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

By Jo Nova

Brave scientists at the CSIRO and BoM have dug hard through the sacred Arc of the Climate Covenant, CMIP-6,  to discover the horrible truth that we only have seven years (just seven!) until we pass through the sanctified Target-of-Paris on Halloween of 2031.

Channel Nine shares this “harsh deadline for humanity” and tells us the chance to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees “will expire” then, like 2 for 1 sale coupon. They don’t quite explain what happens on November 1st, 2031 — but most people will assume it’s just like what happened after Prince Charles and Al Gore and the UN said we only had ten years to go (which was nothing).

But the horror show continues, not in our climate, but in our science: where the work of past scientists is deleted, and dubious datasets get adjusted with secret algorithms and thermometers near incinerators and over hot bitumen carparks that may be 1,000 kilometers away.  The CSIRO-BOM Blob have massaged Australia’s temperature record so it can fit their favourite climate model. Dishonestly, both institutions hide the heat of the Federation Drought, where places all across Australia recorded temperatures over 50 degrees in 1896. BoM and CSIRO delete the cooling trend their own experts recorded from 1900 to 1950 in Australia. (Deacon et al).

 

The BOM and CSIRO pretend the temperatures are accurate in the graph above. They don’t tell Australians that they keep adjusting the data, even a hundred years after it happened. Some poor towns didn’t know they were two degrees colder in World War I until the BoM “discovered” that in 2014. The people of Marble Bar thought they had the hottest heatwave in world history in 1923 until the BOM traveled back in time to delete it, I mean “correct it”. Temperatures in 1910 have fallen 22 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 10 years.

At the current rate of decline, the 1920 miners of Marble Bar will be in an ice age by the end of the century.

The irony is that the BOM ignore the hot temperatures of the 1800’s because they were not in standardized modern Stevenson screens, yet the BOM is happy to take those lauded Stevenson screen measurements from 1920 and drop them in a high speed homogenization-blender to adjust them by as much as 2 degrees.

So the BOM can “adjust” the data to get any trend they want. Then there’s the added heat of a million tons of concrete and brick keeping our cities warm. And on top of that scientific hamburger, thermometers boxes shrank from 240 litres to 60 litres, and glass instruments became electronic ones. They don’t mention that their super accurate new gizmos can pick up brief changes in temperature that the old glass ones can’t. And possibly they can pick up the airport radars too.

Maximum record temperatures may be a one-second-record, literally there and gone in a moment, and if it was radar interference, not even there at all.

When asked, the BOM say they have calibrated and tested the thermometers side by side, to  but they won’t release the data. As if the thermometer readings at Canberra airport are a national security issue.

They also don’t mention that scientists in Australia were reporting that Australia was cooling from the 1890s to 1952. (Deacon et al) The ghastly heat of 1896, the Federation Drought, and the 50C record temperatures all over Australia all go down the memory hole.

Not surprisingly, after we adjust all the records, we find extreme heat events are increasing

And this is the shocking graph the BOM-CSIRO blob gave us in 2024:

But ten years ago the BOM showed Australians a different graph, one which looked like this, til they took it off their own website. So there is bound to be some excuse. A different permutation or combination of variables, an older dataset, some plausible deniability.

But the fact remains, that the BOM-CSIRO-blob are not trying to give Australians the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

Reading the tea-leaves on rain in Australia

By selecting some contrived permutation the BOM-CSIRO-Blob can create the illusion that something unusual is happening. Here, they show the April to October rainfall in one particular part of the country as if this has some special meaning. (Their climate models fail on rainfall trends nearly universally).  The Blob can cherry pick permutations until they find something. But here, even the best trend they can get doesn’t resemble our CO2 emissions. Why was the winter rain almost as low in 1940? The BOM don’t know. They could make up some reason post hoc, but they can’t predict it.

If the BOM-CSIRO-blob wanted, they could show Sydney-siders the total rainfall record for the last 130 years. But they can’t because it would be obvious to everyone that it has nothing to do with CO2. It could just be noise in the system, oceanic oscillation, or cycles controlled by the sun.

This was the total rainfall in Sydney from 1840 to 2019, and the total number of rainy days, the peak amount of rain that falls in a single day and the intensity of the downpours. Why isn’t it in the State of the Climate? Why haven’t the BOM updated this graph?  (From the Ashcroft paper of 2019).

 

The exact same pattern is visible, by the way, in rainfall records from Melbourne and Adelaide too. But almost no one in Australia would know that. The ignorance isn’t an accident.

Thank the BOM. Thank the CSIRO. Thank the ABC.

REFERENCES

LindenAshcroft^abDavid J.Karoly^acAndrew J.Dowdy^b(2019) Historical extreme rainfall events in southeastern Australia, Weather and Climate Extremes Available online 10 May 2019, 100210

Deacon, E.L. (1952) Climatic Change in Australia since 1880, Australian Journal of Physics, Volume 6, Pages 209-218.  [PDF]

State of the Climate 2022, Bureau of Meteorology

State of the Climate 2022, CSIRO

State of the Climate Report CSIRO 2014. CSIRO

Previous State of the Climate Reports, CSIRO

And even more droughts and trends graphs here.