And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind…
From “The Windmills of Your Mind”, theme song from ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’, 1968.
I was having lunch with my friend Becky yesterday — yes, we’re just friends — when a big wind kicked up, and Becky commented that it looked like rain.
It didn’t look like rain at all. There was barely a cloud in the sky.
“Whenever it starts blowing like this, there’s a rainstorm coming,” Becky claimed. I had never noticed that fact.
It took a few hours, but sure enough, it started drizzling that evening and kept it up all night long,
Too bad I didn’t own some windmills yesterday. I could have made a few bucks from all that wind.
But I can still write about windmills. Which is probably all an American citizen can hope for, these days. A humor column.
When world historians tell the story of 2025, it will be about the passing of technological, and hence economic, and hence political leadership from the U.S. to China, in the span of eight months…
— from an essay “The Stupidest Speech in UN History” by Bill McKlibben, September 2025.
I don’t know when the world historians will get around to telling the story of 2025. Could take a while. So let’s help them out.
Noted environmentalist Bill McKlibben is fond of ‘renewable energy’ like windmills and solar farms, and not fond of coal-fired energy. He will tell you so. Endlessly.
He’s also willing to complain about the current leadership of the federal government. Especially about one particular person. In one of his typical environmentalist essays, Mr. McKlibben offered several quotes from that particular person’s speech to the UN last year, which I have to admit sounded… well, I don’t like to use the word “stupid”… but certainly “questionable”.
We all know from stories in the Lamestream Media that wind and solar power are now “cheaper” than coal-fired energy, and in a country where we’re always looking for a good bargain, you might think we would want to switch sooner rather than later. Like how I switched, last year, from Heineken to Pabst Blue Ribbon, and saved probably $100 over the past 12 months.
Not that I’m comparing wind energy to Pabst Blue Ribbon, exactly, but maybe we should be.
I don’t know if they drink beer in China? But they are totally into converting their electric grid to renewables.
If you’re wondering what that particular American leader said at the UN, here’s a sample quote, below, that Bill McKlibben referenced in his essay. I don’t know how many people have read Bill McKlibben’s essay. Mostly fellow environmentalists, I imagine. Since I have a different readership, I will share it on his behalf. (He can buy me a beer someday.)
We’re getting rid of the falsely-named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow.
Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot.
Most expensive energy ever conceived… You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies. And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they’re very few wind farms.
So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them?
I wasn’t sure whether these facts about China not using windmills to generate electricity, are actually facts. The stuff I read on the internet mentions 500,000 megawatts of windmill generation in China. Is that a lot? I guess the U.S. has around 150,000 megawatts of wind capacity.
Not sure a country can claim to be “Great” with only 150,000 megawatts. Seems like you really ought to have 500,000 megawatts if you want to be “Great”.
Yes, it would be really nasty for China to manufacture 80% of the windmills, globally, and then not use any of them. But that’s doesn’t seem to be the case.
At any rate, I did finally look up the information about China and beer, and it looks like the U.S. brews about 5 billion gallons of beer annually, and China brews about 9 billion gallons.
But is Chinese beer superior to Pabst Blue Ribbon? That’s the real question.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.