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Readers are probably aware of my affinity for Ithaca. I went to grad school there, met my wife there and very much love the land and water there. Heck, even some of the people there still like me too. But you may also know that Ithaca is home to perhaps the most anti-fracking sentiment on the East Coast. So I find it mildly ironic that the heart of Ithaca is undergoing an upgrade … of its natural gas lines … to accommodate more growth. And no, it’s not April Fool’s Day. Someone please explain to me why this project is not requiring huge windmills to be installed on East Hill and South Hill and perhaps even on the Inlet to Cayuga Lake itself in order to supply it with local, clean, sustainable energy?

Here is the news item from the City of Ithaca. I suppose you might call my post disingenuous, and a bit too close to resembling the comment, “if you don’t like it, leave” which I entirely dislike as a form of argument for logical reasons. I encourage you to understand that this is not quite that kind of argument.

5 Responses to “You Can’t Make This Up”

  1. RIT_Rich says:

    You know there’s a big coal power plant about 15 miles from Ithaca that provides most of the electricity needs of the city (Milliken power plant). I also wonder how many hippies know about the coal heating plant right behind Cornell (I think it’s maybe 200m from the stadium)

  2. Speedmaster says:

    We might be in Ithaca this coming weekend to have our daughter visit Ithaca and Cornell. I’ll pass your sentiments along. 😉

  3. chuck martel says:

    This is what happens when the intellectual heavy-weights of a college community start digging into stuff they don’t know much about: http://www.dailycamera.com/business/ci_23016231/price-tag-boulder-utility-switch-from-xcel-stirs?IADID=Search-www.dailycamera.com-www.dailycamera.com

    • Wintercow20 says:

      Brilliant – over $3 million spent on the studies alone. I’m beginning to think that the alternative energy movement is just a giant jobs program for “E”nvironmentalists. That’s probably worse than having them on the “social safety net” rolls.

  4. Harry says:

    I assume you are still plugged into the Farm Bureau’s Marcellus Shale Update. If not, let me know.

    Since we have six hundred years of coal, and since we have the technology, much of it already applied, and for the past thirty years have been getting low sulfur coal, it is too bad that a handful of lawyers from the Sierra Club have captured the interest of Luddite politicians to, well, get our government idiots to ban all carbon-based energy and impoverish us, All of this is impelled by the notion that Carbon Dioxide, a fundamental compound for keeping trees and grass alive and producing the oxygen we breathe, is a pollutant the same as SO2, which if we breathe it in enough concentration, will combine with the water in our lungs and kill us. Maybe we have another six hundred years of methane under just us here in the northeast, and perhaps Cyprus has enough carbon energy to motivate the Russians to start World War Three over what can be fracked.

    Talk about the power of government intervention to screw things up. When Carter created the Department of Energy, in two years natural gas was roughly $8.50/MCF, and soon after we had long lines at gas stations, including in Maryland, with the Feds pulling their levers and manipulating who got the refined gas, or gasohol. We had New Gas and New Oil. In 1981, we got deregulation, energy prices dropped like a stone, and a big drag on our economy, on our standard of living was lifted. Anne Gorsuch, who wanted to excise the Luddites from the EPA, got vilified and was purged, and the cancer that lives with us today has metastisized, and lives in the hearts of college professors everywhere, not just at Cornell.

    My fellow camper at the Sierra Club has enough money to afford a windmill to power his house, and enough money to fly to Jackson Hole to camp in the mountains, yet he denies everybody else cheap energy, and is a chief opponent of fracking, even though he lives near Washington, DC. He wants an End to Coal, and all carbon energy, except for his camp stove.

    Would not it be good if we discuss this subject, even you crickets, before the country goes down the tubes and you find yourselves out of work and no prospect of a bright future, without lights, and cold?

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