Rural and coastal little guys delay and block massive ‘green’ energy projects
Paul Driessen
Environmentalists insist they love “little guys.” At least in the abstract, until those folks get in the way, raise inconvenient questions, or try to block “renewable energy” projects intended to “save the planet” from “manmade climate cataclysms.”
Then the little folks learn the environmentalists are really working with (and for) Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Utilities, Big Finance, powerful politicians and crony bureaucrats – the Climate Industrial Complex. Stand in its way, and farm families, small rural communities and even Native American groups can face protracted, expensive battles. But they often emerge victorious.
Energy analyst and journalist Robert Bryce reports that these little guys have rejected or restricted 735 US wind and solar projects since 2015, including 58 solar and 35 wind proposals so far this year. Transmission line, grid-scale battery and other plans also face growing resistance.
Rural Americas don’t want these huge installations destroying traditional ways of life, hurting property values, raising electricity rates, wrecking vital croplands and habitats, ruining scenic vistas, killing birds, bats and other wildlife – and creating serious fire and toxic gas risks from lithium-ion electricity storage batteries.
They don’t want their countryside dotted with huge landfills, piled high with billions of tons of broken, storm-destroyed and obsolete solar panels, wind turbine blades and other renewables trash.
The number and scale of many proposed projects is daunting – and the Complex’s dream of “transitioning” the entire United States from fossil fuels to an all-electric energy, transportation and industrial system would require vastly more.
Before being scaled back in a failed effort to reduce local and state opposition, the Lava Ridge Wind Project would have installed 400 huge turbines on some 200,000 acres of federal land in Idaho. That’s 310 square miles; 5.5 times Washington, DC. Most of its output would go to California, which already imports nearly one-third of its electricity.
The Koshkonong solar project near Christiana, WI would cover 6,400 acres (10 sq mi) and put a 667-MWh battery storage system near a local elementary school.
The Biden-Harris plan for 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy translates into 2,500 12-megawatt turbines rising 850 feet above the waves. But all those turbines wouldn’t provide enough electricity (31,541 MW) to power New York State on a hot summer day, if the wind is blowing.
The state’s plan to spend $2 billion for 24,000 MWh of backup batteries for windless/sunless days would provide enough electricity to run the state for barely 45 minutes! Sufficient batteries would cost trillions.
Each offshore blade is 350 feet long and 140,000 pounds; 2,5000 turbines would mean almost 500 miles of blades weighing 1,050,000,000 pounds! Imagine cleanup and landfill costs after a major hurricane.
And yet a 2020 Princeton University report called for massively expanding US wind and solar capacity, to fight climate change and rebuild America.
However, as Mr. Bryce points out, those plans would require solar projects blanketing an area the size of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut combined – plus wind installations sprawling across lands equal to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee!
That’s without factoring in wind and solar power needed to charge grid-scale backup batteries to store enough electricity to power America for even a day or week of windless, sunless days.
Other projects are equally enormous, expensive and fanciful.
Summit Carbon Solutions wants to build a pipeline to carry carbon dioxide from 57 ethanol plants in five states – and inject the CO2 into geologic formations beneath North Dakota. Summit can provide no guarantees that the pressurized gas will stay in the ground, and not erupt suddenly and violently, killing wildlife and people by rapidly replacing breathable air – as a natural CO2 reservoir did at Cameroon’s Lake Nyos in 1986.
The cumulative impacts of all these wind, solar, battery, transmission line and other projects would be incalculable – on lands, wildlife, families, budgets and human health.
Adding to the cost, construction and raw material requirements, home, neighborhood and regional grids would have to be expanded and upgraded to handle the ballooning electricity demands, and the surges and plummets associated with unpredictable, weather-dependent wind and solar power.
All this is irrelevant to Climate Industrial Complex members, who want to virtue-signal and extol the “pivotal role” they are playing in driving America’s “renewable energy transformation,” meeting arbitrary greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and preventing “climate catastrophes.”
Property rights advocate Tom DeWeese says concerned citizens can fight back by asking tough questions about these policies and projects. For example:
* What benefits has our community gotten from the massive solar and wind farms we already have? From the taxpayer subsidies and rate hikes we already have to pay? What benefits will we receive from the huge new projects you are promoting now?
* Why are you trying to end local land use controls, use eminent domain to take our property, and destroy small local and minority businesses to build these enormous projects?
* How will ruining our wild and agricultural areas, killing wildlife and reducing our living standards reduce global greenhouse and “save the planet,” if China and India alone emit 38% of the world’s greenhouse gases (versus 11% by the USA) and are building new coal-fired generating plants every week?
Proud, principled, vocal resistance is essential, if citizens are to defend their jobs, lands, health, living standards and freedoms.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.
This article originally appeared in the Washington Times online (10/22/24) and print (10/23/24) editions.
https://www.WashingtonTimes.com/news/2024/oct/22/environmentalists-detest-little-guys-who-get-in-th
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wind and solar are subsidy mining operations, typical rent seeking by the well connected.
It’s not just the little guys who rankle the environmentalists. It’s anyone that points out the pitfalls and shortcomings of their theories and proposals. Just check back at the article from a couple of days ago that lists the questions that the greens refuse to or can’t answer; it provides the crucial reasons that these guys lack credibility. Their mantra is to do as we do or say and never mind if there’s any rationale or practicality behind them
Having followed the Tom DeWeese link and reading “how to ask the tough questions” I was stunned to see just how thoroughly they’re planning to destroy our lives: moving us into buildings reminiscent of communist blocks from the 50s, crowding us out of public transportation, getting rid of room for cars to operate on the road (already well under way in Boston, a town for few bicycles), needing new gov’t controlled appliances, etc, etc.
It’s not that they want a cap on our lifestyles as they are at present. No, they want to scrap everything we know, take everything we own, and give us post-war Dresden instead.
Who are these monsters/imbeciles?
I don’t think it is just the ‘little guys’ objecting ever more effectively to manifest renewables environmental devastation.
Renewables have two insurmountable and increasingly self evident grid deficiencies.
So as renewables increase, they suffer the triple whammy of environmental, grid backup, and grid instability costs. Will not end well.
And, the climate alarm that prompted the renewables ‘solution’ is itself unraveling:
Hopefully, the AI Revolution will force the High Tech Nazis to abandon NutZero, and fully embrace Gen4 nuclear to fill their power requirements! That’ll put the Green’s panties in a bunch!
He who controls the language controls AI.
If opposition is silenced and censored, AI will not know the other points of view that need to be considered.
The governor of Wokeachusetts is trying to push a law to prevent local communities from restricting wind and solar farms. Not sure of the current status of the proposed law. Tried googling it but couldn’t find it. Maybe someone here knows about this.
JZ did not know this, so was curious as a retired lawyer and did some quick research. The battle is about local zoning ordinances versus state renewable (and other) mandates (Googlefu will take you there). So far MI, CN, NY, OR, and MN have passed such local zoning ordinance override laws. RI has a partial related only to low income housing. MA as yet has nothing. Data was as of 1/24.
good lipids opposing that.
The ‘Greens’ are environmental terrorists.
The great question for the Biden Harris regime and GangGreen is are these pesky peons to be denoted as “domestic terrorists,” “garbage” or “deplorables?” Probably all of the above!
Anyone else notice that whatever created the post image has a weird way of drawing wind turbines !
Artificial Stupidity does that
Wind turbines are ‘weird’ and so the depiction is meaningful.
The front entrance to the “house” looks a little shaky and the smoking thing behind and left looks like a failed rocket launch.
Not to mention seagulls standing in a farm field while people are walking toward them and raptors are flying overhead.
Obviously the smoke from the house is what caused that massive cloud of CO2 in the sky.
Harold the Old Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Everyone
RE: C02 Does Not Cause Warming Air.
Shown in the graphic (See below) are plots of temperatures in Death Valley
from 1922 to 2001. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was 303 ppmv
(i.e., 0.595 g/cu. m.), and by 2001 it had increased to 371 ppmv
(i.e., 729 g/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in the temperature of the dry desert air.
Thus, on the basis of the empirical temperature data, I have concluded that C02
does not cause warming of global air. The reason is quite simple: there is too little CO2 in the air.
At the MLO in Hawaii. the concentration of CO2 is 422 ppmv in dry air. One cubic meter of this air contains 0.829 g of C02 and has a mass of 1.29 kg at STP. This small amount of CO2 can heat up such a large mass of air by only
a very small amount if at all.
I have further concluded that the claim by the IPCC since 1988 that CO2 causes global warming is a deliberate fabrication and lie. The purpose of this lie is to provide the UN the justification of the distribution, via the UNFCCC and the UN COP, of the donor funds from the rich countries to the poor countries to help them cope with global warming and climate change. The amount of the funds is now many billions of dollars.
Hopefully, this fraud can not go on forever.
“UN the justification of the distribution, via the UNFCCC and the UN COP, of the donor funds from the rich countries to the poor countries”
Sorry Harold, this is somewhat incorrect.
The donor funds DO NOT go to poor countries…
… they go to the dictators of those countries, and bureaucrats in the chain to those dictators.
Many people in that chain are part of the UN, or aiming to end up in the UN.
It is a sort of UN self-funding mechanism.
Unfortunately, your are right. The IPCC has 432 employs and its headquarters is in super safe Geneva, Switzerland. I couldn’t quite figure out the budget because it was in Swiss francs. There is sheet that list all the donor countries and the amounts of their donations. Even some of the poor donate small amounts of funds.
The UNFCC has over 1,400 employs. The budget sheets were many and very complex. I did find out that COP28 had a promised budget of 58 billion dollars.
I think I’ll go to X and tell Trump to terminate donations to these UN orgs.
BTW: I forgot to mention the source of the Death Valley graphic which is:
http://www.John-Daly.com. If everyone learned of this site, all this global warming and climate change nonsense would vanish overnight.
“I think I’ll go to X and tell Trump to terminate donations to these UN orgs.”
I would ask him instead if telling him.
Nope! I am 80 years old and senior to him, so I’m going tell him that the US will save millions. I recall he said that climate change is a fraud.
Elon’s the guy to mention it to,
… he seems to be the one probably helping to eliminate the WASTE of government money.
Elon Musk was asked the other day about how much he thought he could save out of the U.S. budget and Musk replied that he thought he could save two TRILLION dollars.
Well, of course, the Left went nuts upon hearing this and started in with the ridicule and criticisms, but I saw an interview this morning with Elon’s mother and his mother said she thought her son was underestimating the amount of money he could save the U.S. taxpayers. 🙂
Elon’s mother also said she has changed her political party from Democrat to Republican.
Very nice Paul. The sorry part of this is that if renewable energy were made to pay their own way and not get paid for energy the didn’t sell and not be able to force their product on the rest of us they would be gone tomorrow.
From the article: “Other projects are equally enormous, expensive and fanciful.”
“Fanciful” is the proper description for all this Net Zero insanity.
Some people in my neck of the woods are pushing back against a Windmill Farm in Oklahoma.
The windmill company says their first windmill will be 900 feet tall.
https://www.fox23.com/news/mcintosh-county-residents-come-together-to-try-to-stop-wind-turbine-project/article_6f36e042-90ec-11ef-9c47-3beaac4f3cd1.html
“Dawn Stacy, another livestock owner in the community, has been very outspoken against the wind turbine project and wants to make sure everyone in the community understands what the project will mean for McIntosh County.
“It’s a massive project and I was just concerned that I didn’t know if the residents understood what that would mean to their community in the long term,” said Stacy.
Many who attended the meeting at the church are hoping to hire a lawyer who will help them create a petition that will allow them to pause the project for a year to allow them to do more research.
Stacy said she and other residents are “trying to band together and say, ‘Hey we care about Oklahoma’ and we don’t our land, our farms, our wild life, our beautiful natural wonders—Oklahoma is beautiful and we don’t want them to ruin it.”
County Commissioner Bobby Ziegler said they will discuss the project at their regular Monday meeting at 8am at the Eufaula courthouse.
end excerpt
To meet the transition goals, we will run out of copper in 4 years. What then?
I know a chap who can supply you with copper at a good price – how much do you want? 🙂