It's good to see an oil man show a little vision. Wind is going to be one of the important energy resources of our future. If oil and energy companies want to have a future they need to get on board.

I live near the Altamont wind farm. It's a great asset and has been providing clean power here for about 30 years. It was a surprising and diasppointing revelation a few years back when they started to realize how many hawks and other birds get killed by the turbines. Since then they have been working with new turbine designs that will supposedly reduce bird kills. And in the future more attention should be paid to siting these things --- these are all along the ridge lines of the Altamont pass, and the birds like to cruise the thermal updrafts there.

Every new power source is going to have unintended consequences.

With wind, one unintended consequence is bird kills, which is something they are now aware of and are working to fix. The other is P4B's Whirling Blades of Death slicing their way through Tornado Alley.

The other great renewable source of electricity that the country has been using since the 30's is the hydroelectric dam, which has the unintended consequence of killing fish --- some of those dams will have to come down and others be redesigned, or we will have more of our Pacific Coast salmon runs go extinct.

Ethanol has had the unintended consequence of spiking food prices. This technology is still in its infancy and is still being reengineered to really work. Food crops are not appropriate feedstocks for ethanol and methane disgesters. Soon the technology to digest cellulose will revolutionize this technology, and we'll be able to turn a lot of agricultural waste into fuel.

Oil has the inintended consequences of air pollution, smog, global climate change, catastrophic oil spills, massive trade imbalances, the geopolitical nightmare of funding our enemies, and the fact that it is running out. That one is going to be hard to solve.