SENATE RACE - A blanket mailing, a targeted mailing, and the myth that high-tech wind energy jobs will be everywhere.

It seems the wind turbine is the new symbol of environmentalism, cure of balance of payment imbalances [aka "energy independence" or "ending dependence on foreign oil," etc.], and the shorthand image for envisioning a future yielding of great jobs everywnere to be every state's answer to a better future for its work force.

How all that is expected to work out is of course unclear, and devils are in details. For now large corporations dominate large wind energy unit production, with the Europeans well ahead, as Boeing was when Airbus started.

In effect, yes, Bob Olson was right locally to seize the issue before others did, and he was right to suggest the alternative to large wind turbines was smaller distributed ones, each part of the power grid, along with some stand alone farm and other local installations. Winds, on average, average out if the geographical area is great, so that local wind intensity changes can be handled by the grid as less variable in aggregate than if localized. A single large turbine failure or wind farm failure, tornados do happen, can be tolerated, and the more distributed the sources, the better grid demand variance can be handled. And yes, a shift to renewable energy is needed. Ultimately, all energy is solar. Solar energy reaching earth makes the winds blow, the biomass grow, and it made the oil and coal deposits over geological time by growing the organic matter that later became overlain into formed pockets of oil, gas, coal, and oil shale, tar sands, etc.

But saying all energy ultimately is solar, is like saying life is like an endless river. So what, how does that translate to help make reality better today and tomorrow?

_________
On the same day, yesterday, I got the Franken positive we-are-the-world enviro targeted mailing, an 8-1/2 x 11 four page glossy paper thing; plus the generic orange hate-and-fear mongering item from NRA saying I need Norm Coleman, gun-wise, since I need to hate and fear others.

Each mailing has premises and its differing goals behind it, with the ultimate goal of capturing votes one at a time. Each carries its own cachet. You may find one thing or another more convincing, but I find the Franken intrusion into the quiet space of my home less an intrusion, and more promising of a sounder policy and mind and intent, than the Coleman/NRA half-page cardstock, and its insultingly simplistic sophistry and misstatement. Here are the images. The middle two Franken pages are the mailer inside, the others the address page and outer "back." As always, click to enlarge and read. Enjoy.