The wind and solar ‘industries’ are clear-felling ancient forests, bulldozing whole mountains, stripping the last remnants of fragile vegetation from deserts, killing endangered whales, eagles, bats and more, turning productive farmland into industrial wastelands and are being paid handsomely to do so by the governments you elect. Seems legit, right?
As Bonner Cohan outlines below, the environmental destruction being wreaked to make way for endless seas of solar panels and thousands of giant industrial wind turbines – neither of which will ever generate power on demand – makes absolutely no sense, at all.
Thousands of Joshua Trees set to fall victim to Green-Energy transition
DC Journal
Bonner Cohan
28 June 2024
More than 3,500 majestic Joshua trees in California’s Mojave Desert are being shredded onsite to make way for thousands of solar panels under a plan approved by California and Kern County officials.
The sprawling solar project will produce intermittent energy on 2,300 acres of land near the small towns of Boron and Desert Lake.
It is not clear whether any of the electricity produced at the solar site will serve some nearby communities. But the project’s developer, California-based Avantus, says contracts have been signed to deliver some of the power to Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Central Coast Community Energy, both are nonprofits that provide green energy to homes in more affluent coastal communities, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Even though many of the trees are estimated to be between 100 and 200 years old, government approval of the solar project in 2021 predated a state decision to protect the Joshua tree under the California Endangered Species Act and last year’s enactment by the legislature of the Joshua Tree Conservation Act, which bans unpermitted killing of the trees. As a result, the targeted trees are defenseless.
The company provides no evidence for its claim that Joshua trees “are being threatened by climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.” [Note to Ed: How carbon dioxide gas – essential for all plants and all life on Earth – threatens any vegetation is beyond comprehension]
In addition to the loss of the Joshua trees, which share the same habitat as the threatened desert tortoise, residents will have to contend with massive amounts of dust that will be kicked up during the project’s construction.
“Let’s destroy the environment to save the environment. That seems to be the mentality,” Deric English, a Boron Junior-Senior High School teacher, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s hard to comprehend.”
Two recognized subspecies of Joshua trees are native to the Mojave Desert, where they can be found at elevations of 2,000 to 6,000 feet. The trees enjoy varying degrees of protection in the jurisdictions they inhabit, but those protections can be undermined if a favored project, such as a solar plantation, comes along.
A similar fate could befall the Mojave Desert tortoise. In April, in a 4-0 decision, the California Fish and Game Commission voted to list the Mojave Desert tortoise as endangered under the Golden State’s Endangered Species Act. The creature has been listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act since 1990. Even though the tortoise is California’s state reptile, it is being pushed to the brink by various factors, including vehicle strikes, wildfires, raven predation, illegal marijuana growth, and massive solar farm development.
While desert tortoises and Joshua trees are at risk from giant solar arrays on the ground, up in the air, taxpayer-subsidized wind turbines pose a real threat to supposedly protected bald and golden eagles.
In February, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service updated its rule for an “incidental take” under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
“In addition to continuing to authorize specific permits, we created general permits for certain activities under prescribed conditions, including qualifying wind energy projects, power line infrastructure, activities that may disturb breeding bald eagles, and bald eagle nest take,” the FWS states.
In other words, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act is a nice law, but, under certain conditions, wind power developers can go around it by getting permits for the “incidental,” but entirely predictable, killing of the eagles the law is supposed to protect.
To promote renewable energy, FWS officials allow wind turbines to reach hundreds of feet into the air and go up in areas where “protected” eagles are known to fly. And by issuing permits for the “incidental take” of a bird, they acknowledge that some of the eagles will be slaughtered in the turbines’ spinning rotors.
If wind and solar power are making it rough for endangered species on land and in the air, things are no better at sea. On April 14, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed an agreement with administration officials to secure more lease areas for offshore wind development in the Atlantic Ocean.
More offshore wind turbines would further complicate the migratory patterns of the endangered right whale. Female right whales migrate from the Northeastern Coast to waters off the Southeast, where they give birth before returning north with their calves. Their path — going and coming — takes them through an area where Richmond, Va.-based Dominion Energy plans to construct 176 turbines as part of its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
If neighboring Maryland becomes a player in offshore wind, the migrating whales’ journey will become even more perilous.
Lured by generous taxpayer subsidies and encouraged by compliant government officials, wind and solar developers have concluded that endangered species pose little threat to their livelihoods.
DC Journal
via STOP THESE THINGS
August 9, 2024 at 02:31AM
National Grid executives have warned of blackouts before the end of the decade unless the South East pays more for power than other regions.
In private conversations with the energy industry, executives from the Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) claimed the network was becoming so congested that “there will be blackouts in the South East by 2028”, one industry source claimed.
The issue has prompted the Government to weigh major changes to the electricity market, potentially by splitting it into regional zones that would each have their own electricity price.
Power Chiefs Fear Blackouts In London | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (wordpress.com)
via climate science
August 9, 2024 at 01:40AM
Ed. Note: The ideology of environmentalism has proven itself to be, by far, the most persuasive enemy of the Master Resource, energy. Pollution … Health Hazards … Species Extinction … Ecosystem Destruction … Resource Exhaustion … Global Cooling … Global Warming … Melting Glaciers … Rising Seas … Climate Change. Why do the enemies of energy industries seem always to fall back, in the end, on environmentalist themes for their strongest and most effective stands? Is there something deeply embedded in our Western culture that makes the philosophy of environmentalism the most influential instrument for opposition to the energy industry?
Today, Master Resource begins a six-part series analyzing the philosophic basis of environmentalism, its enmity to the technologies of instrumental reason (especially energy technology), as well as its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Written some years ago by the award-winning essayist Robert Bidinotto, this manifesto seemed worth preserving here at MR now that Bidinotto has moved on professionally to writing the best-selling Dylan Hunter political-thriller series (including one novel featuring environmentalist villains!). A fuller biographical note appears at the end of each post.
America’s Enlightenment Heritage
Every culture and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain dominant ideas. At its birth, America’s basic premises were part and parcel of the glorious historical period that was rightly called “the Enlightenment.”
In his book The Empire of Reason, historian Henry Steele Commager wonderfully captured the spirit of the American Enlightenment. Men such as Franklin and Jefferson, he wrote, had “a prodigality about them; they recognized no bounds to their curiosity, no barriers to their thought, no limits to their activities.” Commager cited “their confidence in Reason, their curiosity about the secular world and—with most of them—their indifference to any other, their addiction to Science—if useful—their habit of experimentation, and their confidence in improvement…” Heroic achievers, these men “exalted Reason and worshipped at the altar of Liberty.”1
That linkage between reason and liberty wasn’t coincidental: men of reason require freedom to explore, to communicate their ideas, to realize their visions. And what is the goal of these activities? In Jefferson’s immortal words, “the pursuit of happiness”: that is, personal fulfillment and self-interest.
Such were the ideas and values of America’s Founders. Their individualist ethic, embodied in the social system of capitalism, has produced—in what amounts historically to the blink of an eye—the greatest material abundance the world has ever known. Once people were encouraged to employ their minds in the pursuit of personal values—and once they were politically free to do so—a torrent of human ingenuity and energy was unleashed, curing hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance on an unprecedented scale.
Not just America, but every country and culture that adopted these ideas progressed dramatically to the extent it did so. On the other hand, every society that turned its back on these ideas continued to suffer, as primitive societies had suffered throughout history. Witness in our time the intellectual, economic, and political collapse of all forms of socialism, including fascism and communism.
It would seem that this practical demonstration of the extraordinary benefits of reason, individualism, liberty, and capitalism should have been enough to convince all the world—and certainly the world’s intellectuals and leaders—of their unarguable merits. Yet ironically, these Enlightenment ideas, which have given the world so much, are still considered controversial and suspect. And not just the ideas, but also the rational faculty that generates them.
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In fact, Man himself is no longer praised as a conqueror of nature’s obstacles, nor even accepted as just another part of the natural world. To many, he is an interloper, an alien presence on the planet—even nature’s enemy—and his creative works are increasingly regarded as a growing menace to all that exists.
“[W]e are threatening to push the earth out of balance,” warned former Vice President Al Gore in his book, Earth in the Balance. “Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response.”2
Philip Shabecoff, formerly the chief environmental reporter for the New York Times, summed up this outlook in his history of the American environmental movement: “…[A]n unspoiled land of great beauty and wonder began to change when Europeans came here five hundred years ago,” he wrote. “Its resources were squandered…large areas were sullied, disfigured, and degraded, and…our negligent use of the Promethean forces of science and technology has brought us to the verge of disaster.”3
The Promethean allusion is strikingly appropriate, for Prometheus was the Titan of Greek mythology who loved Man, and brought to him the fire of the Gods—a tool by which he could transform nature for his own benefit. It is perhaps the archetypal myth of Western civilization.
But many—certainly, many who rally under the green banner of environmentalism—now hold that worldview in contempt.
Environmentalism’s Assault on the Enlightenment
The essence of the environmentalist outlook is suggested in the title of Mr. Gore’s book, and made clear in its pages. It’s the view that everything in nature exists in a perfectly harmonious balance—a balance ever threatened by the activities of Man.
The roots of this outlook lie deep in antiquity. “We encounter the ‘paradise myth’ all over the world in more or less complex forms,” writes classical scholar Mircea Eliade. “Actually, all these myths show primitive man enjoying blessedness, spontaneity, and liberty, which he has most annoyingly lost as the consequence of the ‘fall’…”4
For example, in seminally influential writings, the Greek writer Hesiod (circa 750–650 BC) presented the so-called “myth of the ages,” or of a lost, blissful “Golden Age.” The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), “one of the most influential of the Latin writers of antiquity,”5 fleshed out the myth of the ages and transformed it into a consistent, compelling story of man’s decay that is remarkably resonant with the themes and narratives of contemporary environmentalism.
In these transcultural myths, the cause of Man’s decadence or “fall” from a previous blissful state of paradise is almost always rooted in the sin of hubris, of pride, and of self-assertion—especially intellectual self-assertion—against authority.
Consider the Greek myth of Prometheus. By giving men the knowledge of the gods, Prometheus enrages Zeus, who chains him to a rock to suffer a thousand years of torture. And to punish Man he sends him the first mortal woman, Pandora, bearing a box that he forbids her to open. But moved by curiosity, she opens it anyway, unleashing on Man all the evils of the world.
Similarly, when given wings of wax, Icarus is warned by his father not to try to fly too high, but the lad ignores him. Soaring upward, the aspiring youth flies too close to the sun, where his wings melt and he falls to his doom.
The Greeks believed that hubris had to be suppressed by recognizing something greater than oneself, by cultivating a sense of humility before the gods or some higher good. Man’s proper path lay in self-restraint, in practicing virtues centered on the idea of moderation, such as prudence, wisdom, and temperance. The importance of humility and steering a moderate course is illustrated in the cautionary Greek myth of Phaëton, who insists on driving his father’s chariot to bear the sun across the sky. But heedless of warnings, he fails to stay on the middle course through the heavens and, flying out of control, sets the world on fire and perishes.
This fear of unrestrained human aspirations, especially Man’s boundless thirst for knowledge, is equally evident in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the ideals of humility and moderation, the Old Testament incorporates its own version of the paradise myth in the form of a pastoral ideal, symbolized by the Garden of Eden.
In Genesis 2:4–3:24 (King James Version), God plants a Garden, separate from the rest of nature, “and there he put the man whom he had formed” (2:8). This Garden is like a desert oasis, irrigated by a river from Eden—an earthly paradise that contains “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (2:9–10). God also creates for Adam (“man”) a female companion, whom the man later names Eve.
Adam and Eve live together in the “pleasant” Garden as naked, ignorant primitives, eating the fruit of the trees that God has planted for them (there is no mention of killing and eating animals). Provided a virtually effortless sustenance, Adam’s only assigned tasks in the Garden are “to dress it and keep it” (2:15) and to name all the animals.
But Adam and Eve defy the authority of God and eat fruit from a forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result of this Original Sin, God tells them that, as punishment, they will be expelled from the paradisiacal Garden into the harsh state of nature. Thereafter, merely to survive, Adam must “till the ground from whence he was taken”—soil that God has “cursed” and filled with thorns and thistles—and he must labor “in sorrow” to produce bread by “the sweat of [his] face” until he dies. Eve is cursed, too: she henceforth will conceive and give birth “in sorrow” and be subjugated to the will of her husband (3:16-24).
The Judeo-Christian story of Man’s fall from a pastoral “paradise” mirrors the core themes of the transcultural “myth of the ages” and similar ones. Other tales from the Bible reinforce these themes. For example, later in Genesis, when men try to build a tower that can reach heaven, God laments that “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”6 So to punish men once again for their unrestrained imagination and ambition, He scatters them across the earth and confuses their languages.
Consider the basic premises about Man and his world that these ancient morality tales have transmitted across the centuries—premises communicated in songs, sermons, images, icons, fiction, films, and scholarly works—premises that have shaped the thinking and the lives of billions. Here, in summary, is their message:
Everything in nature exists in harmonious balance and perfect order (the myth of the Golden Age and the Eden myth). Man’s duty is to accept his humble niche within this benign, bountiful, and balanced paradise, where he can exist simply and non-intrusively (the virtue of humility). However, Man’s ambition—especially his quest to improve himself by gaining and applying knowledge—represents a grave peril to this pastoral ideal (the sin of pride). Man’s ambitious exercise of his creative intelligence disturbs the tranquility and destroys the harmony of the pristine natural order (the danger of reason and the sin of selfish ambition).
To prevent chaos, therefore, Man’s evil, selfish appetites must be curbed, and his intelligence suppressed. That is the task of morality, whose virtues consist of constraints: humility, obedience, self-suppression, sacrifice of self to a “greater” good. By limiting Man’s disruptive ambitions and creative aspirations, then, morality will preserve the natural balance and order.
Since antiquity, this worldview has been drummed dogmatically into billions of brains—so successfully that it’s now the reigning interpretive template. It’s the basis for most people’s understanding of the world around them. It’s the code of values governing their choices and actions. It’s the metaphysical and moral heritage upon which writers such as Al Gore and Philip Shabecoff draw—and which they intuitively trust their readers to share.
It’s the spiritual soil in which the seeds of the environmentalist philosophy and movement have taken root and flourished.
It’s also the complete antithesis of the philosophical outlook of America’s Founders: a rejection of the Enlightenment outlook that, like Prometheus, championed Man and his requirements for living on earth: reason, science, individualism, self-responsibility, personal freedom, private property, and capitalism.
Rational individualism was the emerging worldview for people newly liberated from superstition, savagery, stagnation, and slavery—people striving to explore, develop, use, and enjoy the earth’s resources. Rational individualism was the philosophy of modernity.
But even in America, this modern, progressive ideal never fully overcame the pre-modern “ideal” of The Eden Premise. That atavistic ideal continued to hold a viselike grip upon millions who feared the prospect of self-responsibility, and hated the socio-economic system that demanded it.
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︎︎︎︎︎︎About the Author
Robert Bidinotto is an award-winning journalist, editor, lecturer, and novelist who reports on cultural and political issues from the perspective of principled individualism. Over three decades he has established a reputation as a leading critic of environmentalism.
As a former Staff Writer for Reader’s Digest, Bidinotto authored high-profile investigative reports on environmental issues, crime, and other public controversies—including articles on global warming and the 1989 Alar scare. His Alar article was singled out for editorial praise by Barron’s and by Priorities, the journal of the American Council on Science and Health. He authored a monograph, The Green Machine,and for several years ran a website (“ecoNOT”), both critically examining the environmentalist philosophy and movement.
Bidinotto’s many articles, columns, and reviews also appeared in Success, Writer’s Digest, The Boston Herald, The American Spectator, City Journal, The Freeman, and Reason. He served as the award-winning editor of The New Individualist, a political and cultural magazine, and as editor of publications for the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.
In 2011, Bidinotto began writing political thrillers. HUNTER—the debut novel in his Dylan Hunter series—soared to the top of the Amazon and Wall St. Journal bestseller lists. BAD DEEDS, the first sequel, dramatizes the evils and dangers of environmentalism. A number-one best-selling Audible political thriller, BAD DEEDS was named “Book of the Year” by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. Bidinotto’s thrillers are available on Amazon.
Learn more about Robert Bidinotto at his fiction website, “The Vigilante Author” and at his nonfiction blog.
The post Environmentalism or Individualism? (Part 1) appeared first on Master Resource.
via Master Resource
August 9, 2024 at 01:07AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 