The answer apparently, is not blowing in the wind.
Here is Dennis Miller's take on Al Gore and Barrack Obama, yesterday's political wind bag and today's: full of promises, somewhat short on performance.
And so it is with wind farms: long on promise, a lot short on performance. Worse, the negative effects of living close to wind farms are becoming more apparent.
All of which may mean that the political embracing of environmentalism may similarly be running out its course.
Which means that politics will once more re-assert the primacy of the lobbyist and the insignificance of science to public policy.
Politics is a function of prevailing ideology. And as both Gore and Obama demonstrate, ideology is more often about image than it is substance -- at least it is for those who seek to package and present images that are meant to signify an ideological perspective and preclude individuals from actually scrutinizing the substantive constructs, ideas and realities that stem from the medium as the message.
I sense we are in a very turbulent phase of transition. Information technology presents all sorts of new media that allow for individuals to access information. It is unclear how much substantive information and perspective individuals are accessing, and how much the new media are simply alternative vehicles by which ideological imagery may be distributed. One indicator will be the path of national elections throughout the free world in the next 2 to 5 years:
- is voter apathy still pre-dominant?
- how engaged are ordinary citizen's in the democratic process?
- is the Woodstock generation finally ready to hand over its influence on politics? and to whom? and,
- when politician's like Obama say they stand for change, what do they mean? is it really change?
