Mandatory Retirement

According to brookings.edu: 

 "Presidents of the regional Fed banks can serve until they’re 65—unless appointed after turning 55, in which case they can serve for a maximum of 10 years or until they’re 75, whichever comes first."

From pbs.org: "FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said in a letter to two key senators that pilot fitness is critical to safety, and the agency should be able to create safeguards before raising the age limit to a proposed 67 from the current 65."

Federaltimes.com:

"CSRS and FERS law enforcement officers and firefighters are subject to mandatory retirement at age 57 if they have 20 years of service. An agency head can retain an LEO until age 60 if he finds that the employee’s continued service is in the public interest. The FBI has limited authority to raise the age to 65. While a CSRS LEO can be retained above age 60, it may only do so with the Office of Personnel Management’s permission. A FERS LEO may only be retained with the permission of the president.

Air traffic controllers must be separated from the service on the last day of the month in which they become age 56. However, that requirement doesn’t apply to someone appointed as an ATC by the Department of Transportation before May 16, 1972, or by the Defense Department before Sept. 12, 1980.

Foreign service officers are mandatorily retired at age 65."

 

It's Gotta Be Climate Change

One of the latest and most significant events blamed on climate change is turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. A Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore encountered turbulence so serious that about 70 passengers were injured and one died, apparently of a heart attack. US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has said publically that climate change is the culprit for an increasing amount of air turbulence that must affect commercial aircraft at an altitude of 30,000 ft. since that's where they fly. The Transportation Secretary is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities but his fields of study were in politics and economics rather than atmospheric physics.

 “Looking forward into the future, in terms of managing water resources and flood control, we should be anticipating that the wetter extremes will be wetter and the dry extremes will get drier,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University....

According to the American Psychological Association:    

• Gender-based violence: In 2022, researchers at the University of Cambridge analyzed 41 studies that explored several types of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires. They found that gender-based violence appears to be exacerbated by extreme weather and climate events. Contributing factors include economic shock, social instability, enabling environments, and stress.
• Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history, had rates of PTSD on par with war veterans, and they were at increased risk for depression and anxiety, according to a 2021 study from the University of California–San Diego. Survivors of hurricanes and floods suffer similar rates of depression and PTSD.
• Suicide: The economic impacts of droughts lead to increases in suicide, particularly among farmers. Further, authors of a 2018 study in the journal Nature predicted warmer temperatures could lead to as many as 40,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050.
• Aggression: Higher temperatures lead to more aggressive behaviors. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Public Economics found that violent crime in Los Angeles increased by 5.7% on days when temperatures rose above 85°F compared with cooler days.
• Anxiety: Even some Americans who have not been directly affected by a climate disaster are experiencing climate anxiety—an overwhelming sense of fear, sadness, and dread in the face of a warming planet or anxiety and worry about climate change and its effects. A 2020 APA survey found that 56% of U.S. adults said climate change is the most important issue facing the world today. Nearly half of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.  ____________________ Edward Narayan of the University of Queensland in Australia points out that pets are also likely to suffer adverse effects from climate change and that their owners or partners or whatever should be aware of the discomfort faced by tropical fish and birds, as well as dogs and cats. Let's face it, climate change is probably also putting pressure on inanimate factors in our lives. Our automobiles are likely running less efficiently, the color on our television sets may be fading, the songs on the radio just don't seem as great as they once did. This climate change thing is a bear.
  

Demolishing German Industry

According to Tilak Doshi, writing in Forbes:

 "The heavy costs of suppressing the use of fossil fuels while promoting intermittent, weather-dependent renewable energy technologies over the past decade has been disguised and diffused by hidden costs and fiscal transfers to powerful constituencies. But over time, “net zero” climate policies have become increasingly unbearable for ordinary people as they reach beyond the power sector to cover agriculture, transport, homes, and buildings."

This isn't just an accurate picture of what is soon to emerge in the US but also one that describes the current situation in Germany because both countries seem to share some of the same evolving values.

The imaginary climate crisis has been augmented not only by the eco-paranoid but also even more by the corporate/government axis that stands to profit from the supposed remedies. The abandonment of hydrocarbon energy, really impossible at any meaningful level, is more than anything a vast transfer of wealth from one group of industrialists to another. 

 

 

FAO On Food and Climate Change

accessagric.com 

Mr Kaveh Zahedi, the Director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), of the United Nations has made a trip to Japan to attend an environmental meeting in Tokyo.

He's there to impress the locals with the importance of addressing agricultural policies in the context of climate change. He says: “agriculture is also on the front line of the impact of climate change. It contributes to and is impacted by climate change.” That sounds bad.

If 700 million are facing hunger it looks like more effective agriculture is necessary. But agriculture is part of the increase of climate change so more food will spell less food. Worse still, an FAO analysis has found that the funds needed to combat climate change have decreased.

Mr. Zahedi notes that the Japanese are experienced at doing more with less. His interview seems to be just more climate change boiler plate.

The reality is that localized weather events aren't indicative of climate change, which occurs over an extended period of time greater than even several lifetimes. Floods in southern Brazil don't mean anything in regard to the climate of Europe a century from now. Individuals like Mr. Zahedi and the institutions they represent owe their existence to the climate anxiety that they seek to perpetuate. That's their job, it's how they "earn" a living.

Klaus Schwab To Step Aside As WEF Executive Chairman

The 86 year-old founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum will relinquish a post that he's held for 64% of his life and become chairman of the WEF's board of trustees by January, 2025.

 

 time.com

A German citizen, Schwab was educated in mechanical engineering in both Germany and Switzerland, also receiving a Master in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1967.   Schwab was professor of business policy at the  University of Geneva from 1972 to 2003, and since then has been an honorary professor there. He formed the WEF in 1971.

While Schwab was actually a disciple of Canadian Maurice Strong, his tenure in the public eye and continuing attempt to make seminal changes in society  through "stakeholder capitalism" somewhat resembles that of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an educated physicist, and his "transcendental meditation" and Science of Creative Intelligence, which was also located in Switzerland.

 

 thefamouspeople.com

The difference is that the Maharishi's "TM" is an entirely voluntary movement that attracted celebrities as well as government figures and ordinary people. Naturally, his successes inspired investigations and criticism. The Maharishi died in 2008 at age 90 but many of his ideas are embraced to this day, his books are still available, and educational institutions inspired by his teachings continue to exist, albeit with skepticism. 

In normal human terms, Schwab's existence is likely to come to an end soon. While he oversees an organization that rewards him with serious riches, 1 million Swiss francs annually, the odds that his ideas will continue to percolate long into the future, that The Fourth Industrial Revolution will be easily available, seems poor. While it's inevitable that technology will continue to change, human beings will probably remain, at least physically, the same as ever. Only their ideas and beliefs will be affected by whatever industrial revolution comes along. 

 

Open AI Being Suied For Copyright Infringement

The very substance of artificial intelligence and large language models has come under attack from The Authors Guild, an organization that exists to promote free speech, fair contracts and copyright. They are suing Open AI for using copyrighted material, ie. over 100,000 copyrighted books used to "train" Chat GPT-3. According to Digital Information World, Open AI was well aware of the illegality of what they were doing, deleted the data sets used and the researchers involved in the project are no longer available.

It's not hard to imagine that a successful suit against Open AI and other artificial intelligence efforts might throw a giant monkey wrench into the AI machinery. Certainly the opposing sides might come to an amicable and financially rewarding agreement on the matter but the possibility that negotiations could drag on for an extended period could slow the adoption of what seems to be the greatest invention since beer.

Not everyone sees AI and large language models as an unalloyed blessing. This article by Garrison Lovely points out that nobody can really balance the risk-reward situation if AI is employed as currently visualized.

Open AI update:  News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, has reached an agreement with generative artificial intelligence Open AI allowing the use of published news to answer questions and train its system. It could mean $250 million dollars for News Corp over the next 5 years and include cash and credits for the use of the Open AI technology.

It seems as though News Corp, if making use of Open AI, will be regurgitating its own work, as well as that of other publications.

 

Is It Really Climate Change?

Al Jazeera, an alternative on-line media presence with a somewhat different perspective on world affairs, has digitally published an essay on how "climate change pushes indigenous people from their land".

Perhaps the author of the piece and the writer of the headline occupy different offices but the substance of the article and its headline don't reflect the same facts.

While Neil Giardino's article points out the many problems indigenous peoples face, at least those in the Amazon basin, few, if any, are caused by the inevitable changes in climate. In fact, practically all of them are the result of the encroachment of 21st century society, economics and technology. The Ashaninka of eastern Peru, residents of the remote upper Amazon for who knows how long, are rightly devastated that their corner of the world is being over run by loggers, cattlemen, miners and all the other representatives of modernity. The reality is that they and their ancestors far back in time faced and overcame many episodes of climate change. They may not be able to overcome an invasion of technologically superior invaders. No new world culture has done so.

 

 Pachaka Samaniego, right, and her family search for water in the Amazon rainforest [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

Furthermore, like all victims of the colonial era, now in its 532nd year, they have quickly adopted the most useful items of the invader technology. The lady cooks in a modern metal pot, something that the Ashaninka have never been able to produce. Of course no small society has ever been able to produce such items. The European descendants  who live in a place like Minot, North Dakota can't manufacture their own pots and pans either. They buy them from distant strangers. 

Giardino mentions that many of the Amazon indigenous have moved to the big cities in South America, like that was a bad thing. Everywhere, rurals have pulled up stakes and left for the urban mega-cities where they hope to make things better for themselves and their families, at least in economic terms. Climate has nothing to do with it.

The US has had, and continues to have, similar issues with its now tiny indigenous population, once in the many millions, which has been swindled of its land and banished to the least hospitable and infertile areas of the continent, which includes the most dangerous areas of major cities as well as deserts. 

The point is that climate change isn't a real burden on the Ashaninka or the Masai or the Aborigines or the Comanches. In their pre-colonial state they would have been unlikely to have even noticed a cooler winter or a warmer summer. They can't fail to notice the social and economic changes forcing their way into the once pre-technological era in which they lived.      

A Big Reward For The Capture Of Nork IT Bandits

The US State Department will disburse up to $5 million for information leading to the capture of North Korean internet bandits from the Rewards For Justice program. A dedicated section is devoted to North Korean activities. 

Since at least 2020 three North Korean IT workers have managed to access US companies and divert funds with the assistance of Christina Chapman, a US citizen. The digital embezzlement has reached a sum of $6.8 million.

The program has also offered a reward of $5 million for Singapore business man Kwek Kee Seng in 2022 for his part in diverting oil to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions. No announcement has been made if he has been arrested.

Of course one could be sitting next to one of the digital pirates at a movie and be completely unaware of his illegal activities. In fact, there are no published photographs or descriptions of any of the Norks involved. Their names are unknown. Perhaps word has reached the North Korean street on the possibility of claiming millions in Yankee riches but it's unlikely that anyone outside the deepest levels of Nork intelligence has the necessary information. What this "reward" is meant to do is inspire the treasonous avarice of a figure high up in the intelligence service. The likelihood of certain sudden death for the informer means that it will never be collected.   

 

The Pope And Climate Change, The Pontifical Academy Of The Sciences

The meeting of movers and shakers at the Vatican in Rome brings to mind aspects of the Roman Catholic Church's relationship with ideas in the past.

 

"In AD 340 St. Cyril of Jerusalem had reasoned that what all men believe must be true, and ever since then the purity of the faith had derived from its wholeness, from the conviction, as expressed by an early Jesuit, that all who worshiped were united in 'one sacramental system under the government of the Roman Pontiff'. Anyone not a member of the Church was to be cast out of this life, and more important, of the next. It was consignment to the worst fate imaginable, like being exiled from an ancient German tribe--'to be given forth,' in the pagan Teutonic phrase 'to be a wolf in holy places.' The faithless were doomed, the Fifth Lateran Council ((1512-1517) reaffirmed Saint Cyprian's third-century dictum 'Nulla salus extra ecclesiam'--'Outside the church there is no salvation.' Any other finding would have been inconceivable.

______________________________

'The Catholic Church holds it better' wrote a Roman theologian, 'that the entire population of the world should die of starvation in extreme agony . . . than that of one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin.' In the words of one pope, ' The Church is independent of any earthly power, not merely in regard to her lawful end and purpose, but also in regard to whatever means she may deem suitable and necessary to attain them.' Another pope, agreeing, declared that God had made the Vatican "a sharer in the divine magistracy, and granted her, by special privilege, immunity from error.' Even to 'appeal from the living voice of the Church was 'a treason', wrote a cardinal, 'because that living voice is supreme; and to appeal from that supreme voice is also a heresy   , because that voice, by divine assistance, is infallible.' A fellow cardinal put it even more clearly: 'The Church is not susceptible of being reformed in her doctrines. The Church is the work of an Incarnate God. Like alll God's works, it is perfect. It is , therefore, incapable of reform."

William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1993. 

Historical Warmth in Scandinavia

Clues hidden deep in the trunks of ancient trees have revealed that last summer was the northern hemisphere's hottest in 2,000 years. 

Or at least that's what the BBC says, relaying along information provided by Ulf Büntgen, professor of environmental systems analysis at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study. Researchers say that temperatures last June, July and August were nearly 4C warmer than the coldest summer two millennia ago. If that's not a typo, so what? Wouldn't even a normal summer, whatever that is, obviously be significantly warmer than the coldest summer two millennia ago?

A different study, using similar proxy indicators, has produced a very different result. Printed in the on-line Science Advances, this is the abstract of a study conducted of the faunal diversity from Nygrotta, a former entrance of the Storsteinhola cave system in Kjøpsvik, municipality of Narvik, northern Norway.

Abstract

 Paleo-archives are essential for our understanding of species responses to climate warming, yet such archives are extremely rare in the Arctic. Here, we combine morphological analyses and bulk-bone metabarcoding to investigate a unique chronology of bone deposits sealed in the high-latitude Storsteinhola cave system (68°50′ N 16°22′ E) in Norway. This deposit dates to a period of climate warming from the end of the Late Glacial [~13 thousand calibrated years before the present (ka cal B.P.)] to the Holocene thermal maximum (~5.6 ka cal B.P.). Paleogenetic analyses allow us to exploit the 1000s of morphologically unidentifiable bone fragments resulting in a high-resolution sequence with 40 different taxa, including species not previously found here. Our record reveals borealization in both the marine and terrestrial environments above the Arctic Circle as a naturally recurring phenomenon in past periods of warming, providing fundamental insights into the ecosystem-wide responses that are ongoing today.

______________________________

 

What they're saying is that bones of animals found in caves at nearly the same latitude as Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, dated from 9600 to 9005 years before the present,were animals that are no longer found that far north, such as species of grouse and cats because it was much warmer than today with intermittent cooling. It would appear that the Holocene thermal maximum of that era was dramatically warmer than the present, indicating that at least the northern hemisphere was also very much warmer than it is today.

This work was financially supported by The Research Council of Norway and Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologie (FRQNT) provided a doctoral fellowship to A.B.

  

Who Is Catherine Howarth?

 

 

theguardian.com

Catherine Howarth is the chief executive of ShareAction, a UK-based organization, that, according to their website, works with  investors, policymakers and individuals to address the problems presented by climate change, global issues and health. This is done by organizing shareholders in an attempt to influence corporate boards in matters of investment and operation. 

For instance, currently, according to the Wall Street Journal, ShareAction is one of several entities attempting to intimidate Barclays, over their financing of fracking activity in the US. While Barclays appreciates the concern of ShareAction and others in this matter, they are also going along with the International Energy Agency's Net Zero Emissions 2050 Scenario, that recognizes that short-term developments in gas and oil will be necessary in the transition to a hydrocarbon-free future.

A strong ally in ShareAction's operation is the UK publication the Guardian, this being an example of their work.

Back to Catherine Howarth. The lady "was a Member Nominated Trustee of The Pensions Trust (the multi-employer pension scheme for the UK’s not-for-profit sector) for five years, where she served on the Investment Committee of this £7bn fund. Catherine holds a First Class BA in Modern History from Oxford University and an MSc in Industrial Relations from the London School of Economics. In June 2011 Catherine was named a ‘Rising Star of Corporate Governance’ by Yale University’s, Millstein Center.

Catherine was recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014."

She has been the head of ShareAction since 2008. 

She is also on the board of  the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian Media Group, publishers of the the Guardian.

 

Klaus Schwab, The WEF And Stakeholder Capitalism

 

LGBTQ+ at greater risk of climate change

It took awhile to make the connection but the existential threat of climate change puts at risk the LGBTQ+ "community" more than other groups, according to the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute after a study using US Census data, NASA figures and FEMA experience. Same sex couples are said to occupy vulnerable coastal areas in a greater proportion than the more elevated interior. Furthermore, same sex couples tend to live in crappier neighborhoods with inferior infrastructure and fewer resources to deal with bad weather and climate vagaries. 

" Washington, D.C., a county equivalent, has the highest proportion of same-sex couples of any county in the United States. It scores high for a variety of climate risks, including heat waves (97th percentile), flooding (95th percentile), and dangerously strong winds (98th percentile)."

The UCLA legalists recommend that a federal effort be made to determine the dimensions of the LGBTQ+ community in any area and provide resources to enable their successful response to climate issues. 

Personalism and the Destruction of Democracy

 This video is a production of the Center for a New American Security, a D.C. think tank with a close relationship with the Democrat wing of the US government. 

The substance of the argument put forth in this video is that nasty people in less-enlightened parts of the world use the democratic process, whatever that is, to gain control of governments and further their power. Some even go to the trouble of creating their own political parties to achieve this. The CNAS deplores such behavior. 

The history of the world is littered with the bodies of personalities that used their own attributes to take power over their countrymen through a democratic process or otherwise. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Napoleon, Simon Bolivar, Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, Hitler, and many others followed this very path. Naturally, the video commentators are comparing those travesties to the superior results of the US paradigm.

They seem to favor a government composed of party apparatchiks, faithful technocrats, selflessly following a script. The reality is that in the somewhat unique US two party system there are situations where neither address the issues most important to the populace. Maybe both parties consider those issues to be less important than the most pressing ones, continuing profits for the financial sector, construction of a huge and expensive military, interference in the domestic politics of foreign countries, fighting ephemeral climate change and so on. That is how personalist figures come to power. By addressing the ignored needs of the general public. It doesn't usually work. See William Jennings Bryan.       

The Bad Nurse

This image provided by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office shows Heather Pressdee.

Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office via AP

 

The nursing license of Heather Pressdee has been revoked and she has been sentenced to life imprisonment for pleading guilty to three counts of murder and nineteen counts of attempted murder. She may have dispatched as many as 17 patients by administering excessive amounts of insulin to persons under her care.

Her life sentence includes three consecutive life sentences and another consecutive term of 380 to 760 years. 

No mention is made of when she might be eligible for a parole hearing. The important thing, as usual, is that she actually be incarcerated for the entirety of her sentence, which, at her age of 41 could easily be 880 years. We know that her evil heart will eventually fail to supply blood to her devilish brain but why take a chance and remove her dead body from its cell and allow her spirit freedom? 

The law is the law and a small matter like her death shouldn't free her  from the terms of her sentence.   

Reuters, The Voice of the Climate Apocalypse

There's probably been high water or drought somewhere on earth ever since long before Noah built his ark. But in his case it was of literally biblical proportions. Since Noah's view of the world's extent was rather limited, we can't know exactly how much of the Green Planet was flooded. 

Reuters, the international news agency, keeps very close tabs on unpleasant weather affairs that add credence to the rapid climate change fears reverberating through the media. 

 

 colorado.edu

In this case, it's the flooding in the southern Brazilian Taquari River valley, said to be the worst in 80 years. To put this in perspective, according to someone's records, 80 years ago the flooding was even more severe. But we aren't told about the frequency and extent of floods that may have occurred prior to the 1944 inundation. They may have been a regular event, as is the case with many rivers. The Lena River in Siberia, flowing due north, floods almost every spring, as does the Red River of the North that forms the North Dakota-Minnesota border and continues on to Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, the world's 11th largest lake. Nobody can remember when these rivers didn't flood so the fact that they  continue to do so means that people are either foolish to live near their banks or willing to accept the inconvenience of wading through water to get from the living room to the kitchen. A small increase in global temperatures, if such a thing can even be measured in a meaningful way, is unlikely to change the flow of major rivers.    

Renewable Energy Adoption Problems

Haley Zaremba has written an article for Oil Price.Com telling us the truth, rather than fantasies, about the adoption of renewable energy.

She quotes: " “There’s a lot of lying to ourselves,” Jason Grumet, the head of the American Clean Power Association (ACP), was quoted by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. “We don’t want to grapple with a very, very tough issue: How do we think about the extent to which some communities have been fundamentally antagonized and disadvantaged, which is absolutely true, and the fact that the world is going to boil if we don’t speed things up?”

The world is going to boil. Sure, it is. A few years back the worry was about "peak oil". As petroleum production entered its inevitable decline its subsequent rising price would wreak economic havoc, especially with the poor. That didn't happen. There is more oil and its by-products available than ever before and higher prices aren't due to scarcity but instead international disagreements. So the prophets of apocalypse need to come up with a different existential threat. Lucky for them it's invisible and probably beneficial, atmospheric CO2. 

She covers the IMF's five challenges to the successful transition to renewable energy. Monopolies and destructive mining are part of the renewable process. Copper, for instance, with its rising price, is stolen from operating municipal lighting systems, a kind of mining in itself and recycled. The proliferation of AI and data centers, enormous consumers of electricity, will also be an impediment to energy transformation, even though there's been no public discussion on the wisdom of embracing AI. Why do people who have no conception of how it works arrive at the idea that it's a good thing if they consider it at all?

It may very well be that AI could become a greater threat to human happiness than a difficult to quantify and unpredictable change in world climate, if there even is such a thing. They're probably worrying about the wrong potential problem.

 

Seventy-five year old Secretary of the Air Force goes for an autonomous plane ride

Frank Kendall III, the 75 year-old secretary of the Air Force took an hour-long spin in a DARPA-modified F-16 Vista fighter jet that was controlled entirely by artificial intelligence. Flying at speeds of 550 mph and with forces of 5 Gs, the plane engaged in simulated combat with an F-16 flown by a pilot.

 

edwards.af.mil

Mr. Kendall, DARPA and the rest of the military community are enthusiastic about the possibility of sending swarms of unmanned war planes against similar wings that are sure to be part of the Chinese repertoire. 

Others have reservations:  

“There are widespread and serious concerns about ceding life-and-death decisions to sensors and software,” the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Autonomous weapons “are an immediate cause of concern and demand an urgent, international political response.”

Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used.

In fact, in a democratic society the use of AI in any manner should be determined by a majority of the people, not military and scientific technocrats. With their fantastic budgets, the military will always be the beneficiary of newer destructive scientific discoveries. 

Phil Alvin & The Blasters "Common Man"

The rock-a-billy Blasters recording of "Common Man" was released in their Hard Line album of 1985. Most people of age 50 or even younger remember the name of the US president referred to in the song. It turns out that other chief executives also fit that description. Maybe you could guess who they might be.

                youtube
 

For now, the wind power jobs are gone

The Albany Times-Union explains that the predicted 870 jobs building wind turbine dynamos and the blades that turn them at the nearby Port of Coeymans on the Hudson River won't happen as things currently stand. This is because major offshore wind developments adjacent to New York, the Attentive and Community Offshore projects, have been cancelled. About 2,718 megawatts of wind-produced energy won't be added to the state power grid. Other projects remain in the works. 

The center-piece of the Port of Coeymans effort was to be a facility where the components of wind dynamos, blades and submarine towers would be assembled and then transported down the Hudson to the sites off Long Island. As might be expected, the cost of the yet-to-be built factory has exploded from an initial estimate of $350 million to a current $604 million.