Offshore Wind Quotes

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.

It was not yet hot that morning; the breeze that stalks all seaside towns was running offshore. Nina could feel the wind across her shoulders as she walked onto the perfectly cut grass, feeling the stiff edges of the blades between her toes. She walked until she got to the edge of the cliff.

Let’s each take a Sailfish and have a race,” George cried, running over to a pretty light-blue boat, with a yellow sail wrapped neatly around the mast. The mast and rudder had been placed carefully next to the hull. “That sounds like fun,” Nancy said enthusiastically. “Which boat would you like, Bess?” Nancy was eying a dark-green one with a red stripe around it. Its white sail, mast, and rudder were placed exactly like the others. “Someone keeps things shipshape around here,” she thought admiringly. “These boats look like painted wooden soldiers all lined up.” “I’ll stick to the rowboat, thanks,” Bess said. “I’d rather be under my own steam. If I took a sailboat, the wind might blow me somewhere I didn’t want to go,” she added, glancing at a breakwater of rocks not far away. “Don’t worry, Bess,” said Nancy. “Why don’t you come with me? We can always tack back when you say the word. It’s a light offshore wind,” she added, looking up at the pennant on the boathouse. “And I promise to head up into the wind, whenever you’re scared, although I don’t relish getting in irons. Oh well, if we do, you can jump out and push!” Nancy laughed.

Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody’s skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore.

Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.

We burnt paper-money – we thought it was our fault, that we hadn’t done enough to appease the heavens. Everyone said, If we were richer, we could make more donations to the temple, we’d have better catches. They didn’t realise that there was nothing they could do about all the pollution flushing down the river that went right through the cities and emptied into the sea in front of our houses. Or from the offshore prawn farms that had started further up the coast where the water was deeper – you could smell the chemicals sometimes, late in the afternoon when the wind was blowing in the right direction

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

At the time of the Fourth Fire, the history of another people came to be braided into ours. Two prophets arose among the people, foretelling the coming of the light-skinned people in ships from the east, but their visions differed in what was to follow. The path was not clear, as it cannot be with the future. The first prophet said that if the offshore people, the zaaganaash, came in brotherhood, they would bring great knowledge. Combined with Anishinaabe ways of knowing, this would form a great new nation. But the second prophet sounded a warning: He said that what looks like the face of brotherhood might be the face of death. These new people might come with brotherhood, or they might come with greed for the riches of our land. How would we know which face is the true one? If the fish became poisoned and the water unfit to drink, we would know which face they wore. And for their actions the zaaganaash came to be known instead as chimokman—Vne long-knife people. The prophecies described what eventually became history. They warned the people of those who would come among them with black robes and black books, with promises of joy and salvation. The prophets said that if the people turned against their own sacred ways and followed this black-robe path, then the people would suffer for many generations. Indeed, the burial of our spiritual teachings in the time of the Fifth Fire nearly broke the hoop of the nation. People became separated from their homelands and from each other as they were forced onto reservations. Their children were taken from them to learn the zaaganaash ways. Forbidden by law to practice their own religion, they nearly lost an ancient worldview. Forbidden to speak their languages, a universe of knowing vanished in a generation. The land was fragmented, the people separated, the old ways blowing away in the wind; even the plants and animals began to turn their faces away from us. The time was foretold when the children would turn away from the elders; people would lose their way and their purpose in life. They prophesied that, in the time of the Sixth Fire, “the cup of life would almost become the cup of grief.” And yet, even after all of this, there is something that remains, a coal that has not been extinguished. At the First Fire, so long ago, the people were told that it is their spiritual lives that will keep them strong. They say that a prophet appeared with a strange and distant light in his eyes. The young man came to the people with the message that in the time of the seventh fire, a new people would emerge with a sacred purpose. It would not be easy for them. They would have to be strong and determined in their work, for they stood at a crossroads. The ancestors look to them from the flickering light of distant fires. In this time, the young would turn back to the elders for teachings and find that many had nothing to give. The people of the Seventh Fire do not yet walk forward; rather, they are told to turn around and retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here. Their sacred purpose is to walk back along the red road of our ancestors’ path and to gather up all the fragments that lay scattered along the trail. Fragments of land, tatters of language, bits of songs, stories, sacred teachings—all that was dropped along the way. Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire. We are the ones the ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of a nation.

Within four years, we’d reduced the cost of offshore wind by 60 percent, far beyond what we’d ever imagined.

Harsh times require difficult high-risk decisions. My grandmother was born in February 1884 on a small island off the coast of Norway. On the day of her christening, her father sighted a swirl of fish offshore. A heaven-sent gift for extra mouths to feed in a lean winter? He and his partner rowed out despite the waves. They hoisted their nets again and again, until the boat was full. Should they persist or go home? The fish were still there, and they might not come back, so the men also filled a spare dinghy, connected to their boat by a chain. The wind rose, the dinghy flipped, the chain could not be cut, and both boats went down. My great-grandmother was helpless onshore, holding her newborn daughter as her husband drowned. Optimism and boldness are often worthwhile, but occasionally they are fatal. The perils of risk-taking in a harsh environment may help to explain why my great-grandfather’s surviving descendants have tendencies to anxiety and pessimism.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship to port may blow another offshore.

This dramatic wine has the burnish of torched sienna, that hint of Tuscan chickens, perhaps even pullets, that gamey, feathery aroma; a dishy first impression of guppies spawning and bracken roasting in the Castilian sun, and the high wind blowing from offshore when a garbage scow has recently run aground, not exactly fresh passion fruit, but passion fruit after it has been chewed by a horse that's just run through a heathery dale, you know, sort of sopping wet fetlocks and old dogs; and the finish, oh, just a portrait of nasturtium, or shuttlecocks dipped in quince jelly, or the stench on a fox's muzzle after he's eaten a number of small rodents or the ice caked in a refrigerator in a Paris apartment, or like new sandals, especially if the feet in them have been soaked in a bromide solution” and revisiting the nose is all rotty mulch sluicing out of a bilge pipe in a fetid stream of sweetly blooming hawthorn in a flighty perfume of freshly starched uniforms of a flight attendant in the first-class cabin in a manly swill of gassy medicinal opaline mordant porcine gratuitous acetate begonia-laden air freshener or like the fannings from a fire of souchong tea or like…Somebody make him stop! Just one more thing: Am I the only one who finds this wine a bit hirsute?

The offshore north wind built to a gale force. My poor dogs. They would hit a wind-polished spot, loose traction, and literally get rolled into a knot, requiring a frustrating untangling, under something lessthan good picnic conditions. Other times, away would go the sled skidding sideways, with me firmly attached, until it struck an immoveable drift or a crusted snow patch, and over I went, taking the entire team with me, ending, one time, a half block off the trail. Wha, storm. What an experience. Blinding and, at times, breath-sucking Dangerous, scary, but exciting and exhilarating at the same time. One remembrance I have kept—all these years—is thankfulness for the relatively mild temperature at the time. And another is an absolute, set-it-in-concrete admiration for my dogs. In the course of many untangles I rearranged my front end. Genghis, my old faithful, went in front with Kiana. Bandit was placed back in swing. We went. In spite of roll! overs, roll-ups, wraparounds, and tangles, we went. And even when a couple of males—Kuchik and Casper—repeatedly attempted to dive behind snowdrifts, out of the punishing tempest, we went. How gratifying it was to witness my years of training pay off. Uncounted hours: back on Kenai Lake and Resurrection River flats, driving this never-say-die team head-on into fiendish, violent snowstorms.

For a month Cook sailed along offshore looking for a safe anchorage, with the northern and then the eastern shore on his starboard bow, but he was frustrated at every new turn of the land by winds or currents or pounding surf in the shallows.

severe storm sprang up. The strong offshore winds blew Magellan’s ships out to sea,

A hurricane?” Sturman said. “No. But there’s a tropical cyclone offshore, headed our way, and it’s nasty looking. The wind and rain would make it too dangerous for this operation.

Offshore wind turbines are having detrimental effects on marine wildlife.

it decided last year to become a ‘broad energy’ firm, investing up to 15–20 percent of annual capital expenditure in ‘new energy solutions’ by 2030, mostly in offshore wind.

Conditions can’t be any better. Clear skies, tide going out, and an offshore wind are gifts from God. A sailor can’t ask for any more.” The admiral drained his pewter mug and called to the landlord for more ale. “I wish you fair winds, my friend. And just ask God for luck. Don’t ask for anything else. It’s too confusing. See, if he grants you good luck, that covers everything else.” The Marshall looked down into his ale and swirled it around. “You know what this means.”  He drained the mug. The admiral nodded, but said nothing. “I don’t like it. A retreat is still a retreat, no matter what you call it, even if you call it a ‘strategic redeployment of forces.’” The Marshall spat on the sawdust floor of the tavern.

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014

Moreover, as much as a third of China’s reported FDI may in fact be “round-tripping”—investments by Chinese individuals and companies that are routed through companies in other jurisdictions, especially Hong Kong. Until about 2005, there was a strong incentive for round-tripping in order to capture tax breaks and other benefits reserved for foreign firms. Even as those preferences were phased out, other reasons for round-tripping remained. Some Chinese companies—such as Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent—are classified as “foreign” firms because they have set up offshore holding company structures in order to list on international stock markets. It may be that some investments of these firms wind up counted as “FDI.”11

fission, carbon capture and sequestration, offshore wind, cellulosic ethanol (a type of advanced biofuel), and meat alternatives.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.