Donald Trump is probably worried that if he stood in front of a windmill his ludicrous hair piece would fly off.

“Tickets are £275 each.”

Bloody hell, they’ve lowered their prices.

“Donald Trump is probably worried that if he stood in front of a windmill his ludicrous hair piece would fly off.”

Ok, that was pretty funny.

Strange how Donald Trump was banned from using pictures of rusting and broken turbines in the U.S. to illustrate what happens at end of life. The Scottish wind mafia objected, saying it couldn’t happen here, as safeguards are in place. No, really! I’ll believe that when the wind mafia are forced to act as the offshore rig operators are, in that they have to return the entire area to it’s original condition, right down to digging out foundations.

It’s not a hair piece, it’s a triple weave comb-over.

@nellslad #4:

Strange how Donald Trump was banned from using pictures of rusting and broken turbines in the U.S. to illustrate what happens at end of life.

Can we have some (credible) cites with that?

Some background on why Donald Trump got involved with anti-wind farm stuff. His mother is from Skye and he wanted to show gratitude for a wonderful mother by building something in Scotland. So after various disputes the something he built was an exclusive golf course outside of Aberdeen. The people in Scotland said gee thanks Donald.

Another company was given planning permission to build some OFFSHORE wind turbines miles from the golf course. Trump went ballistic because the turbines apparently will be visible from his golf course. Horizons are like that when you look out to sea. He had been buddies with Salmond until Salmond refused to intervene to stop the development. Trump went in the huff and promised to fund campaign groups against wind turbines.

6. Robin Levett

@nellslad #4:

Strange how Donald Trump was banned from using pictures of rusting and broken turbines in the U.S. to illustrate what happens at end of life.

Can we have some (credible) cites with that?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/19/scottish-anti-wind-turbine-ad-banned?newsfeed=true

The ASA upheld the complaint because the turbines in the picture are about thirty years old and are in Hawaii. The advert implied they were turbines in Scotland.

Somehow the idea of Donald Trump and wind is not altogether pleasing.

@4 nellslad

If you’d taken your tin foil hat off for two seconds and actually bothered to look into the story, you’d be aware that it wasn’t just the standards issue that was upheld:

“Scottish Renewables also challenged whether the photo and the ad’s text stating “Alex Salmond wants to build 8,750 of these monstrosities” were also misleading because the model of turbine featured is not used in Scotland and because the proposed number is “significantly less”.”
http://news.uk.msn.com/environment/watchdog-bans-trump-anti-turbine-ad

The ASA was apparently convinced that the ad misrepresented a) the type of wind turbine, b) the number of wind turbines and c) the scenario within which those turbines would be built. And so the advert managed to get banned by a watchdog that always gives a fair hearing and tends to err on the side of the advertiser.

I don’t know who you think the “wind mafia” are, or why you think they’ve got some kind of hold over the ASA. But I do know that attaching the word “mafia” to every group that disagrees with you is extremely childish.

@ Chaise

I know you are responding to nellslad, but…

I thought the wind mafia was people like Trump, Delingpole, and Heaton-Haris, they are after all spouting loads of hot air from their nether regions on this subject!

@8. Richard W: “Can we have some (credible) cites with that?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/19/scottish-anti-wind-turbine-ad-banned?newsfeed=true”

Thanks for that link. The back story (the abandonment of a wind farm) is interesting. For a wind farm to work technically, you need turbines that are efficient/reliable and a location with wind. For onshore wind farms, the available land is almost finite (I assume that better technology will allow us to use turbines on high buildings etc).

Abandonment of a useful space thus highlights the fragile economics of wind power. To reuse the space, old turbines would have been dismantled and new, more efficient ones erected in their place. But the numbers did not add up sufficiently for it to happen.

I’m a big fan of wind/tidal/solar technology and I enjoy reading case studies about successful deployments. I’m also a realist. Micro power projects to provide power at a remote location or for a specific function (eg solar electricity to offset air conditioning) make sense but I am unconvinced that wind/tidal/solar is ready to power the UK.

So I’m a sceptic. At the same time I think it is daft to continue burning oil, coal and gas in the same way as 40 years ago.

@ 11 Dissident

“I thought the wind mafia was people like Trump, Delingpole, and Heaton-Haris, they are after all spouting loads of hot air from their nether regions on this subject!”

See, that use of the term I like!

If anyone’s interested, here’s the ASA ruling on the “Welcome to Scotland” ads. Tried to get it earlier but the site was playing up, hence the MSN News link.

http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2012/9/The-Trump-Organization-LLC/SHP_ADJ_195478.aspx

I consider myself a liberal, but I can’t get my head around the left’s general approach to climate change policy. What’s the economic justification for subsidies for things like wind farms, solar panels, etc.? Come to think of it, what’s the justification for banning incandescent light bulbs or for regulating standards for energy efficiency? And what’s the justification for opposing road building or airport expansion on the grounds that it will increase carbon emissions? Note that there may be other justifications for these policies, but I see no coherent climate change related ones.

The optimal policy for tackling carbon change should simply be a carbon tax, ideally set at such a level that the after-tax marginal cost of carbon includes its marginal social cost. Alternatively and perhaps necessarily (given that the government has committed itself to targets for the total quantity of carbon emissions, irrespective of changes its social cost), the carbon tax should be varied on a quarterly or yearly basis in order to hit some quantitative targets for overall emissions a year hence.

With such a tax, all the aforementioned policies would seem to make no sense. Take airport expansion, for example. If that passes a cost-benefit test with an optimal carbon tax, then it is efficient to build it (at least purely on carbon emission grounds). If the tax is being varied to hit some quantitative target, then it would rise such that overall emissions would still remain on target, with carbon emissions from other sources falling.

Or, more relevant to this thread, let’s take wind farm subsidies. If the carbon tax is set at its optimal level, then whatever energy mix the private sector selects (coal, gas, nuclear, wind, or whatever) must be optimal (unless there is some market failure, which I don’t think anyone has claimed is the case). A subsidy for wind farms implies that they have some positive externality of their own separate from anything to do with carbon emissions, which I find implausible.

More realistically, perhaps energy use in general has a positive externality (e.g. insofar as lower energy prices reduce fuel poverty). In that case though, the optimal policy is a general subsidy for energy production from all sources with a concomitant increase in the carbon tax (such that total carbon emissions remain the same before and after the general energy subsidy). Such a policy would automatically lead to the private sector selecting the optimal mix of energy sources, so again, separate government subsidies for wind farms, solar panels and such would make no sense.

On a slightly related note, there was an interesting article in the NYT recently making a similar point to mine regarding regulated fuel efficiency standards for cars: “According to economists crunching the numbers, this makes mileage standards somewhere between 2.4 and 13 times more expensive than a gasoline tax as a tool to reduce our use of fuel. Indeed, by some calculations, raising fuel-economy standards is more costly than climate change itself.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/fuel-efficiency-standards-have-costs-of-their-own.html?pagewanted=2

So, yeah, can the liberals that support wind farm subsidies explain their justifications please?

@ inyourhouse

“So, yeah, can the liberals that support wind farm subsidies explain their justifications please?”

They’re sustainable and better for the environment. An issue that you’ve somehow seemed to overlook in your confusion over left-wing support for renewables.

@Chaise Guevara

“They’re sustainable and better for the environment. An issue that you’ve somehow seemed to overlook in your confusion over left-wing support for renewables.”

I think my post went over your head somewhat. The whole point of the post is that setting an optimal carbon tax makes the market prices of any given energy source include the social harm resulting from its carbon emissions. In other words, the final price of coal would be substantially higher than its private price (as it’s a very carbon intensive power source), the final price of gas would also be higher than its private price (though by a lesser margin than coal as it is somewhat less carbon intensive), etc. The prices of renewables would remain more or less unchanged.

They key point is that those are the efficient prices (reflecting the harm caused by each sources carbon emissions) because the carbon tax is set at its optimal level. The private sectors choice of energy production sources given the optimal carbon tax should therefore also be optimal (unless there is some separate market failure, which I don’t think anybody has suggested).

So there is no need for separate government subsidy schemes for wind, solar, etc. These are inefficient and a waste of government money. If they were efficient energy sources with the presence of the optimal carbon tax then they would be entirely privately funded as they would be the cheapest source of energy.

So what is the point of wind-farm subsidies?

@ 17 inyourhouse

The problem is that your scheme firstly might not be doable (how does one go about setting an “optimal” tax? Would the act of setting the tax not change the market, meaning the tax would have to be re-set?) and would push renewable prices up (because you’ve just crippled the competition). The idea of putting extra tax on carbon generation is fairly good, but you’re going to need to bring down sustainable energy prices to keep them affordable. Which means subsidies, government ownership, something like that.

16. Chaise Guevara

They’re sustainable and better for the environment.

There are two interesting assumptions. Why do you believe either?

@Inyourhouse

It is laudable that you think there should be a carbon tax, but how do you define an optimum level? Offsetting your carbon footprint has been botched badly by flooding the market with too many carbon credits, making the system unworkable because they are too cheap. Who benefited? aaah yes, the fossil fuel industry and other energy intensive industries!

I fear any carbon tax will be botched in the same way.

How about closing loopholes instead? Like the classic accountancy trick of externalising costs. Many of the supposedly profitable industries, like the fossil fuel industry are only profitable at even the current price of crude oil because the true costs of cleanup, pollution in our cities, etc are not put onto the balance sheet in the first place! If they were, then the price of crude oil might have to be in the order of $200 a barrel.

That is before you calculate the already large, and exponentiating costs of sea level rise, disappearing arctic sea ice, escalating extreme weather events in most of the world’s breadbaskets… the list goes on & on. Imagine how costly crude oil would be if those costs were accounted for in the books of the fossil fuel industry. To say nothing about steel, aviation, concrete and car industries!

Still, interionising costs will very effectively remove those old dinosaur industries, and leave whole niches for new industries to emerge, in much the same way that those industrial dinosaurs replaced yet older industrial giants. Maybe that is the real reason for people being in denial about AGW, and why so many misinformation campaigns are being waged by some of the current crop of rich & powerful.

Unlike SMFS (welcome back lol) I do not see what is happening to the climate globally as just natural variation. If that was the case, there should have been ice caps forming in Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia and mountainous areas elsewhere around the world by now. That is because the Milankhovich cycles (enhanced by new forest growth on northern landmasses fixing CO2 from the atmosphere) are in the phase where ice should be forming, for the past few thousand years.

There is a hypothesis that we have disrupted the natural variations by chopping down forests and replacing with farmland ever since that technology spread from the middle east.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8014.html

If that hypothesis is indeed true, then we as a species have already modified the natural climate of the earth drastically for most of the last 6,000 years. Without knowing it. What strengthens this hypothesis, is whenever our population slumped due to plagues, those forests regrew, fixing lots of CO2, leading to cooler temperatures. The most obvious one being the little ice age. Another thing to note, is our population was a tiny fraction of what it is now, with very primitive technology. In short, our impact was far less back then!

At least now we know the mechanisms, and can play the civilisation game smarter…

@ 19 SMFS

“There are two interesting assumptions. Why do you believe either?”

Sustainable’s a no-brainer. Wind and sunlight might technically be finite resources, but they’ll last longer than the Earth.

Better for the environment because they don’t pump pollutants into the world. Now, atm that benefit is mitigated by inefficiency, meaning that a lot of it is swamped by production. But it’s eraly days.