If Jerome is serious about promoting wind power he needs to focus on items two and three, the case for wind power has already been proven.
Who will object is fairly easy to determine - a minimum the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, including mining, transport, refining and the governments which get revenue from these activities.
All these interest groups will need to be bought off. It is not enough to say that wind will provide new jobs, it won't provide new jobs to those in the existing industries. It will provide different jobs. You will never get the support of a Kentucky coal miner by explaining about those building wind farms in Texas.
You also can't offer retraining and other transition programs. Workers have seen over the past 20 years that such programs don't work.
Also remember that the government of Kentucky will be against change as well, including its representatives in congress. You can see a good example of how this regionalism played out over the big three auto bailout. The Japanese auto firms are in Kentucky and Tennessee and the senators from these states opposed the bailout for the firms in Michigan and Ohio.
So what's the plan to get past the entrenched interests? Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
So the questions are, who are the core support, who are the core opposition, how does the core support hold more marginal members of their coalition in place and how does the core support wedge off marginal members of the opposition.
This diary, in particular the dKos edition, is a contribution to the third of those questions ... part of maintaining the marginal members of the coalition together against the active opposition strategy of deception and misinformation is to periodically renew the information base in high visibility locales. Its not, by any means, a major part of the answer to the third question, but few individual actions are a major part of the contribution to either the defense or the offense.
It would be a mistake to treat the dKos audience as static ... it grows and turns over across time. Periodic refresh is required.
The core support is to be found in the rustbelt states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois and the rich wind resource states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, the Dakotas, etc.
On wedging Southeastern Ohio, Southwestern Pennsylvania, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia, Western North Carolina and northern Georgia, an active program of promotion of sustainable perennial biomass feedstock in the form of wood coppice is a natural, since bio-coal is a readily dispatched carbon neutral fuel source that is a natural complement to wind power, if provided with a sustainable supply of biomass feedstock, and it fights against the depopulation of the hills of Appalachia that is being pursued as a policy of Big Coal. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
