Per analysis posted on TOD (I checked out and the #s seemed good), 44% of the MWh generated in 2007 in the US from new electrical generation installed in 2006 will come from renewables.  40% wind + 4% a mix of all else (new hydro, solar PV, landfill gas, geothermal, biomass waste).  If more WTs were available, the % would have been larger.

After having followed the wind industry for 2+ decades, it is FINALLY about to cross a cusp from "large scale demonstration + gain operating experience (confidence)" yo early stage maturity as a significant source of electrical generation.

Wind is not truly through that cusp yet.  All Vestas WTs in a large offshore wind farm were recalled for bad gearboxes.  Such issues need to be worked out before wind becomes dominant.  And they will be :-))

Check out the AWEA site some time.

http://www.awea.org/

I chekc out "projects" every few months.

best Hopes,

Alan

Alan, it isn't my hypothesis. Please consider the prejudices you have inherited in this question, as have most of us.

First though, I must correct you about a very important point, namely enserfment. This was not invented by post-Roman society, but by the Romans themselves during the Empire, and eventually became nearly universal in Roman territory. Indeed, virtually the entire agricultural population of the empire - that is, almost everybody, because almost everyone was a peasant - was enserfed under Diocletian. This appalling development took place during the empire, not after it fell.

As for technology, here is the historian G.M.E. de Ste. Croix, initially quoting another historian (Gordon Childe) but then adding his own observations on the subject:

"`... the cultural capital accumulated by the civilizations of late antiquity was no more annihilated by the collapse of the Roman empire than smaller accumulations had been in the lesser catastrophes that interrupted and terminated the Bronze Age. Of course, as then, many refinements... were swept away. But for the most part these had been designed for, and enjoyed by, only a small and narrow class. Most achievements that had proved themselves biologically to be progressive and had become firmly established on a genuinely popular footing by the participation of wider classes were conserved... So in the Eastern Mediterranean, city life, with all its implications, still continued. Most craft were still plied with all the technical skill and equipment evolved in Classical and Hellenistic times.'

Here I agree with Childe. The material arts are never the exclusive preserve of a governing class. When a civilization collapses, the governing class often disintegrates, and its culture (its literature and art and so forth) often comes to a full stop; and the society which succeeds has to make a full start. This is not true of the material arts and crafts: luxury trades of course may disappear, and particular techniques may die out as the demand for them ceases, but in the main the technological heritage is transmitted more or less intact to succeeding generations. This has been the experience of the last five thousand years and more in the Far Eastern, Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Western societies. Each society can normally begin in may material respects where its predecessor left off.'

And:

`The `economic decline' of the Roman empire was essentially a deterioration in the economic organisation of the empire rather than in its techniques, which deteriorated little, except in  so far as the lack of any widespread effective demand for certain luxury goods and services eventually dried up their supply.'

And again, this time quoting the American historian Lynne White:

`There is no proof that any important skills of the Graeco-Roman world were lost during the Dark Ages even in the unenlightened West, much less in the flourishing Byzantine and Saracenic Orient.'

You might all want to remember also the origins of the term `Dark Ages': made up by a bunch of Renaissance Latin scholars who were essentially condemning  what they considered the barbarous Latin prose style of their Medieval predecessors. Yes, much of our distorted view comes from some people making snotty complaints about grammar. As if people of 500 years hence were to label your current US society on the basis of William Safire's complaints about language.

I hope the pieces I have gone to the effort of quoting demonstrate to all of you that the opinions I have expressed here are not unsupported. Indeed, it is your own positions that rest on baseless stereotypes and prejudices, some of which go back many centuries. The discipline of Ancient History itself is replete with these, because virtually all our literary materials come from the upper classes, and most historians simply accept the biases expressed by the authors.

Anyone who wants to read a real eye-opener about this stuff should consult 'The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World' by de Ste. Croix, from which I have quoted above.

Forgive me if I post this on a later Drumbeat as well - I doubt you will see it here.

Regards,

The point you are missing it that life under the empire was already extraordinarily bad for almost everybody: that is, for the peasantry, which made up over 99 percent of the population. Those people were excluded entirely from the benefits of Roman civilization, but they paid all of its costs via extortionate taxes exacted via corporal punishment. They didn't go to the baths, they didn't go to the games, they didn't use the roads (they were enserfed and weren't supposed to go anywhere - the roads were for the army). The empire did not `protect' them, except in our modern Mafia-Don sense, and they could get that from the barbarians as well - often at lower rates. (Many inhabitants of the empire `went over' to live among the barbarians because it was preferable to living under the empire.)

No sewers in London anymore? Whoop. There were no sewers in the villages after the fall, but then there never had been any in the first place. The city is entirely aberrant. City life in the ancient world is not even slightly representative of how most people lived. That's why I say the collapse of the empire made no difference to most people. That is, nearly everyone.

On reflection, this is the central problem in this argument. Everyone keeps thinking life in the Roman empire was the same as life in Rome - and for someone like Cicero at that. It was not. Almost everyone lived in the country. Almost everyone was a peasant.

What you say about distributing bread applies only to the urban plebs in the larger cities. Think: where did that bread come from in the first place? Peasants grew it. Those people were not better off seeing their grain go to urban areas. And the urban plebs has its origin in being dispossessed of land by wealthier Romans earlier on. That was part of the dynamic of imperial growth. They too would have been better off without that happening.

Oh yeah, Alan mentioned `rule of law' above too - that is ridiculous. The Romans had a great private law system, but they had zero constitutional law and criminal procedure was barbaric. It was a rule of procedure that a wealthy person's testimony counted for more than a poor person's, even in civil suits. There is an attestation of a doctor being so disgusted with the corruption in a lawsuit he had become embroiled in that he left to live under the Huns, because they had a better sense of fair play! Yes - the Huns!

Rome shows us nothing about our predicament, because it is only about the top level of administration collapsing and trade in luxury goods drying up. It's not even remotely analogous to any situation we face. We would certainly be better off if it were, but it isn't. A better analogy is the Maya. Those people really did suffer - not because they screwed up their tax and rent systems, but because their agriculture failed them.

Rome tells us nothing about ourselves now - except for our willingness to believe imperial propaganda fifteen hundred years after it stopped being current. Bob is right: humans are dumber than yeast after all.