n to study whether wind towers mask radar signals,
allowing small and possibly threatening aircraft to penetrate restricted
As a result, the FAA has blocked new wind farms
that might interfere with military radar, including more than a dozen in the
Last week, the six US Senators from Wisconsin,
Illinois, and North Dakota wrote to Defense Department and FAA officials
asking that the agencies "not unnecessarily obstruct the implementation
of this major source of domestic, clean energy."
"Since much of the nation is in radar line
of site, this interim policy has a sweeping effect," the senators'
letter stated. "Prohibiting, even temporarily, the development of wind
energy facilities within those areas would be a considerable setback for
efforts to increase our country's energy independence."
6) Warning of
Calamities and Hoping for a Change in 'An Inconvenient Truth'
By A. O. SCOTT May 24, 2006 http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/movies/24trut.html?pagewanted=print
CANNES, France, May 23 "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's
new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should
never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and
policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the
findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to
protect the common interest.
But when this does not happen and it is hardly a partisan statement to
observe that, in the case of global warming, it
hasn't others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists,
scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth"
should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.
Appearances to the contrary, Mr. Guggenheim's movie is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a
multimedia presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore has given many times
over the last few years, interspersed with interviews and Mr. Gore's voice-over
reflections on his life in and out of politics. His presence is, in some ways,
a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will
become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes
for political discourse these days. But really, the idea that worrying about
the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some
kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless
speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.
In any case, Mr. Gore has long since proven to be a deft self-satirist. (He
recently told a moderator at a Cannes Film Festival news conference to address
him as "your Adequacy.") He makes a few jokes to leaven the grim gist
of "An Inconvenient Truth," and some of them are funny, in the style
of a college lecturer's attempts to keep the attention of his captive audience.
Indeed, his onstage manner pacing back and forth, fiddling with gadgets,
gesturing for emphasis is more a professor's than a politician's. If he were
not the man who, in his own formulation "used to be the next president of
the United States of America," he might have settled down to tenure and a
Volvo (or maybe a Prius) in some leafy academic grove.
But as I said, the movie is not about him. He is, rather, the surprisingly
engaging vehicle for some very disturbing information. His
explanations of complex environmental phenomena the jet stream has always
been a particularly tough one for me to grasp are clear, and while some of
the visual aids are a little corny, most of the images are stark,
illuminating and powerful.
I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited
gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of
carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on
screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields
and glaciers consequences of climate change that have already taken place
are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of
increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more a