @Bob in Castlemaine: RE “19th-century anachronisms”. Older than that: the basic designs of windmills did not change considerably after its development in the 15th/16th century – an upright wooden box on a pivot for the small models, a squat masonry tower with the sails mounted on a swiveling wooden top – until the introduction of steam. Remarkable technology for its time: it made taxation in rural areas possible (one could order the miller to put aside every fifth sack of flour ground; it’s the reason why handmills for farming families were often forbidden), it made tax evasion easy. They actually produced something useful. Not durable though – almost as perishable as wooden ships; the roofs, sails and the gears had to be replaced every 15-20 years; the millstones every 2-3 years; the supporting stone structures lasted 50-60 years. Then again, imagine large wooden gears bearing tons of load with even the gear teeth made out of wood…
    Ever since the 19th century, they have been imbued with an intense (and rather vague) nostalgia for “the old country ways” – see Daudet’s “Lettres de mon moulin” (1866) or Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “Platero y yo” (1917). People actually put up lots and lots of them to DRAW in tourists… (The sinister connotations with mills and millers – robbers’ dens, satanic pacts, and the like – are connected solely to water mills; German readers will associate Otfrid Preussler’s “Krabat” at once.)
    None of the above applies to the modern variety.

    “…amigo Sancho Panza, donde se descubren treinta, o pocos más, desaforados gigantes […] que ésta es buena guerra, y es gran servicio de Dios quitar tan mala simiente de sobre la faz de la tierra.”
    “Mire vuestra merced,” respondió Sancho, “que aquellos que allí se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento.”
    “Bien parece,” respondió don Quijote, “que no estás cursado en esto de las aventuras: ellos son gigantes.” [ch. VIII]
    […for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves […] This is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”
    “Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills.”
    “It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants.”]
    For once, the Knight of the Sad Countenance was absolutely right.

  7. DirkH

    h/t Jo Nova: Spain plans to slash wind power subsidies. It is unclear whether this is for new installations only but I suspect so.
    Press release by wind power lobby; gnashing teeth; screaming bloody murder:
    http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=14294

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