Biden signed a bill Wednesday to develop the 9/11 National Memorial Trail, a 1,300-mile recreational trail that will link all the three crash sites, Psaki says pic.twitter.com/IibHacqh9F
— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) October 13, 2021
Today, the President will sign H.R. 2278 into law! This bipartisan Act authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to designate the September 11th National Memorial Trail. The trail links the National September 11th Memorial, the Pentagon Memorial, & the Flight 93 Memorial @911trail pic.twitter.com/ISYUd8PPwh
— Trails Coalition (@TrailsCoalition) October 13, 2021
This is more significant in the long term, even if it does mean President Biden will never get another invitation from the millionaires on Martha’s Vineyard:
The Biden administration wants to build seven major offshore wind farms on the East and West coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico. It's part of President Biden's plans to deploy enough offshore farms by 2030 to power more than 10 million homes. https://t.co/C8xIQ1Rb7z
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 14, 2021
… Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said her department hopes to hold lease sales by 2025 off the coasts of Maine, New York and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Carolinas, California, Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico. The projects are part of Biden’s plan to address global warming and could avoid about 78 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, while creating up to 77,000 jobs, officials said.
“The Interior Department is laying out an ambitious road map as we advance the administration’s plans to confront climate change, create good-paying jobs and accelerate the nation’s transition to a cleaner energy future,” Haaland said. “We have big goals to achieve a clean energy economy and Interior is meeting the moment.”
In addition to offshore wind, the Interior Department is working with other federal agencies to increase renewable energy production on public lands, Haaland said, with a goal of at least 25 gigawatts of onshore renewable energy from wind and solar power by 2025.
Haaland and Amanda Lefton, director of department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said officials hope to reduce potential conflicts with fishing groups and other ocean users as much as possible. “This means we will engage early and often with all stakeholders prior to identifying any new wind energy areas,” Lefton said in a statement…
The bureau completed its review of a construction and operations plan for the Vineyard Wind project 15 miles off the Massachusetts coast earlier this year. The agency is reviewing nine additional projects, including the South Fork wind farm near New York’s Long Island and the Ocean Wind project off New Jersey.
Vineyard Wind is expected to produce about 800 megawatts of power and South Fork about 132 megawatts. Ocean Wind, the largest project, has a total capacity of 1,100 megawatts, enough energy to power 500,000 homes across New Jersey…
In a related announcement, the Energy Department said it is spending $11.5 million to study risks that offshore wind development may pose to birds, bats and marine mammals, and survey changes in commercial fish and marine invertebrate populations at an offshore wind site on the East Coast.
The department will spend $2 million on visual surveys and acoustic monitoring of marine mammals and seabirds at potential wind sites on the West Coast.
“In order for Americans living in coastal areas to see the benefits of offshore wind, we must ensure that it’s done with care for the surrounding ecosystem by coexisting with fisheries and marine life – and that’s exactly what this investment will do,″ Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a news release.
Jerzy Russian
The wind blows in, the wind blows out. You can’t explain that.
ronno2018
The former idiot president did not like wind farms. Another reason I hope to the great spaghetti monster that guy does not get elected again.
debbie
I hope tons of “Patriots” get hopelessly lost on Joe’s trail and are never seen again.
dmsilev
The former President is invited to literally go tilt at windmills. Offshore, so clearly he’ll have to ride a seahorse.
NotMax
Dragging this upstairs.
They’re putting guns on robot dogs now.
Lawmakers, are you listening? Nip this in the bud. Now.
Freemark
The trail is just across the Susquehanna from my house.
As for the wind farms I hope they don’t put one in the Gulf of Mexico. I can’t imagine the horrendous ecological damage a wind spill could cause. Bad enough we occasionally have minor oil spills there but at least they can be limited. Wind is much harder to contain.
Baud
@NotMax:
Agreed. There are real dogs who still lack guns.
Burnspbesq
Paxton will sue. Efgoldman him.
Baud
@Burnspbesq:
On what basis?
Another Scott
Biden’s SCOTUS reform commission is meeting on 10/15 at 10 AM ET.
Briefing Materials for discussion have been posted. It’s an interesting set of on-the-one-hand / on-the-other-hand PDFs.
It doesn’t look like there’s an easy solution, but if it were easy it would have been done already.
Cheers,
Scott.
Doug R
15 miles out? NIMBYS can GTFOH. Any more than 1km away, there’s no reason to complain.
SpaceUnit
@Baud: Cleek’s Law.
Burnspbesq
@Baud:
Doesnt matter. The filing of the suit will be front page news and will reconfirm to right wing Texans his unending hatred of all things Federal. He runs on a platform of suing the Feds, and the median voter doesn’t think to ask whether he got any results.
The granting of the motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim will, at best, be on page A13, and he won’t be sanctioned.
Baud
@Doug R:
I wish the world was round so people wouldn’t have to see the wind farms from shore.
Geminid
Just a few years ago there was a real prospect of oil drilling off the Atlantic seaboard. Pushback from seaside communities helped delay this long enough for cheaper oil from horizontal drilling and fracking on the mainland to make offshore drilling uneconomic. Now the offshore wind farms will support the jobs and business profits that oil promoters touted, but they will support clean and renewable energy instead. For decades a transition to clean energy was framed as a tradeoff between the environment and economic growth, but now it is a “win/win” proposition.
SiubhanDuinne
@dmsilev:
What did seahorses ever do to you, that you should wish them such a fate?
Doug R
@Baud: If you’re too far away to hear them, you can just get used to how they look.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
One never needs a basis to efgoldman Paxton.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Do coastal dwelling nincompoops resort to swallowing seahorse paste?
HypersphericalCow
How much of this going to use “Rails to Trails”, I.e. using abandoned railroads and convert them to hiking/biking trails? There are a bunch of them in Pennsylvania.
zhena gogolia
Now that Armitage has a new show coming out, he’s tweeting like a maniac.
SiubhanDuinne
@HypersphericalCow:
I remember when John first got Lily, they used to go on nice long rails-to-trails hikes. Until he wrote about it, I had never heard the term. It’s such a great idea!
debbie
@Burnspbesq:
What is this costing TX taxpayers?
MomSense
We had an amazing offshore wind project lined up for Maine that had been negotiated with Norway but LePage scrapped it. The nice thing about the wind patterns off Maine is that the wind is strongest during peak demand.
debbie
McCabe will get most of his pension and benefits back. Yay, Joe!
NotMax
@MomSense
“My wind chimes don’t work anymore. I’ll sue!”
//
trollhattan
“Keep your daggone wind farm offa mah oil lease, you Yankee power-grabber!”
Elizabelle
@debbie: That’s excellent news. McCabe (and Strzok and Page) — all treated very unfairly. And so many others.
fuck the fucking former guy
geg6
@SiubhanDuinne:
They’re all over the place around here. Great walking and biking. Often, right along our many rivers and creeks.
NotMax
Expected Fox chyron.
“Biden’s plan for hurricane magnets threatens coastal cities.”
Dan B
@trollhattan: One cool option is using oil drilling platform technology to set up floating wind platforms where wind is strongest and most consistent. There are issues getting long cables to shore and there may be less issues with rotor types that produce lower stress on the platforms and cabling/ anchorage but we’ll find out by building them. And we move electricity hundreds of miles on land so getting power to the shore is not the biggest issue. 15 miles out is probably not visible from shore but I know we could see the lights on top of the Sears / Willis Tower about 50 miles away on the far side of Lake Michigan. At 1500+ feet it is not likely we’ll have a turbine that tall.
Auntie Anne
Uncle Joe doesn’t do Martha’s Vineyard – he’s a Rehoboth kind of guy. And I’ll bet the DE politicians are lining up to put a offshore wind farm here.
Mike in Pasadena
About that trail — as Julianni would say “9-11 9-11 9-11 9-11.
Maybe a January 6 or 1-6 trail from the ellipse to the Capitol?
trollhattan
@Dan B:eYou’re sure right about the size. I’ve seen specs for turbines from GE and Vestas that are mind-boggling.
At least with an offshore installation you resolve that pesky issue of transporting the blades, et al overland. (110 meter blade radius on a GE Halide-X).
Geminid
@Dan B: An electric cooperative based in Valentia, Ireland is projecting a plan to use the plentiful offshore wind to produce “green” hydrogen. They are on Ireland’s west coast, distant from the European grid, but cheap wind generated elecricity would be used to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water. Initially the hydrogen could be used to heat buildings and power ferries locally. Eventually the hydrogen could be exported much as liquified natural gas is today.
A British Isles jackal who is very knowledgable in energy technogy maintains that hydrogen is an unlikely future energy source. But the EU projects hydrogen as a sizable component of it’s future energy supply, and Airbus has floated plans for hydrogen powered aircraft, so hydrogen power may not be just a pipe dream. This could result in floating wind farms in the open ocean where large arrays of windmills do not reduce available wind power like they do on land.
eclare
@SiubhanDuinne: There are several popular rails to trails sites here in Memphis.
Burnspbesq
@debbie:
Where did you get this quaint idea that Paxton gives a shit about taxpayers?
Geminid
@eclare: There is a 35 mile trail in Southwest Virginia that runs from Abingdon through Damascus to WhiteTop. It’s on an abandoned rail right of way. The stretch from Damascus to White Top is steep, so there is a shuttle service for bicyclists who just want to enjoy the downhill. The trail runs through beautiful country along Laurel Creek, and is named “The Virginia Creeper Trail” after our famous vine.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
Many schemes for storing surplus power from green generation will be needed and hydrogen will surely be in the mix. How it gets consumed I don’t know but presume fuel cells are at least one option. Storing and transporting it is tricky because it’s hard to contain those teensy H2 molecules.
I suppose at sea pumped storage could be an option, but I’ve never seen it proposed. Finding water’s not an issue. :-)
debbie
@Burnspbesq:
I would have thought the taxpayers would object. That money would be better spent on the grid, which I hear still isn’t ready for the next disaster.
NotMax
@trollhattan
How to transport it?
By zeppelin.
;)
WaterGirl
@debbie: That seems exceedingly fair
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Yes. I didn’t know they were considering it, but I’m so glad they did.
WaterGirl
@debbie: see me at #42
Roger Moore
@Dan B:
Using a “distance to the horizon” calculator, I get that you can see the top of something 150 feet tall that’s 15 miles away. Likewise, if you’re in a 150 foot tall building- not too uncommon close to the shore in places like New York and Miami- you’d be able to see the base of something 15 miles away.
The bigger question is whether something that size is a big visual nuisance. My friend Google says offshore wind turbines are likely to get to about 500 feet tall. If they’re 15 miles away, that would take up about the same amount of visual space as something 50 feet tall 1.5 miles away or 33 feet tall 1 mile away. That’s not a big deal.
Kay
Bring out the wind turbine technicians for the announcement! They make 28 an hour here – with two years of experience the team leaders make 70 (home) to 100k (travel) a year and they’re absolutely desperate for them.
Don’t let Biden leave the White House unless he’s with some kind of green job…person. He likes people. He’ll enjoy it.
eclare
@Geminid: Nice! Our biggest one here is the Wolf River Greenway. Memphis, so, obviously, steepness is not an issue!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: Oh, the humanity!
espierce
@SiubhanDuinne:
Pinellas County, Florida (Tampa Bay Area) has 32 miles of “rail to trail” and approximately 20 miles of power line easement trails.
https://www.pinellascounty.org/trailgd/PDF/Pinellas_Trail_Network.pdf
debbie
@WaterGirl:
Thx. Didn’t know he’d filled a lawsuit.
sab
@Kay: My more mechanical step-son wants one of those jobs but he is terrified of heights.
NotMax
@sab
Is he analog or digital?
:)
sab
@NotMax: He is a machinist
ETA Also pretty good at his job. Doesn’t surprise me at all
Skepticat
@Freemark: This wins this thread at the very least. Thank you.
JAFD
Local pail-trail proposal:
https://jcitytimes.com/essex-hudson-rail-trail-imperiled-by-governor-murphys-tepid-support/
Oneovdezedaze they will finish rebuilding the Pulaski Skyway, then add safe walking and bicycling route along old US-1 / Lincoln Highway, from Newark to the Jersey City waterfront. Hope I’m still young enuf to enjoy it when ’tis done.
In other news, saw first Bird electroscooters on streets of Newark this past week. Any of you jackals ridden them ? Tips ?
Robert Sneddon
Scotland — 2,762 new COVID-19 cases reported today. The test positivity rate is 8.2%. There were 32 new deaths reported. ICU bed occupancy numbers are 45, down five from yesterday while hospitalisations are 851, down 57.
There were approximately 6,000 vaccinations carried out in Scotland yesterday (Thursday) with about 65% of these being first vaccinations. 91.7% of 16+ adults are now vaccinated with their first dose and 85.1% are fully vaccinated. 73.6% of 16 and 17-year-olds have now received their first vaccination, up 0.1% from yesterday. 44.3% of 12-15 year olds have now received their first vaccination, up 1.1% from yesterday.
There were about 20,000 booster vaccinations carried out yesterday. Vaccine hesitancy in already-vaccinated people is apparently not a thing in regards to the third-shot booster programme.