By Craig Rucker
For decades environmentalists raised questionable, but often successful, objections to block mines, pipelines, nuclear power, and oil and gas operations.
Now, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet might say, they are “hoisted by their own petards,” referring to a small explosive device used in siege warfare.
In a bit of irony, the very legal and regulatory obstacles the Greens erected and deployed against fossil fuel companies they were opposed to are now coming back full circle to explode in their faces, blocking and hindering their beloved solar and wind projects. Even more poetically just, it has often been the “little guys” environmentalists have insisted they care so deeply about who are the ones wielding the weapons.
Energy expert and journalist Robert Bryce notes that farming families, small rural communities and Native American Tribes have rejected or restricted 35 wind and 58 solar projects this year, through September. Since 2015, these “little guys” have stymied a whopping 735 “renewable energy” projects across the USA.
Rural and coastal communities know those installations will be in their backyards. They apparently don’t want them impacting croplands and habitats, ruining scenic vistas, pummeling property values, killing birds and other wildlife – and creating major fire and toxic gas risks from lithium-ion electricity storage batteries.
Who could blame them? The bad news for the Greens is these locals are challenging their beloved “climate-friendly” projects, using the environmentalists’ own legal roadmaps … and winning.
In Idaho, local preservationists opposed the Lava Ridge Wind Project, which would install hundreds of 700-foot-tall turbines within eyeshot of the Minidoka National Historic Site, where a World War II Japanese internment camp was located. They have been joined by local officials, the Idaho legislature, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and both US senators in demanding that the US Bureau of Land Management scrap the project.
The unprecedented defiance convinced a nearby county to implement a moratorium on wind and solar farms the Biden-Harris Administration wanted as part of its climate agenda.
In next-door Oregon, Native Americans filed lawsuits to challenge a deepwater offshore wind project – which arguably makes no energy, economic, engineering or environmental sense. Even liberal Governor Tina Kotek has now changed her position on offshore wind, and an October auction was postponed because no company was interested in bidding.
In California, local officials and landowners oppose the proposed 320-MW Seguro battery energy storage facility, after a series of battery fires in EVs and at battery factories and energy storage facilities.
Heading east, after a decade-long legal battle, Oklahoma’s Osage Nation forced wind energy developers to tear down and remove dozens of turbines, because they had not obtained leases or permits to install the turbines and power lines on Native lands beforehand.
In Wisconsin, the Engelstad family and other locals are battling the Koshkonong solar project near Christiana, Wisconsin. It would blanket 6,400 acres (10 sq mi) of prime agricultural land and put a 667-MWh battery storage system hundreds of feet from an elementary school.
Along the Atlantic coast, multiple groups have helped to cancel the Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects (NJ), put Atlantic Shores North and South (NJ) under pressure, make Skipjack Wind (MD) less promising, and subjected Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and other offshore wind projects to litigation over harm to endangered whales.
Multi-hundred-mile transmission lines – including the Grain Belt Express (Kansas-Missouri-Illinois-Indiana) and Piedmont Reliability (Pennsylvania-Maryland-Virginia) – also face intense pushback.
The list of delayed, cancelled or stymied projects goes on and on.
Local residents, developers, regulators, permitting agencies and insurers are rightly concerned about the impacts of so-called “green” energy. It is they who must consider its major issues that have received scant scrutiny in the past. They must address questions such as what to do with the thousands of solar panels or hundreds of wind turbines get worn out after 20 years … or maybe destroyed by hail, tornados or hurricanes. It is they who must figure out who pays for dismantling, removing and disposing the trash, and in whose backyard do those billions of pounds of trash go.
Case in point, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird recently sued a waste disposal company for failing to cut up, transport, recycle and otherwise properly dispose of 1,300 broken and decommissioned wind turbine blades, which the company simply left piled up at multiple locations across the state.
As green ventures collapse, there’s a reckoning environmentalists must come to grips with – they no longer have the public trust. They will have to make their case to state and local officials who, to quote Shakespeare, will determine whether green energy projects are “to be, or not to be.” This may become much more difficult to do.
This article originally appeared at NewsMax
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Be careful what laws or regulations one approves, as they might be applied to you.
Wait!! This doesn’t mean that no one’s above the law, does it!? That can’t be right!
I thought only climate “deniers” were subject to prosecution and persecution! What’s the statute of limitations on conspiracy, again?
There is much more than just recycling that ‘Big Green Renewables’’ has not been charged for.
(6) The cost of constraint payments.
(7) The cost of transmission from wind farm to where its needed.
(8) The cost of de-commissioning at end of life.
[very annoying, WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the HTML ‘start’ tag]
You forgot bats and insects. And weather! Don’t tell me that extracting energy from the wind and the Sun has no weather impacts!
Not a moment’s thought has been given to the detrimental effects of windmills and solar panels on ecosystems. Or the weather.
It cheers me up to see that “God’s ear” was available and paying attention when many of us asked that the “renewables” scam be thwarted. Now on to the religion of the climate cultists and exposing that nonsense to the light.
schadenfreude at it’s finest!
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Everyone!
RE: Carbon Dioxide Does Not Cause Warming OF Air!
Shown in the graphic (See below) are plots of the temperatures in Death Valley from
1922 to 2001. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 was 303 ppmv (i.e., 0.595 g/cu. m.
of air) and by 2001, it had increased to 371 ppmv (i.e., 0.729 g/cu. m. of air), but
there was no corresponding increase in the temperature of the dry desert air.
On the basis of the empirical data from this arid field site, I have concluded that CO2
does not cause any warming of air, and therefore can not be the cause of any global warming. The reason is quite simple: There is too little CO2 in the air.
In air at 70 deg. F and with a RH of 70%, the concentration of H2O is14,780 ppmv.
One cubic meter of this air has 14.3 g of H20 but only 0.78 g of CO2. To the first approximation and all things being equal H2O is about 95% of the greenhouse effect.
We really do not have to worry about the minor greenhouse gas CO2, because it can not cause global warming.
NB: The graphic of the Death Valley temperature plots was obtained from the
late John Daly’s website: “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” available at:
http://www.John-Daly.com. Click on the tab “Station Temperature Data” at the end
of site to access the temperature graphics of many weather stations in many locations around the world.
I forgot to add the graphic. Here it is:
What comes around goes around.
It’s becoming obvious that the climate changers are trashing the environment with their extremely dilute fickles-
Ecology experts calling for a halt to large scale renewable projects
Their problem now is offshore wind costs as much as proven large scale nukes and they’ve already breached the limits of reliable engineering with blade size.
I’m surprised this one snuck under the guard of the usual suspects but perhaps even the weather worriers are struggling to control the message and swimming against the tide-
New insights from Shakespeare’s England reveal striking parallels to contemporary climate change
Danish and Australian retirement funds; the Victorian State and Australian Federal governments are the proponents of a 2.2GW wind farm off the coast of Victoria.
https://getinvolved.starofthesouth.com.au/sots/offshore-wind/
The 586km^2 wind farm, if built, will sit off the Gippsland coast which is a highly productive dairy and farming region in Australia.
Why would any government want to accept the risk of 150 onshore wind stillers reducing the productivity of this verity special region of the country to enable wealthy Danish and Australia retirees rob from young Australian consumers?
Because they don’t give a rats rump about the “little people”, the country rubes, the deplorables, etc. etc. in the USA the coastal greens feel the same way about those living in what they dismissively refer to as “flyover country.”
Is it no wonder that suddenly those in power want to streamline regulations and approvals? Regulations should be simplified, but not under the Biden-Harris administration. Also Executive Orders should not be used to kill projects that have made it thru the regulatory maze- Keystone pipeline anyone ?These EOs make a joke of the approval process.
What type of chemist are you? Why didn’t the chemists and physicists issue about 30 years ago a joint press release stating that the greenhouse gas CO2 does not cause warming of air and that water is the main greenhouse gas?
BTW: What is your assessment of my comment above? Did I get everything right?
The Green Movement has always been fundamentally a Marxist powergrab. The environment was merely a pretext.
This will be a tell all looking at the big picture for Oz-
Veteran journalist Chris Uhlmann to lift lid on ‘real cost of net zero’ in new Sky News Australia documentary next month | Sky News Australia
You can’t blame the early adopters for piling on the fantasy and getting amongst the gravy but Oz is well into the hard yards of the climate changer’s fallacy of composition now and slim pickings with the level of fickles penetration.
This is a mixed bag for me. I’m glad they have helped stop wind and solar that is a good thing, wind and solar don’t work. Fossil fuel and nukes do work and they are being blocked by some of these same people. I don’t know what the answer is but people who block projects that do work shouldn’t have access to them.
It’s not only that these projects have negative effects on the landscapes; it’s the fact that they have questionable track records for reliability and costs to the consumer. People want affordable consistent energy sources, and never mind these tiresome claims that renewables are the only way we can save the planet, civilization and everything in between.
In Hamlet it is “hoist…,” as the two-syllable modern past tense spoils the scansion.
The small explosive device itself is a third or fourth order definition of the word, and a double pun worthy of Shakespeare. It is a medievel French word for passing gas. Hamlet’s quip refers to engineers being violently blown up — literally skyward — by a bomb of their own devising.
But the saying isn’t quite appropriate to the cases listed in this piece. For example, rather than being blown up, the wind turbine developers (Italian company, with investment from EU national pension plans) in the Osage Nation case have successfully kept the case from being decided for near a decade, and even now it is still on appeal. The case should have been taken up by the federal government before now, since the Bureau of Interior rulings, in favor of the Osage, were defied by the Italian group, and there may be strong evidence of bribery against state and federal officials. There should be investigation into severl frauds committed by company officials, sometimes with U.S. federal government support. In addition to trespass, the original developers violated owners’ mineral rights. Meanwhile, the turbines are still turning, the operators are still rewarded with subsidized, overpriced and preferred compensation for every Watt generated (and some not generated) from the grid operators – and passed on to customers across five states. Abuse of the rights of native peoples should be prosecuted in the EU, as well, yet other than Bryce, I find little coverage of any of these scandals.
Perhaps the criminals in this case will eventually come to justice, but it seems unlikely. Perhaps the Osage will get the compensation they deserve, but it won’t be for some time yet. Perhaps the responsible EU and US officials will be exposed in a public scandal, but despite the rotten smell, don’t hold your breath.
“For decades environmentalists raised questionable, but often successful, objections to block mines, pipelines, nuclear power, and oil and gas operations”
Nuclear Power Blocked! When the history of this whole fiasco is written, the blocking of safe, clean reliable nuclear power will be the headline. Ignorant fools.
The sub-head will be the complete failure of “higher education” to counter the flat-earth-like policies of the recent decades.
Wind farms haven’t been held to the same standards as oil companies if an eagle is killed. Or migratory birds for that matter.