By Robert Bradley Jr.
“There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable-energy development grows in regional and rural Australia…. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanized communities into action.”
“I’m dismayed by the indifference of Green activists to the fate of the Greater Glider and other native wildlife that is losing its natural habitat in the rush for renewables,” Nick Cater recently posted. He continued with the specifics:
The vast hectares of native forest being destroyed to install wind turbines along the Great Dividing range is well documented in environmental impact statements for projects like the Upper Burdekin (Gawara Baya) Wind Farm in Far North Queensland.
Here’s an extract from the approval for the project given by Tanya Plibersek in April:
“To avoid and mitigate harm to protected matters, the Approval Holder must not clear more than:
“a) 605.3 ha of Sharman’s Rock Wallaby Habitat,
“b) 581 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Habitat, including:
“i) no more than 331 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Denning Habitat, and
“ii) no more than 250 ha of Greater Glider (northern) Foraging Habitat,
“c) 581 ha of Masked Owl (northern) Habitat,
“d) 614 ha of Koala habitat,
“e) 616 ha of Red Goshawk Habitat, including:
“i) no more than 331 ha of Red Goshawk Breeding Habitat, and
“ii) no more than 285 ha of Red Goshawk Foraging Habitat,
“f) 614 ha of Grey-headed Flying-Fox Foraging Habitat,
“g) 614 ha of Spectacled Flying-Fox Foraging Habitat
“h) 546 ha of Greater Large-eared Horseshoe Bat Roosting Habitat,
“i) 545 ha of Bare-rumped Sheathtail Bat Habitat,
“j) 614 ha of White-throated Needletail Habitat,
“k) 614 ha of Fork-tailed Swift Habitat, and
“l) 0 ha of occupied Magnificent Brood Frog Habitat”
These are vulnerable and endangered native species. Should the developers be allowed to destroy a single hectare of their precious habitat?
Cater added in “Collateral Damage” at his Substack site, Reality Bites with the subtitle “Destroying Greater Glider habitat is ok if you’re trying to save the planet”
The greater glider is in pole position to win the Marsupial of the Year contest. Australia’s largest gliding possum has pushed the much-fancied koala into second place in the latest rankings. Fittingly, the winner of the battle between creatures struggling for survival will be announced next week on Channel Ten’s The Project, a show that has been hovering on the brink of extinction for some time.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has been drumming up support for the panda-eyed eucalypt munchers with their teddy bear ears. “If smooth gliding, extra fluffy fur and smelly conversations are your thing, vote for the Greater Glider!” It urges on its website. It claims the Greater Glider population has halved in the last 20 years because of bushfires and logging.
This makes it odd, to say the least, that ACF is not raising a stink about Lotus Creek, where 310 hectares of old-growth forest are about to be bulldozed to make room for wind turbines.
The Lotus Creek Wind Farm is 100 per cent funded by the Queensland Government and is supported by the Commonwealth. The environmental cost of the project in the Connors Range adjacent to the Glencoe State Forest is well documented. Researchers counted 138 greater gliders during their environmental assessment. The old-growth trees provide hollow dens for the creatures to rest during the day. The area offers a rich habitat for Koalas and Squatter pigeons and is a refuge for the Powerful Owl and White-Throated Needletail, all classified as vulnerable.
The culpability is at the top of government.
An ecological assessment report listing five Matters of National Environmental Significance under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was placed on Tanya Plibersek’s desk shortly after she became Environment Minister in 2022. It gave Plibersek strong grounds to block the project as her Coalition predecessor, Sussan Ley, had done. Yet Plibersek overturned Ley’s decision and sanctioned the destruction of remnant bushland on the Great Dividing Range that was virtually untouched by farming.
The ACF has not raised an eyebrow about the Lotus Creek atrocity. Neither has it lodged an objection to Twiggy Forrest’s Upper Burdekin (Gawara Baya ) wind turbine development that received Plibersek’s rubber stamp in June. Ditto the French giant Neoen’s plans for Mount Hopeful 65 km west of Gladstone, approved by Plibersek in April, and the Boulder Creek Wind Farm she approved in June 2022, in which the Queensland State Government has a 50 per cent stake.
Cater continues:
Wind turbine developments also threaten to destroy greater glider and koala habitat at Mount Fox north of Ingham, Moah Creek and Boulder Creek to the west of Rockhampton. The Queensland government has approved all three, and Plibersek’s signature is regarded as little more than a formality.
The gulf between Plibersek’s actions and words is wide enough to be viewed from outer space. On Friday, Plibersek announced the Government would co-host the Global Nature Positive Summit next month in Gadigal Country, or Sydney as it was once known. “Australia can be a global leader in protecting and restoring nature and stopping biodiversity loss,” she said.
The “environmentalist” movement is at fault.
Yet our nature-positive Environment Minster has sanctioned the destruction of at least 1260 hectares of Greater Glider habit in old-growth forests in Queensland while supine environmental bodies like the ACF, Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society urge the Government to roll out renewables faster.
The three activist organisations, with a combined income of more than $58 million at their disposal last year, are staunch advocates of renewable energy and are strongly opposed to nuclear. None has been prepared to question the cumulative environmental damage of land-hungry wind, solar and pumped hydro schemes. They have shown little compassion for scores of rural communities with uglification forced upon them by pious city-based bureaucrats drawing lines on maps.
Continuing,
A decree by the European Union to ban imports of beef contaminated by de-forestation has gifted the laptop activists another chance to beat up on regional Australia.
The ACF is running a slippery campaign of moral equivalence to portray tightly regulated rotational clearance of woody growth on well-managed Australian farms with illegal tree-felling by cattle ranchers in the Amazon Basin.
The activists want to change the definition of “old-growth” to anything older than 15 years. If beef farmers become collateral damage in the EU’s virtue-signalling campaign, so be it. To them, anything that hastens the glorious vegan revolution must be good.
The Save Our Big Backyard campaign raises the green left to new level of unsteady, bare-faced hypocrisy. There is ample evidence to show that the biggest threat to the sanctity of our native vegetation and wildlife comes from wind and solar farmers, not the cattle industry. Vast hectares of land that have survived more than 200 years of settlement farming are being sacrificed for the sake of the planet.
Cater asks, what will Australia’s future citizens and government officials think about the anti-CO2 crusade in light of its collateral damage?
Future generations will look back at these people with disdain. They will gaze at scarred hillsides where dynamite was used to build access roads and clear the ground for vast concrete pads as big as a football field to erect giant wind turbines which will have long-since been removed. They will wonder how on earth an affluent, sophisticated and environmentally conscious nation could sanction such things.
Future anthropologists will write textbooks about the religious fervour that led early-21st-century humans to believe they could harvest energy directly from the wind and the sun. They will be puzzled as to why they didn’t adopt nuclear technology, just as cultural historians of Mesoamerica are curious why the Aztecs never discovered the wheel.
There are signs that we may be reaching peak madness as opposition to cowboy renewable energy developers grows in regional and rural Australia, and people in the city begin to latch on. The backlash is particularly noticeable in Queensland, where the Labor government appears to have given up hope of retaining any seat north of Sandgate. Anger about the rampant spread of solar, wind and transmission development proposals has galvanised communities into action. Anti-renewable billboards funded by small donations have begun to appear along the Bruce Highway south of Gympie….
Final Comment
Nick Cater speaks truth to wind power on ecological grounds. His persistence documents the “it’s hard being green” quandary of the modern environmental movement, which has made a pact with the devil in its one-dimensional crusade. Will real environmentalists please stand up?
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Note that one hectare is almost 2.5 acres. That list is a lot of land.
I wonder if the land areas listed overlap. Or if the total area for clearing should be a simple sum.
If it’s a sum, that’s a hell of a lot of land.
How many barrier reefs is that? Or is the measure blue whales in Sydney harbour?
A visual of the areas being DESTROYED by proposed wind factories.
Proposed renewable energy projects across Queensland. (youtube.com)
Totally disgusting
So many movements, in effect, are meant to extract the greatest amount of money from people in the shortest period of time. When the amount of money flows to a trickle, then the movement stops.
Never believe what leftists say.
Look at what they do or don’t do.
Their chief weapon is not surprise.
It’s HYPOCRISY.
Never understood with all the evidence of adverse effects on Birds that the RSPB in the UK backs Wind Farms over the lives of Birds.
With onshore turbine pushback the natural reaction is offshoring wind turbines and you can see the massive costs involved with that here-
(198) Wind Turbines: Are They Really The Answer? – YouTube
We’re certainly clever capable little beggars at tackling the untried by building upon existing knowledge and tech. One thing to note is how the project proceeds as an overall concept and as it does so it places new demands on specifics most notably a jump to 75M long turbine blades that haven’t been tried before and note how the process calls up 107M long blades for further projects at the end.
You can certainly appreciate why you’d want to get more bang for buck out of each individual generator and its costly mount and in that regard although you can engineer and briefly road test longer blades they’re up against the extreme elements and very limited testing periods. Hence recent very early blade failures like Nantucket must really put the wind up the industry. Then there’s those lovely nameplate house numbers of power but no mention of Dunkelflautes.
Are the 75 metre blades being marketed as “safe and effective” yet?
Well they’re all supposed to last 20-25 years but we have some figures on capital cost per kW in Aussie dollars with offshore wind approaching nukes assuming the blades last that long-
Offshore wind zones: Ambitions in disarray as key players walk (afr.com)
With nuclear power stations lasting 50-60 years replacing well transmissioned existing coal power stations you can see why Bowen and Co are dreaming with offshore wind unless they deliberately mortgage power consumers and/or taxpayers up to their necks.
story tip
Well blow me down if it isn’t 20MW Typhoon Tessie with 128M long blades messing with the microclimate-
Switched on for the first time the largest wind turbine in history: It has caused an unexpected effect (eldiario24.com)
Perish the thought that South Australia’s first onshore 35MW wind factory would affect the microclimate in any way-
Starfish Hill Wind Farm – Wikipedia
So those early onshore blades are less than 32M long and aside from the early burn up one not all of them were rotating in the wind when I was past there a week ago and they were ones with funny tips. Anyway with that $65 million and the RBA inflation calculator that works out at around $3250AUD currently per kW investment compared to the AFR article’s CSIRO current Gencost report of $5550/kW anchored offshore $7500 for floating offshore and $8500 for big nukes. Now apart from the fact nukes capital cost can be amortised over up to 3 times the life of wind turbines wind’s output is also a third of its nameplate and it’s messing badly with the environment.
Kermit The Frog: It ain’t easy being green.
But it is easy being a Magnificent Brood Frog
Your habitat is 100% protected
The fact that the only or best way to stop the insanity of “green” energy is an equal insanity of “protecting endangered species” says so much about the state or our mental health as a society. NEITHER make any sense whatsoever for the happiness and well-being of humanity.
Green energy is and will undermine our ability to generate enough energy to support our happiness and well-being because it is disastrously un-economic.
Species come and go…sometimes due to changes in habitat, sometimes due to being out competed by other species. Mankind CANNOT and SHOULD NOT try to halt the change in the species that exist or their numbers, unless doing so has an obvious and direct effect on our happiness and well-being. The fact that thousands of species have come-and-gone, many of vital importance to humanity at the time and some due directly to human predation, since homo erectus walked the earth and yet here we are, more numerous and prosperous than ever gives the lie that mankind must “save endangered species.” Nonsense.
Counting down to the usual suspects running false equivalence between all this ecological damage and the paltry amount of land required for mineral fuels.
I am in favor of responsible logging but I wouldn’t remove one tree for wind or solar farms. To hell with wind and solar.
Areas that were once true areas of Australian wildlife, being DESTROYED on the altar of the fake climate religion.
Hopefully the LNP will get elected in Queensland, and put an end to this travesty, but just saying NO !!
The LNP become the protector of the environment, the Greens and Labor, the destroyer..
Need a seven foot roo to protect these environments.
And Zombie to boot…what a Rippah… can’t wait
Michael Beihn is looking old (so am I) though it has been 40 years since Terminator