We know that many Lefty Fundamentalist and environmentalists are Luddites.
We seldom realize that they are looking nostalgically at the 19th century. A place and time many of us are happy to leave behind.
One of the major innovations of the 19th century was the bicycle. Today envirotech and do-gooders are fanatics about the value of bicycles and are promoting them aggressively.
I personally like bicycles and find they have an important role to play in transportation. So do Segways and skateboards that are much underappreciated and deprecated.
The problem with this bicycle love affair by the American environmentalists is that they are inappropriate for older people, people with disabilities, families and regular American style shopping. There is room for more bicycles but it should not be at the expense of other motorized vehicles. We needn’t glamorize 19th Century life.
There is also a worship of wind generators. Wind mills (the brother of the wind generator) have been used for many centuries. In most of America they were used as water pumps in rural areas.
The problem with windmills or wind generators is that there are very few locations with high wind speeds over long periods of time. In San Francisco we have only one windy month where the average wind speed reaches 10 miles per hour. The consequence is that for an established demand curve for electric power, wind generators are only available at their peak wind output and the rest of the time the electric network must provide backup. That means more conventional electric generation facilities than wind generators. Until there are effective storage mechanisms for electricity wind generators will remain a Luddite luxury.