US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6928

On February 21 2017 01:05 LegalLord wrote:
Also the side-problem of pregnancy. There are about zero 13-year-olds who are actually mentally/financially ready for that responsibility.

Living in New York and Washington, Greg Wortham heard all the grand talk about green energy from liberal politicians. Then he returned to the place where he grew up, a small town that embraced wind power so warmly that within a couple of years of the first turbine turning, it had some of the biggest farms on the planet.

Yet Wortham is not from California, Oregon or New England, but a deeply conservative sector of Texas on the edge of the Permian Basin, one of the most bountiful oil and gas patches in the world.

The welcome sign that greets motorists as they arrive in Sweetwater along Interstate 20, a three-hour drive west of Dallas, is not in the shape of an oil derrick or pumpjack, though: it’s a wind turbine blade bearing the town’s motto, “Life is sweet in Texas”.

For ranchers facing ruin until major international companies planted forests of 300ft-tall turbines among their crops and cattle, the wind boom has provided regular income that has allowed them to maintain their land and keep it in the family.

For Texas, this most Republican-dominated, oil-rich and fracking-friendly of states has found itself with the improbable status of being a national leader in this growing form of renewable energy.

Texas has 11,592 turbines and an installed wind capacity of 20,321 megawatts, according to the American Wind Energy Association: three times as much capacity as the next state, Iowa. (California is third.) For the 12-month period ending in October last year, wind provided 12.68% of Texas’s electricity production – equivalent to powering 5.7 million homes.

Four of the eleven largest wind farms in the world are in the region around Sweetwater, a friendly, part-historic, part-decrepit town of about 11,000 people that is home to so many serpents that every spring it holds a gory rattlesnake roundup.

The county’s tax base has soared from roughly $400m in 2000 to about $3bn today, as a result of a dramatic investment in wind that began in earnest under the governorships of two stalwart Republicans, George W Bush and Rick Perry.

Texas is just one of the Republican-leaning states that dominate wind energy in the US – the top three producers by percentage of state electricity supply are Iowa, South Dakota and Kansas. Like Texas, these states all voted for Donald Trump, who has made clear his dislike of clean energy such as solar and wind. “To begin with, the whole push for renewable energy is being driven by the wrong motivation, the mistaken belief that global climate change is being caused by carbon emissions,” the president wrote in his 2015 book Crippled America. “ If you don’t buy that – and I don’t – then what we have is really just an expensive way of making the tree-huggers feel good about themselves.”

At a campaign rally in August, Trump added that wind energy “kills all your birds. All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that”.

But while the president and many Republicans in Congress have been disdainful of renewable energy and dismissive of climate change, support for wind in conservative areas has been quietly noted. In 2015, Congress extended a tax credit for wind production until 2020. With many rural communities feeling the benefits of wind energy, it’s unlikely that Trump would find much backing if he attempted to pull away this support.

On February 21 2017 03:26 ticklishmusic wrote:
inb4 he complains about how SJW's and such are the reason he got disinvited

Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that he and President Donald Trump "strongly support a free and independent press," amid furor over Trump's latest attack on the media.

"Rest assured, both the President and I strongly support a free and independent press," Pence told reporters in Brussels, Belgium, per a White House pool report.

He said that Trump will continue to "call out" the press if it plays "fast and loose with the facts."

"The truth is that we have in President Trump someone who has a unique ability to speak directly to the American people," Pence said. "And when the media gets it wrong, I promise you, President Trump will take his case straight to the American people to set the record straight."

In a tweet posted Friday, Trump claimed that the "FAKE NEWS media" is not his personal nemesis but rather "the enemy of the American People."

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) warned in an interview aired Sunday that suppressing critical coverage is "how dictators get started."

"If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press," he said. "Without it I'm afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time."

Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis also broke with Trump on Sunday, saying in an interview that he does not "have any issues with the press."

"I’ve had some rather contentious times with the press," he told reporters. "But no, the press as far as I’m concerned are a constituency that we deal with, and I don't have any issues with the press myself."