Joe Barton on the perils of wind energy

Joe Barton (R-Texas) warns of the perils of reliance on wind energy:

Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can't transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It's just something to think about.

I'm less worried about our using up all the wind and leaving the earth a still, lifeless wasteland (though that's a possibility that we can't entirely ignore) than I am of the possibility of a giant wind spill. Suppose the offshore windmills broke down and unleashed a torrent of 200 mile-per-hour winds on Cape Cod. A disaster on that scale would have us wishing that all we had to worry about was oil spills in the Gulf.