Seems the Mojave evictions WERE to make way for solar and wind projects
Guest post by Alec Rawls
In 2006 California’s Senate Bill 107 codified a requirement that by 2010 all electricity retailers in the state were to procure 20% of their electricity from “renewables.” That same year L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich established Nuisance Abatement Teams that started combing the Mojave desert hitting isolated residents with ever-expanding lists of code violations, imposing whatever it took to drive residents out, and they made their intentions perfectly clear:
As her ordeal wore on, she heard one agent, looking inside their comfortable cabin, say to another: “This one’s a real shame — this is a real nice one.”
A “shame” because the authorities eventually would enact some of the most powerful rules imaginable against rural residents: the order to bring the home up to current codes or dismantle the 26-year-old cabin, leaving only bare ground.
“They wouldn’t let me grandfather in the water tank,” Jacques Dupuis says. “It is so heart-wrenching because there was a way to salvage this, but they wouldn’t work with me. It was, ‘Tear it down. Period.’ ”
The immediate object in this case was actual confiscation of the land:
In order to clear the title on their land, the Dupuises are spending what would have been peaceful retirement days dismantling every board and nail of their home — by hand — because they can’t afford to hire a crew.
As the de facto evictions and confiscations multiplied, Antonovich’s motives were questioned. Was he trying to clear the land for redevelopment? In August of 2011, Antonivich Press Secretary Tony Bell denied it (at 8:40):
The county is simply responding to code violation complaints from neighbors in the area and any speculation about redevelopment was purely a conspiracy theory.
I did some Google searching at the time to see if any major wind or solar developments were planned for the area where the evictions were centered (the western Mojave’s Antelope Valley), but couldn’t pin down the connection. When First Solar recently cleared a permit for a massive Antelope Valley project I tried again and found some things I should have seen before.
It seems the wraps were already off when Antonovich issued his denials. Newspapers had reported just a month before that Antelope Valley had “33 utility-scale renewable energy installations” in the works. The updated map above shows how much of the valley has been sectioned off for various wind and solar projects.
These are presumably the anonymous “neighbors” who were asking for previous residents to be evicted. Apparently it is not enough that our green crony capitalists are getting billions in taxpayer subsidies, or that that rate-payers are forced to buy their “renewable” energy at extra-high prices. They also need their pet politicians to steal the land for them.
First Solar is the largest recipient of Obama loan guarantees at $3.73b
From last June:
The Arizona company is set to get a guarantee for a $680 million loan for the 230 MW Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1 project, partial guarantees for $1.88 billion in loans for the 550 MW Desert Sunlight project and partial guarantees for $1.93 billion in loans for the 550 MW Topaz Solar project. Electricity from these projects will go to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison.
PG&E and SCE. It’s all to feed California’s renewables mandate, now raised to 33% by 2020. (That’s Senate Bill X1-2, signed by Governor Brown in 2011.)
California is the perfect patsy. First Solar makes its own cadmium-telluride solar panels. Another cadmium-telluride panel manufacturer, Abound Solar (recipient of $400 million in loan guarantees) just shut down production, but First Solar doesn’t have to worry how much it costs to produce intermittent solar in the Mojave. California residents are required by law to pay whatever it takes. That’s the key to successful green crony capitalism: vertical green-subsidy integration. Solyndra and Abound really should have known. They weren’t corrupt enough.
Grumman Aircraft objected that First Solar’s 2100 acre AV Solar Ranch One would interfere with its stealth radar testing, but this concern was brushed aside:
A solar energy generating plant is “the highest and best use for this particular property,” said Mel Layne, president of the Greater Antelope Valley Economic Alliance.
More important than national security and certainly more important than the property rights of a bunch of isolated “desert rats.” If only we didn’t have the lowest and the worst telling us what the “highest and the best” is, but this is why we have rights. The voluntary nature of the market insures that the benefits from each transaction are sufficient to make all parties better off. As soon as government starts subsidizing loans, forcing customers to buy inefficiently produced power, and otherwise confiscating property, there are no limits to the losses.
Wind was also big on the Antelope Valley menu, but the opposition firmed up
Perhaps that should be re-phrased. Antelope Valley was also big on the wind farmers’ menu:
“The western Antelope Valley boasts both the highest and most consistent winds in almost all of Southern California,” said Nat Parker, project manager for Element Power’s proposed Wildflower Green Energy Farm. “Between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. the winds reach their highest peak, and it falls in line with when the electrical grid has highest demand.”
County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who represents the unincorporated Antelope Valley, said this region “has the potential to become the nation’s leader in green, alternative energy innovation and production.” But he emphasized that community support is key to the success of these projects.
Element wants to use 4,000 acres of private land next to the poppy reserve for solar panels and some 50 wind turbines almost 500 feet high. Each turbine would produce enough electricity to power up to 2,000 homes, Parker said.
As for the wisdom of putting 500 foot tall wind turbines in the Antelope Valley, Antonovich’s own website has an item on the hurricane force winds that struck the area early last December. That nice peak-demand wind isn’t going to help much when half the turbines are on the ground.
Thankfully, the opposition has organized sufficiently to block the big windmills. Even Antonovich is cowed enough to put a wet finger in the air and pretend that he is all about protecting birds now, but of course he’s not done yet. Next in Antonovich’s sights: high speed rail to Las Vegas. Weather warning for the eastern Mojave: 80% chance of confiscatory Nuisance Abatement Teams. S#!+$torm guaranteed.
Mike Bentley says:
April 7, 2012 at 8:57 am
Peter Miller,
“Do I detect a whiff of hypocracy?”
Nope, MJ
Mike
Dunno, Mike — Pete may have something, there.
As in, “hypocracy: government by hypocrites”…
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the recently passed H. R. 1433, ‘‘Private Property
Rights Protection Act of 2012’’…,
Peter says: April 7, 2012 at 8:22 am
“In some ways I would think the States has a certain imunization reaction to this sort of stuff. States that act in this way decrease in prosperity while those that don’t increase.”
This is an important point. When a state destroys its economy and has over 500 government departments and services, as California does, it is free to fail abysmally and the residents are free to move. However, as we have recently seen, the Federal Gov’t is a threat to the process as we have witnessed in the recent TARP bailout of large companies.
An example of a truly failed state program is in Mass.. Known as Romneycare, it is running billions of dollars over projected costs. The costs for this have been shifted onto the federal budget, and today we have the author of this state healthcare mandate running for the nomination for the GOP. He claims it is a good program for his state, and is in fact running on its success as part of his executive accomplishments as a governor. While he claims he would repeal Obamacare, in a USA Today column he wrote that the program would be an excellent model for a Federal program. It was the blueprint used in drafting Obamacare.
(Inre: bailing out liberal states and their economy killing policies.) Here is the study which shows how a state program which has failed miserably has been shifted to the federal budget:
“The BHI report states: “Now that the law [Romneycare] has been in effect for more than five years, we can begin to assess its impact on the state of Massachusetts.”
Among the findings:
• State healthcare expenditures have risen by $414 million over the five-year period.
• Private health insurance costs have risen by $4.31 billion.
• The federal government has spent an additional $2.41 billion on Medicaid in Massachusetts.
• Medicare expenditures increased by $1.42 billion.
The total cumulative cost over the period is just over $8.5 billion.
But the state has been able to shift the majority of the costs to the federal government, which continues to absorb a significant part of the cost of healthcare reform through enhanced Medicaid payments and the Medicare program — meaning Americans outside Massachusetts are helping to pay the bills for the healthcare plan.”
Remember the Kelo decision? Basically the SCOTUS gave the right for a local government to seize private property to sell to another private concern (in this case Pfizer pharmaceutical). Pfizer wanted to build a plant there and the city saw the potential for lots of jobs and a much greater tax base. Didn’t quite turn out that way. After the dust settled following the court case and the private homes seized and bulldozed into rubble, Pfizer changed their minds. Read the whole story from the WSJ here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527513453636326.html
Now, it seems to me that there might be similar things to consider with this California caper. Where are they going to get the water necessary to maintain all those PV panels in the Mohave? Further, environmentalists are not above eating their own. This solar developer could easily be hit with a barrage of environmental lawsuits. Shucks, they might even find an endangered species or two in that area. An energy rich area in Colorado is off limits to development because of an endangered species of a damn weed! Some environmentalists even want shut down oil and gas production (and probably cattle ranching) in the Permian basin because of an endangered sub-species of an otherwise common lizard. Story here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295019/save-sand-dune-lizard-nash-keune
All it would take to derail this stupid solar project is for a few otherwise useless biologists (or “ecology studies” grads) to nose around and find a few desert turtles or toads or cacti that might be endangered (or at least put out) with the construction of acres and acres of solar panels.
I copied all the JPG’s, just in case they get “disappeared”. No problem accessing the site.
This is amazing and a total surprise. I had always thought that Mike Antonovich was devoted to smaller, less intrusive government and lower taxes.
Guess I was wrong
_Jim says:
April 7, 2012 at 7:03 am
jaymam says on April 7, 2012 at 3:13 am:
Did anyone save a copy of the map?
This is what I get:
http://www.avhidesert.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1442
AV Hi Desert forum
“I’m sorry, but you are banned. You may not post, read threads, or access the forum. Please contact your forum administrator should you have any questions.”
[the link works fine for me, you must have irritated them 🙂 . . kbmod]
Sorry mod, this is endemic to that site for some unknown reason; I get the SAME message and I have never even heard of (let alone visited) that site before …
[just been there again and it opens fine for me, and the map is there too . . bizarro non? . . kbmod]
I would think that the less well thought out blocking system being used is blocking an IP range. Perhaps everyone on Mindspring or everyone on AOL is being blocked.
What is going on in the Mojave is nothing short of a human-rights violation that should be broadcast internationally but I’ll wager MSM completely ignores it.
I moved out of California in 1995 and moved my small manufacturing business out in 2004 and feel like I got out in the nick of time – it was getting too weird, crowded, and expensive. California is (still) home to some of the brightest people in the world and the economy of California is enormous.
How long after the Obamabucks run out will this project go bankrupt? Solyndra had the California Demotratic Party listed as one of its “creditors”. How many more of the these Green things that got taxpayer $$ turned around and gave some it to liberal politicians?
For anyone who is having trouble viewing the avhidesert site, here is their big version of the usage map:
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z36/AlecRawls/Environment%20and%20climate/AntelopeSolarMap.jpg
It only labels 17 projects, not the 33 mentioned in the news report. Don’t know what accounts for the difference. The list of projects that Randle points to in the northern Mojave (Ridgcrest area) is also impressive:
http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/
Try using 2000 acres out of 19 million to drill for oil in ANWR and the greenies scream “desecration.” Pave the desert with these solar eco-sacraments and they drop to their knees in adoration. They join a long list of the very worst people who still managed to view themselves as moral paragons.
Alec Rawles has done a brilliant bit of research and reporting. The root of the evil is the mandate the use of so-called renewables. Let’s not forget that in addition to Romneycare, which mandated the purchase of state-approved healthcare plans, the cornerstone of governor Romney’s budget was the implementation of GHG emissions and the mandate to use renewables and reduce carbon emissions in power production. He also passed carbon emission standards in Ma that were 30% stricter than federal standards for automobiles. He was responsible for raising up to 860 million dollars to implement the RGGI.
Romney favors pact by states on emissions
By Scott Helman
Globe Staff / November 8, 2005
Governor Mitt Romney signaled his support yesterday for a regional agreement among Northeastern states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite opposition from power companies and other business interests that have been lobbying the administration against the plan. (Full article: 939 words)
Bill Tuttle says:
April 7, 2012 at 7:28 am
_Jim says:
April 7, 2012 at 7:03 am
Sorry mod, this is endemic to that site for some unknown reason; I get the SAME message and I have never even heard of (let alone visited) that site before …
[just been there again and it opens fine for me, and the map is there too . . bizarro non? . . kbmod]
Bizarro, oui. I’m banned, too, and it was my first trip there.
They might not be very swift and are using an IP address ban system. This is a disaster if they ban IP addresses that are from a pool of randomly assigned ones.
When they think they have banned some spamer it turns out they have burned every 100th users of a very large ISP.
Should read: “Let’s not forget that in addition to Romneycare, which mandated the purchase of state-approved healthcare plans, the cornerstone of governor Romney’s budget was the implementation of GHG emissions reductions, and the mandate to use renewables in order to reduce carbon emissions in power production.”
He is in fact a carbon tax candidate, has expressed support for worldwide carbon emissions reductions agreements, and promised $20 billion in federal spending on car technology and energy research. (Ref: No Appology by Mitt Romney, pg 262; and the Political Positions of Mitt Romney, wik.)
Another left-green hypocrisy: they love to laud primitive peoples for “using the whole animal,” yet are crusading against the processing and use of “lean meat” leftovers (connective tissue and beef scraps), labeling it “pink slime.” There is nothing wrong with it as a food and they are advocating for it to be thrown away just because the nasty name they came up with appeals to them as a way to attack a kind of meat, rather like attacking “assault rifles” or “saturday night specials” or some other category of gun.
They would like to ban all meat, and so are eager to attack any particular meat, oblivious to how they are contradicting their own proclaimed values. A “pink slime” defense here:
http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/why-you-should-learn-to-love-pink-slime/255488/
All this get so much worse. Suppose they do put up this huge wind and solar farm. Let’s look at what happens. The attached link is for BPA (Bonneville Power Administration), they handle the distribution and transmission of approximately 50 gw of power here in the NW, all sustainable (44 damns, 12 thermal, 1 nuke [power not listed for some reason, about 2.2 gw], and thousands of miles of wind farms). Look at this real time power generation chart. Note that wind goes from 0 to 6 gw (enough power for 3 Seattle’s) in a mater of minutes and then can disappear. Try to manage this network work when you gain and lose 30% or so of your capacity in just minutes. Try to keep all this equipment that likes constant level balanced. Now try to forecast and guarantee delivery. Also notice that load is well below capacity. We make way more power than we can use, we don’t have the line to ship it all. When the wind actually blows, we can meet all our power needs from just wind, and then it goes away…
http://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Today’s wsj has an article on California’s war on Suburbs. The planners hope to cram twenty or more houses per acre in pre-approved transit areas to reduce emissions. I suspect the people behind this are the same people in cahoots with the renewables industries. I wondered why all of the whining about sprawl, now I think I have my answer.
e. c. Cowan says:
“This is amazing and a total surprise. I had always thought that Mike Antonovich was devoted to smaller, less intrusive government and lower taxes.
Guess I was wrong”
These things happen when big leftists governments and big leftist crooks get together. Together they have both the carrot to bribe non-leftists and the government stick to tax, regulate, jaiil, and even shoot you to death.
There are many good people in California, but it seems the big-leftist voting blocks in the urban areas overwhelm them. Too bad, I remember when California seemed to have he best of everything and even freedom.
The people of the United States of America can never take the law in to their own hands because the law has always been in their own hands (We the People), there is no taking involved, they only need the will to use they have always possessed.
There is a great book, “The Excluded Americans” by
William Tucker that at one point goes into how
politicians legislate all sorts of exclusionary zoning
ordinances which has contributed to homelessness.
“Think Global, Tax Local”
Andrew30 says:
April 6, 2012 at 11:16 pm
I’ll see your California Senate Bill 107 and raise you a Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Now get the [snip] off my land.
Awesome first post….my thoughts exactly.
And it’s L.A. county, they are as Republican as it gets. Antonovich is a Gauleiter, not a Commissar. Same difference anyways. There is no left or right in this country, only statists and anti-statists, collectivists and individualists.
Regardless of whether they have for us the gulag or the lager in mind, I leave you with Solzhenitsyn:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
Peterhodges,
“The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
Good quote – but doesn’t that say more about the Russian people than the system itself? Americans are not Russians and never will be – thank God.
James Ard says: April 7, 2012 at 12:07 pm “Today’s wsj has an article on California’s war on Suburbs…………..
Yep. The Air Resources Board (CARB) got to lay out the targets as noted below-
http://www.scag.ca.gov/sb375/index.htm
“SB 375 (Steinberg) is California state law that became effective January 1, 2009. This new law requires California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop regional reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and prompts the creation of regional plans to reduce emissions from vehicle use throughout the state. California’s 18 Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) have been tasked with creating “Sustainable Community Strategies” (SCS). The MPOs are required to develop the SCS through integrated land use and transportation planning and demonstrate an ability to attain the proposed reduction targets by 2020 and 2035.”
Some recent activity by two SCS’s-
Sacramento area “Sustainable Communities Strategy” 3/22/2012
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/sb375/sacog_slides_032112.pdfAFTssssTEGY
Southern CA Association of Governments and their plans for SB 375
http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/sb375/scag_slides_032112.pdf
I have a feeling that the assumptions about population growth might be a bit rosy…………..
Could it be that these unfortunate Californians are some of the UN’s lost 50 to 200 million environmental migrants, missing from their failed predictions for 2010.
Seems to me the UN’s rejigged 2020 environmental migrants forecasts should include some big red dots signifying this new class of “environmental migrants”, the victims of green crony capitalism.
I can remember when the eco-fascist movements first resorted to active sabotage campaigns against development in wild places. Actions such as EMETIC taking down ski chairlift towers, and power poles at mining operations, or ELF destroying ranger stations, and burning 4 buildings and damaging 5 ski lifts at Vail ski resort worth 26 million dollars. At the time the eco radicals were viewed as hero’s for their actions within the leftist ecology momement. They were the visible face of an environmentally centered anarchist movement. Craig Rosebraugh said as much in Congressional hearings in 2002 when taking the 5th amendment, explaining that they were fighting against terrorists (the government and big corporations).
My question is why are these radical groups who openly advocated and practiced sabotage against legal commercial enterprises not taking similar action against these wind farms and solar farms and over reach of government?
The only answer that makes sense is that they are getting paid off, or the current turn of affairs of a big socialist style government developing was the goal all along. Some speculate that their extreme actions were simply done to make Green Peace, the Sierra club, Nature Conservancy and others look like reasonable middle of the road operations worthy of being at the negotiation tables.
This was directly implied when Earth First activist Judi Bari in 1994 said:
“England Earth First has been taking some necessary steps to separate above ground clandestine activities… If we are serious about our movement in the U.S. we will do the same,…it is time to leave the night work to the elves in the woods”
By creating a radical extreme movement, they made the other organizations legitimate by comparison and laid the ground work for their inclusion in the system as voices of authority and builders of agenda.
The radical eco moment is documented in the book :
Eco-terrorism: Radical Environmental And Animal Liberation Movements
By Don Liddick
As we watch the sudden slide into over reaching government in recent years, it is hard not to wonder like Solzhenitsyn, has the turning point of no return been passed?
Is there still time for a new crop of Elves in the woods with a different agenda or citizens who are not willing to sit in their apartments and quake in fear that the knock will not come to their door to turn the tide and return government to the control of the people at large and not the powerful and connected?
I hope this can be accomplished without turmoil, but in my life time I have never heard so many average people voice their concern so vigerously at one time about the state of the Union, and openly contemplate if the public will quietly submit to this creeping power grab or if they will draw a line in the sand and say “no more!”
Larry