Nevertheless I will accept the good here as good, despite warts.

“That’s a British company, Altezza. They work on the outside of the blades and towers, like spacewalkers. That building had been vacant for a dozen years, easily. This is General Electric–there’s 150 workers there. It used to be a Coca-Cola storage facility. At one point, a quarter of all GE turbines in the world were built here. Northwind moved into that one; it held a company that made deer blinds.”

It’s the same thing that we’re seeing in rural west-by-northwestern Indiana, which, surprisingly enough, is becoming a significant wind-energy leader (and is experimenting in other alternative-energy fields). It’s great that we’re making this attempt more sustainably to power the world (even if it’s ultimately an attempt “sustainably” to power a fundamentally unsustainable way of life). But it’s happening by way of big-government–big-business collusion/subsidies/big-business control of sustainable-energy-based local economic development. I realize that expecting small businesses to have any major role in wind power is perhaps hopeless (notwithstanding the presumably local ancillary companies, e.g., Evans Enterprises, mentioned in the linked-to article), but is this “good news” worth the continuation of the same old Faustian song-and-dance?