Author: 1957chev

Dangerous Wind Turbines Were a “Bust”, from the Get-go!

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Council blew cash on wind turbines that don’t work

editorial image

editorial imagewind turbines built in the grounds of a school are now to be dismantled – after allegedly generating just £3.67 worth of electricity in NINE years.

Milton Keynes Council paid £170,000 for the giant turbines at Oakgrove School at Middleton .

But shortly after the school opened in 2005, the structures were switched off for health and safety reasons due to a manufacturing defect.

A source told the Citizen: “It all seems to be an extraordinary waste of money. None of it is the fault of the school itself – they’ve just been stuck with these huge things that have proved useless.”

The turbines were provided by a German company which has since gone into liquidation, leaving the council unable to get compensation.

But this week there was finally a sunny outcome to the sad saga. The council has negotiated with another contractor to remove the turbines for free and replace them with solar panels.

A council spokesman said: “These wind turbines were the subject of a nationwide recall and the school was advised by the Health and Safety Executive to turn them off and keep them switched off.”

He said the turbines would be removed during the summer holidays.

He added: “Obviously Oakgrove has very high eco-credentials so this is not an ideal solution but the removal is at nil cost to either the council or the school.”

The Faux-Green Thieves, use the Environment Fears to Extort Money!

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Environmental shakedown through bastardized application of science, policy, and education

Disgruntled ex-federal employees found a way to bilk taxpayers out of millions of dollars using the flawed Endangered Species Act

  • FourCorners

May 14, 2014 by ,

Over a 3-year period, 2009-2012, Department of Justice data show American taxpayers footed the bill for more than $53 million in so-called environmental groups’ legal fees—and the actual number could be much higher. The real motivation behind the Endangered Species Act (ESA) litigation, perhaps, could have more to do with vengeance and penance than with a real desire to protect flora and fauna.

On May 7, I spoke at the Four Corners Oil and Gas Conference in Farmington, New Mexico. During the two-day event, I sat in on many of the other sessions and had conversations with dozens of attendees. I left the event with the distinct impression that the current implementation of the ESA is a major impediment to the economic growth, tax revenue, and job creation that comes with oil-and-gas development. I have written on ESA issues many times, most recently I wrote about the lesser prairie chicken’s proposed “threatened” listing (which the Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS] listed on March 27) and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s lawsuit against the federal government over the “sue and settle” tactics of FWS and the Department of the Interior.

GunnisonsagegrouseWhile at the conference, I received an email announcing that FWS has asked a federal court for a 6-month delay in making a final determination on whether to list the Gunnison sage grouse as an endangered species—moving the decision past the November elections. Up for re-election, Senator Mark Udall(D-CO) “cheered” the extension request. The E & E report states: Colorado elected leaders “fear the listing could have significant economic impacts.”

Kent Holsinger, a Colorado attorney specializing in lands, wildlife, and water, posited: “Senator Udall is among those lauding the move—perhaps because a listing decision would affect his fate in the U.S. Senate. Gunnison sage grouse populations are stable, if not on the increase. In addition, myriad state, local and private conservation efforts have been put into place over the last decade. Those efforts, and the Gunnison sage grouse, are at risk if the FWS pursues listing.”

The report continues: “WildEarth Guardians is not opposing the latest extension after Fish and Wildlife agreed to some extensive new mitigation measures that will be made in the interim, including increasing buffer zones around sage grouse breeding grounds, called leks, and deferring coal, oil and gas leasing, said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with WildEarth Guardians.” It goes on to say: “But the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a party to the settlement agreements with WildEarth Guardians, said the latest extension is a bad move for the grouse, which it says has needed ESA protections for years.”

Two important items to notice in the Gunnison sage grouse story. One, the power the environmental groups wield. Two, part of appeasing the environmental groups involves “deferring coal, oil and gas leasing.”

It is widely known that these groups despise fossil fuels. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) brags about its use of lawsuits to block development—but it is not just oil and gas they block, it is virtually all human activity.

In researching for this week’s column, I have talked to people from a variety of industry and conservation efforts. The conversations started because I read something they’d written about CBD. Whether I was talking to someone interested in protecting big horn sheep, a fishing enthusiast, or an attorney representing ranching or extractive industries, CBD seems to be a thorn in their side. All made comments similar to what Amos Eno, who has been involved in conservation for more than 40 years, told me: “CBD doesn’t care about the critters. They are creating a listing pipeline and then making money off of it.” Environmental writer Ted Williams, in a piece on wolves,called CBD: “perennial plaintiffs.”

New Mexico rancher Stephen Wilmeth directed me to a CBD profile he had written. In it he addressed how the CBD’s efforts targeted livestock grazing and sought “the removal of cattle from hundreds of miles of streams.” Wilmeth states: “CBD has elevated sue and settle tactics, injunctions, new species listings, and bad press surrounding legal action to a modern art form. Consent decrees more often than not result in closed door sessions with concessions or demands made on agency policy formulation.”

In a posting on the Society for Bighorn Sheep website titled: Legal tactics directly from the Center for Biological Diversity, board member Gary Thomas states: “The Center ranks people second. By their accounting, all human endeavors, agriculture, clean water, energy, development, recreation, materials extraction, and all human access to any space, are subordinate to the habitat requirements of all the world’s obscure animals and plants. But these selfish people don’t care about any person, plant, or animal. The Center collects obscure and unstudied species for a single purpose, specifically for use in their own genre of lawsuits. They measure their successes not by quality of life for man nor beast, but by counting wins in court like notches in the handle of a gun.”

You’d expect someone like me, an energy advocate, to dis the CBD—and I have (CBD is not too fond of me)—but how did it get such a broad-based collection of negativity from within the environmental community?

Ted Williams told me: “Environmentalists who are paying attention are not happy with CBD.” He has written the most comprehensive exposé on CBD that can be found—for which he was threatened with a lawsuit. Without Williams’ work, one has to resort to bits and pieces off the internet to put together CBD’s modus operandi—but there is plenty to choose from!

One of the most interesting ones to catch my eye was a part of the post on SheepSociety.com. There, Thomas points out the fact that the three founders of CBD are ex-Forest Service workers. He states: “To donors, their motives appear altruistic. To the informed, they look more like a 20-year quest for revenge for their firing.”

I am fairly well acquainted with CBD, but Thomas’ accusation was new to me—though it fit what I knew. (One of the very first pieces I ever wrote, when I originally got into this work seven plus years ago, was on the one and only legal victory ever won against CBD. Arizona rancher Jim Chiltonwon a defamation suit against CBD with a $600,000 settlement. Nearly everyone I talked to as a part of my research for this story mentioned Chilton’s name with reverence.

I dug around and found an interesting story from Backpacker magazine that gave credence to Thomas’ claim. The February 2003 issue features a multi-page profile on Kieran Suckling, co-founder and executive director. Addressing the three founders, who were working for the Forest Service, Backpacker reports: “All three of them were frustrated by their agencies’ inaction.” The story KieranSuckling-2012.jpgtcurry2goes on to explain how the threesome “hatched a plan” to petition the Forest Service and force it to list the spotted owl.

Then, I found a 2009 profile on Suckling in High Country News (HCN). It quotes Suckling describing how the roots of his full-time activism started while working for the Forest Service doing spotted owl surveys: “We had signed contracts saying we wouldn’t divulge owl locations, but we went the next day to the Silver City Daily Press, with a map that told our story. We were fired within seconds. That was the start of us becoming full-time activists.”

These snippets help explain Suckling’s animosity toward the Forest Service and other government agencies. CBD is gleeful over its results. It has sued government agencies hundreds of times and has won the majority of the cases—though many never go to court and are settled in a backroom deal (hence the term: “sue and settle”). Thomas writes: “They are extremely proud to report that single-handedly they deplete the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s entire annual budget, approximately $5 million, for endangered species listings year after year by forcing them to use their limited funds defending lawsuits instead of their intended purpose.”

The HCN piece describes Suckling’s approach to getting what he wants—which he explains in theNew Yorker, as “a new order in which plants and animals are part of the polity”: “The Forest Service needs our agreement to get back to work, and we are in the position of being able to powerfully negotiate the terms of releasing the injunction. … They [federal employees] feel like their careers are being mocked and destroyed—and they are. So they become much more willing to play by our rules and at least get something done. Psychological warfare is a very underappreciated aspect of environmental campaigning.”

“In CBD speak,” adds Wilmeth, “the suggestion of playing by the rules equates to its rules of manipulating positive outcomes for its mission.”

Putting the pieces together, it does appear, as Thomas asserts, that Suckling is on a 20+ year “quest for revenge” for being fired—vengeance that American taxpayers are funding.

Suckling is an interesting character. The Backpacker story cites his ex-wife, who said the following: “He’s not tethered on a daily basis to the same things you and I are tethered to.”

Tierra Curry is another name that comes up frequently in CBD coverage. CBD’s staff section of the website lists her as “senior scientist” and says she “focuses on the listing and recovery of endangered species.” As Warner Todd Huston reports: “Curry has an odd profile for an activist. She once claimed to have enjoyed dynamiting creek beds in rural Kentucky and taking perverse pleasure at sending fish and aquatic animals flying onto dry land and certain death. Now Curry spends her time filing petitions to ‘save’ some of the same animals she once enjoyed killing.”

Perhaps Curry’s frenetic listing efforts are her way of doing penance for her childhood penchant of killing critters.

The role vengeance and penance may play in CBD’s shakedown of the American public is just a hypothesis based on facts. But the dollars paid out are very real.

In an April 8, 2014, hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources, fifth-generation rancher and attorney specializing in environmental litigation, Karen Budd-Falen talked about the need for ESA reform, as four different House bills propose: “Public information regarding payment of attorney’s fees for ESA litigation is equally difficult to access.” Addressing HR 4316—which requires a report on attorney’s fees and costs for ESA related litigation—she says: “It should not be a radical notion for the public to know how much is being paid by the federal government and to whom the check is written.”

As she reports in her testimony, Budd-Falen’s staff did an analysis of the 276-page spreadsheet run released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) listing litigation summaries in cases defended by the Environment and Natural Resources Division, Wildlife Section. She explains: “The spreadsheets are titled ‘Endangered Species Defensive Cases Active at some point during FY09-FY12 (through April 2012).’ Although the DOJ release itself contained no analysis, my legal staff calculated the following statistics.”

Budd-Falen then shows how she came up with the nearly $53 million figure of taxpayer money paid out over an approximate 3-year period. However, she then shows how her own Freedom of Information Act requests have proven “that the DOJ does not keep an accurate account of the cases it defends”—making the actual dollar figure much higher.

Budd-Falen has stated: “We believe when the curtain is raised we’ll be talking about radical environmental groups bilking the taxpayer for hundreds of millions of dollars, allegedly for ‘reimbursement for attorney fees.’”

Budd-Falen’s research shows that for groups like CBD—who sue on process not on substance—it really is about the money.

Eno believes that for the CBD, it isn’t about the critters: “CBD endangers the endangered species program on multiple fronts.

* First, their petitions and listing suits use up significant financial and personnel resources of both Office of Endangered Species and solicitors office in DOI. This means less funding and personnel devoted to species recovery.

* Second, CBD suits antagonize and jeopardize recovery programs of cooperating federal land management agencies, particularly USFS and BLM.

* Third, their suits have hampered forest and grassland management thereby inviting forest fires which endanger both human and wildlife (sage grouse) communities throughout the west.

* Fourth, CBD suits antagonize, alienate and create financial hardship for affected private land owners, thereby reducing both public support and initiatives and active assistance for listed species recovery.”

Despite numerous attempts, the ESA has not had any major revisions in more than 25 years. TheWall Street Journal states: “The ESA’s mixed record on wildlife restoration and its impact on business have made the law vulnerable to critics.” Groups like CBD have twisted the intent of the law. Reform is now essential—not just to save taxpayer dollars, but to put the focus back on actually saving the species rather than, as Wilmeth calls it: “the bastardized application of science, policy, and education.”

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/05/14/environmental-shakedown-through-bastardized-application-of-science-policy-and-education/#sthash.JPqu7obU.dpuf

Even the Aussies Know, That Hudak is the Way to GO!!!! Yaaayyyy!!!!

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Ontario’s Progressive Conservative’s Leader Tim Hudak – Didn’t Drink the Kool-Aid

May 15, 2014 by 

Jim Jones

Jim Jones was a charismatic cult leader with a colourful past who – amid allegations that he’d been physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing his acolytes at his San Francisco compound – fled the US and set up a new camp at “Jonestown”, Guyana. Close to 1,000 of his “disciples” followed him South – lured by socialist utopian promises of a “new dawn” for all those who believed in him – putting the “blind” into “blind faith”.

Jones’s cult status started early – his mum, Lynetta claimed that she’d given birth to the Messiah. He was an avid Communist and fancied himself a preacher in the league of his heroes, Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. Jones never lacked self-belief – telling worshipers he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi; as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Gotama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin: a lineup of alter-egos that most preachers would find hard to top.

In November 1978, Jim Jones encouraged his faithful band of followers to gulp down gallons of sickly-sweet, grape-flavoured Kool-Aid. Problem was, it was cordial with a “kick” – 910 of his devoted followers (including 303 children) perished from cyanide poisoning. Oops! So much for “blind faith”.

Since then, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has been a figure of speech used by Americans to cover any person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination; and also covers anyone knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. Hmm, sound strangely familiar?

Well, around the globe many of our political betters have already “drunk the Kool-Aid”.

Lured by ridiculous promises of “free” energy and tens of thousands of wonderful, new “green” jobs, politicians of all hues have willingly entered economic suicide pacts – by signing up to completely unsustainable wind power policies – in Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, Australia and Canada, to name a few.

In Canada, however, there is at least one politician who obviously didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Tim Hudak heads up the Progressive Conservative party – which, unlike Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals – has made the obvious connection between Ontario’s giant fan roll-out and spiralling power prices.

tim-hudak

Hudak has also rumbled the fact that – not only did Ontario’s wind rush fail to produce the promised “green” employment bonanza – but that the wind-power-driven escalation in power costs has killed thousands of jobs in the real economy.

Wynne’s Liberals were early Kool-Aid consumers – committing Ontario to fork out for wind power subsidies, which are among the most ludicrously generous on earth.

In the lead up to Ontario’s upcoming election Hudak is going head-to-head with Wynne and has slammed the economy-killing energy policies dreamed up by her Liberals.

Hudak is all set to take the axe to wind power subsidies – in an effort to bring spiralling power prices under control and to return Ontario to a position of economic competitiveness.

Here’s the Toronto Sun on Hudak’s plan to restore some economic sanity to Ontario’s energy policy.

Hudak will end wind, solar fiasco
Toronto Sun
13 May 2014

It’s amazing only one leader in the Ontario election campaign – the Progressive Conservative’s Tim Hudak – has promised to end the subsidization of inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power.

This is an obvious way to save taxpayers and hydro ratepayers billions of dollars in future costs.

Premier Kathleen Wynne can’t make that promise because to do so would be to admit the Liberals’ naive infatuation with green energy has been a financial disaster, as the non-partisan Auditor General of Ontario concluded in 2011.

The auditor general said the Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions of added dollars on their hydro bills for decades to come.

The auditor general not only found Liberal claims their Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs between 2009 and 2012 were nonsense, but that experience around the world has shown so-called green energy destroys more jobs than it creates because it inevitably leads to higher electricity prices.

As for NDP leader Andrea Horwath – who says she’ll rescind in 2016 the Liberals’ 2010 decision to add the 8% provincial sales tax to hydro bills – she propped up the Liberals as they were signing more and more wind and solar deals, literally throwing more and more public money down a black hole.

Incredibly, Wynne is promising to keep doing this if she’s elected, which is utter madness.

Hudak is the only leader of the three major parties telling the truth, noting he can’t break existing contracts the Liberals have already signed with wind and solar energy developers.

But he can stop throwing good money after bad.

Hudak is also promising to return local autonomy to municipalities so they can decide if they want wind turbines and solar panels in their communities, instead of having them rammed down their throats by the Liberals through their dictatorial Green Energy Act.

As for Liberals’ claim they replaced coal power with wind, it’s utter nonsense.

The Liberals replaced coal with nuclear power and natural gas.

Wind and solar are just another multi-billion-dollar Liberal boondoggle, to go along with their eHealth, Ornge and cancelled gas plants scandals and financial disasters.
Toronto Sun

Energy policy based on nothing more than “blind faith” was always bound to end in tears; as the Toronto Sun’s editor put it in the piece above:

[T]he Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions …

Australians needn’t consider themselves any smarter than the Canadians, on that score.

Our Federal Government signed us up to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target in 2001 without any economic research – let alone a proper cost/benefit analysis of a policy which perversely favours insanely expensive, intermittent and unreliable wind power. That process will be undertaken for the very first time in 2014 – as part of the RET Review. Better late than never, as they say.

Fortune has, however, smiled on Australia – it is, after all, the “Lucky Country” – because the RET Review panel is made up of people who clearly didn’t drink the Kool-Aid (see our posts here and here).

From what we hear emanating from Canberra, STT predicts the imminent demise of Australia’s now beleaguered, bitter and angry Wind Power Cult – and a return to energy market sanity in the very near future.

remember-jonestown-small-jpg

 

 

YES! Tim Hudak CAN save the Day!!!!

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Killing green energy contracts

 

Done the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they?

Brent Lewin/BloombergDone the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they

Hudak’s Ontario Conservatives can easily and legally negate the giveaways the Liberals had lavished on renewables developers

Tim Hudak says the Ontario Conservatives, if elected, will cancel lucrative wind and solar contracts put in place under the Liberals’ green energy program. Can he do so without racking up huge compensation costs?

The answer is yes – if he does it the right way.

The wrong way is to direct the Ontario Power Authority to simply terminate existing contracts, which have robust compensation clauses. The liabilities would dwarf the $1.1-billion paid out by the Liberals for cancelled gas plants.

The right way is to legislate: to enact a statute that declares green contracts to be null and void, and the province to be free from liability. The compensation clauses in the contract will be rendered inoperative if the statute says so.

Statutes can override iron-clad provisions in a contract because that is the nature of legislative supremacy: Legislatures can pass laws of any kind, as long as they are within their jurisdiction and do not offend the constitution. Legislating on electricity production is clearly a provincial power, as are “property and civil rights.”

Since the Canadian constitution does not guarantee property or contract rights, there are no obvious constitutional limitations on a provincial legislature’s ability to change any contract as it likes. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, in Canada there is no constitutional right to compensation for property expropriated by government.

Related

Courts interpret ambiguous statutes as implicitly requiring compensation be paid to the owner of expropriated property. But if the statute is clear that no compensation shall be paid, the words of the statute govern. Where a statute and a contract are in conflict, the statute prevails. Although unilateral and retroactive changes to established contracts might seem to offend the rule of law, the Supreme Court of Canada has said that prospectivity is not a constitutional requirement for legislation.

What about NAFTA? Could a U.S. or Mexican firm with a cancelled green energy contract in Ontario seek compensation for discriminatory expropriation under Chapter 11? If government action singled out a specific party’s contract for termination, it could well be characterized as discriminatory. But if Hudak’s statute cancelled large numbers of contracts for a public policy objective and treated domestic and foreign firms similarly, then NAFTA protections are unlikely to apply.

So, done the right way, a new PC government could indeed rip up green energy contracts with no liability. Should they? While legislatures can cancel contracts, they rarely do so because it penalizes parties who have done business with government, and therefore creates a disincentive to do so in the future. It erodes economic confidence and credibility. For Conservatives and their supporters, cancelling energy contracts may depend on what they find more offensive: Rich subsidies for the production of solar and wind energy, or unilateral changes to valid contracts. No renewable energy contracts have been cancelled in Ontario yet, but in Europe this line has been crossed: Spain, France, Italy and Belgium have all stepped back from their original terms for the production and purchase of renewable power, to the detriment of their domestic renewable energy industries.

The McGuinty Liberals did not pass a statute to escape the bill for cancelled gas plants. It is difficult to know why without all the facts. Perhaps they thought $1.1-billion in costs and erased records would not come to light. Perhaps they feared that legislation would have required disclosure of facts they wanted hidden. Perhaps refusing to pay compensation would have crippled their ability to enter into future contracts with the same or similar companies. Perhaps there were foreign firms involved that could, in fact, have claimed under NAFTA for discriminatory expropriation. Perhaps they judged the political and economic costs to be too high – it is one thing to roll back a program created by a previous government, especially if you have campaigned on the issue, and quite another for a long-standing government to arbitrarily cancel its own contracts. Or perhaps they did not have an opportunity until after they lost their majority, which made it politically untenable.

Contracts are safe when both parties are bound in law to follow them. Contracting with government means that one party has the power to change the rules after the contract is made. Buyers and sellers beware: At the end of the day, the protection in a government contract is not legal but political.

Bruce Pardy is a law professor at Queen’s University.

Wynne Tries to Say she Knew Nothing. No One Could be that Oblivious!!

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Gas plant scandal needs accountability

BOB RUNCIMAN, GUEST COLUMNIST

The question now becomes, what consequences will she and her party face?

Political, without question, but there’s a case to be made for legal ramifications to flow from this fiasco.

Wynne has played the innocent card to the hilt, making the unlikely claim that as co-chair of the Liberal election campaign, she was in the dark on the decision to cancel both the Mississauga and Oakville plants. It’s called the doctrine of plausible deniability. Do what you have to do, just don’t tell me.

And since assuming the government’s top job, she has again professed ignorance of any knowledge regarding the real cost to taxpayers of the cancellation decisions. Other than admitting the cancellation was a political decision, she has studiously avoided answering questions in the legislature dealing with the scandal.

In trying to keep as far away as possible from the stench of Liberal corruption, she has tossed most of the tough questions from the Opposition to Government House Leader John Milloy and Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli.

The release of the auditor general’s report confirmed that Wynne, her cabinet and the previous Dalton McGuinty regime deliberately misled Ontarians on the real costs of the cancellation decision.

The auditor general’s report further confirms the gas plant scandal is more than the Liberals misleading Ontarians about the true cost of their politically motivated decision. In truth, it’s a breach of public trust by various political officials, including Wynne, Chris Bentley, McGuinty and others who put their political interest ahead of the public interest they were obliged to serve.

What’s needed now is real accountability.

During a recent question period in the Legislature, PC MPP Frank Klees asked Wynne if the Liberal party would repay Ontario taxpayers the $275 million cost of their political decision in Mississauga. The Liberals, not surprisingly, refused to answer.

So what can be done?

One possibility could be a class-action civil lawsuit against the Liberal Party of Ontario for unlawfully increasing costs to taxpayers.

Another would be one or both of the opposition parties asking police to conduct a criminal investigation, under Section 122 of the Criminal Code, of the ministers, political staffers and other officials on the public payroll who put politics ahead of the public trust.

The section says that “Every official who, in connection with the duties of his office, commits fraud or a breach of trust is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years…”

Is it far-fetched to consider a criminal investigation in this case?

Hardly.

Government employees have been investigated under Section 122 for far less serious conduct — things such as leaking a confidential report.

Beyond those legal remedies, real accountability will come when the voters of Ontario are empowered to render their decision on whether Wynne and her Liberal cronies are fit to hold office.

That means an election and, hopefully, the NDP will stop providing cover for the McWynne-ty government, and instead join the Ontario PCs to remove these people from office. One thing is for sure, we’ll all be watching.

— Senator Runciman is a former Progressive Conservative MPP and cabinet minister

 

The Faux-Green Renewables Scam is Dripping with Outrageous subsidies!!

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Big Green’s untold billions

Mainstream media don’t know Big Green has deeper pockets than Big Oil

  • Big Green follow the money CFACT Org

May 14, 2014 by ,

The “Kill Keystone XL” crowd isn’t little David up against a Big Oil Goliath. As usual, conventional wisdom isn’t wisdom when the mainstream media ask all the wrong questions with commensurate answers.

Behemoth Big Green outstrips Big Oil in expendable revenue by orders of magnitude — if you know how to follow the money.

The mainstream media don’t know how. Like most liberals, their staffs are afflicted with what 20th century futurist Herman Kahn called “Educated Incapacity” — the learned inability to understand or even perceive a problem, much less a solution.

They’ve been taught to be blind, unable to see Big Green as having more disposable money than Big Oil, so they don’t look into it.

They would never discover that the American Petroleum Institute’s IRS Form 990 for the most recent year showed $237.9 million in assets while the Natural Resources Defense Council reported $241.8 million.

Nor would they discover who started the anti-Keystone campaign in the first place. It was the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund (established in 1940). The fund’s program is elaborated in a 2008 PowerPoint presentation called “The Tar Sands Campaign” by program officer Michael Northrop, who set up coordination and funding for a dozen environmental and anti-corporate attack groups to use the strategy, “raise the negatives, raise the costs, slow down and stop infrastructure, and stop pipelines.” Tom Steyer’s $100 million solo act is naive underclass nouveau cheap by comparison.

Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.

Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.

That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.

Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.

You don’t need expert skills to connect the dots linking Keystone XL to Alberta’s oil sands to climate change to Big Green.

On the other hand, you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with CFACT senior policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry — and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.

“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”

Driessen then identified the most-neglected of all money sources in Big Green: “The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal.”

That figure is confirmed in the Foundation Center database of the Top 100 Foundations. But how much actually gets to environmental groups? The Giving USA Institute’s annual reports show $80,427,810,000 (more than $80 billion) in giving to environmental recipients from 2000 to 2012.

I checked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and found $147.3 million in assets while environmental donor Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation posted $5.2 billion.

Driessen pointed out another unperceived sector of Big Green: government donors. “Under President Obama, government agencies have poured tens of millions into nonprofit groups for anti-hydrocarbon campaigns.”

Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman adds, “The federal government is currently spending $2.6 billion [per year] on climate change research (and only those who support the “carbon dioxide is a pollutant/major greenhouse gas’ receive funding).”

This web of ideological soul-mates, like all movements, has its share of turf wars and dissension in the ranks, but, as disclosed on conference tapes I obtained, it shares a visceral hatred of capitalism, a worshipful trust that nature knows best, and a callous belief that humans are not natural but the nemesis of all that is natural.

Lawyer Christopher Manes wrote “Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization.” Manes now practices tax litigation from his law office in Palm Springs, Calif., which he has not yet unmade.

The legal branch of Big Green is varied. Earthjustice, (formerly Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) raked in $133.8 million in the past five years – comparable to many similar law organizations. Highly litigative attack groups receiving federal settlements are numerous and thriving, such as the Center for Biological Diversity ($29.2 million in the past five years).

It’s not unusual for heirs of big money to dream of unmaking the source of their wealth: Laura Rockefeller Chasin of the Rockefeller Family Fund once said, “It’s very hard to get rid of the money is a way that does more good than harm. One of the ways is to subsidize people who are trying to change the system and get rid of people like us.”

The money reported to the Federal Election Commission is barely the beginning of what’s really happening. It doesn’t show you Big Green’s mobilized boots on the ground, the zooming Twitter tweets, the fevered protesters, the Facebook fanatics or the celebrities preaching carbon modesty from the lounges of their private jets.

When self-righteous victims of Educated Incapacity insist that Big Oil outspends the poor little greenies, keep in mind the mountains of IRS Form 990s filed by thousands of groups, land trusts, lawyer outfits, foundations, and agenda-makers, just waiting for America to wake up and smell Big Green’s untold hundreds of billions.

____________

This article originally appeared in The Washington Examiner

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/05/14/big-greens-untold-billions/#sthash.u6BIT3H8.dpuf

Be Leary of Doing Business with a Wind Weasel!

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Bureau County leery of costs to take down old wind turbines

Katlyn Rumbold
Princeton Bureau Chief

PRINCETON — Pittsburgh-based EverPower Wind Co. is now the formal owner of Big Sky Wind Farm, which is located in northern Bureau County, the Bureau County Board heard during Monday night’s meeting.

But with that came more concerns on eventual decommissioning of the turbines and what that means for the county’s landowners and taxpayers.

At last month’s meeting, the board was looking into a letter of credit for the decommissioning plan as opposed to the existing cash-on-hand arrangements that already have been in place. Board members previously indicated they didn’t have enough information to move forward with a letter of credit, but last night Bureau County state’s attorney Pat Herrmann said the board has three options: They can either move forward with the letter of credit of just over $1.9 million, keep funds as they are currently or accept the cash that is in the cash escrow account.

“I have concerns about the letter of credit,” said Ed Gerdes, Princeton resident. “Two different issues is the amount and how that’s guaranteed.”

Based on a similar project, Gerdes said the total cost to take down 87 wind turbines came out just over $19.4 million which is approximately $224,000 per turbine.

“That’s one of the big problems we have is there’s only $1.9 million,” Gerdes said of what he says could be a $10 million-$12 million project. “That’s maybe going to take down nine turbines. Who’s going to pay for the rest?

“I don’t think the taxpayers should have to pay for taking those down. The other problem we have is that when landowners signed these leases with these companies they were promised that if this doesn’t work they’ll come back and take the turbine down. They also promised that if they weren’t here, the county would have money set aside to take them down. The county isn’t going to have money so I think all these landowners might end up with a bill for $150-$200,000 to dispose of these turbines.”

Gerdes also expressed concerned about the tax levy expiration in 2016 and what might happen if a new bank took over the letter of credit. However, Michael Speerschneider, who has been representing EverPower Wind Co., said the $1.9 million is an increase to where it was at two years ago and that number is expected to increase over the next 20 years to approximately $3 million.

The board approved a motion to go into negotiations to accept the letter of credit.

*In other news, The board approved a proposal from Butler Insurance of medical coverage and approved the Lawyer’s Professional liability insurance premium and renewal from Dimond Bros. for $3,578 for the public defender.

Tim Hudak Promises to End Wind Scam…..other parties will continue to rob us!

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D’Amato: To understand Ontario’s election,

take a careful look at your hydro bill

By  Luisa D’Amato
SEE MOREarticles from this author

It’s so easy to get sidetracked by the distractions.

Ontario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne goes for a morning jog in Kitchener’s Victoria Park, leaving a reporter out of breath as he tries to follow. Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak gets kicked off a Toronto subway when he tries to make an announcement, because his team didn’t get permission.

These events grab the headlines because they’re anecdotes, easy to tell. But they have nothing to do with what a political party will or won’t do for you if it wins.

On the other hand, if you look at your hydro bill, and what each party will do about it, it tells you something significant about each of them.

The cost of electricity is a key issue. Ontario’s electricity rates have soared and are now among the highest in North America.

In part, this is because of the Liberal government’s “green energy” plan that offers subsidies to those that put up wind turbines and solar panels, then sell the power back to the power grid.

Expensive electricity is stressful. There’s evidence that it’s forcing manufacturing employers out of the province. Last week, Don Walker, CEO of auto parts giant Magna International, said: “I doubt we’ll add any more plants in Ontario” in part because of electricity costs.

Full platforms have not been released by the parties yet. But here’s what each has said so far about your hydro bill:

Greens: Conservation is their focus. They’d require utilities to provide grants and “affordable” loans for people to make their homes more energy efficient.

Liberals: Their latest announcement was billed as good news for consumers, but when you check the details, it isn’t.

Their plan is to relieve consumers of the debt retirement charge from the old Ontario Hydro (nearly $8 on my last household bill of $177 over two months).

That sounds helpful, until you realize that the “clean energy benefit,” which gives customers a 10-per-cent break on the bill ($19.35 in my case), is also being eliminated. And there’ll be a 90-cents-a-month hike for most homes to subsidize low-income customers. Total impact: I’m paying $13.15 more every two months, and that’s before the cost of electricity goes up again.

New Democrats: Piecemeal policy. There’s very little so far. Leader Andrea Horwath announced Monday that she will “take the HST” off hydro bills “to put money back into the budgets of middle-class families.” Further down in the press release, it’s revealed that actually it’s only the “provincial portion” of the HST that would come off. On my bill, that’s $13.70 in savings over a two-month period.

Conservatives: Shock therapy: The plan is to bring electricity prices down, and therefore keep industrial employers here, by ending those Liberal subsidies for wind and solar costs, cutting the hydro bureaucracy (Hudak says there are 11,000 people making more than $100,000 a year) and buying cheap energy from the United States and Quebec.

This election boils down to a choice: Do you like things the way they are, or do you want big changes?

The Conservatives offer radical change. The Liberals offer their record over the past 11 years. The New Democrats offer tweaks on the Liberal program. And those basic distinctions are true of a lot more issues than just your electricity bill.

ldamato@therecord.com

Science has turned into a Propaganda Machine!!!

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Shameless Climate McCarthyism on full display – scientist forced to resign

Posted on May 14, 2014 by 

Climate McCarthyism: “Have you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?”.

joseph-mccarthy

Hans von Storch reports on an email that I also received today, but held waiting on a statement from The GWPF. Since von Storch has already published the email, breaking my self-imposed embargo, I’ll add the GWPF statement when it becomes available.

von Storch writes:

 

In an e-mail to GWPF, Lennart Bengtsson has declared his resignation of the advisory board of GWPF. His letter reads :

“I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.

Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.”

I am reproducing this letter with permission of Lennart Bengtsson.

 

Source: http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.nl/2014/05/lennart-bengtsson-leaves-advisory-board.html

Wikipedia says:

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. It also means “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.

This sort of witch hunt for the imagined sin of being affiliated with a climate skeptics group is about as anti-science (to use the language of our detractors) as you can get.

I keep waiting for somebody in science to have this Joseph N. Welch moment, standign  up to climate bullies:

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Nothing will change in the rarefied air of climate debate unless people are allowed to speak their minds in science without such pressure. The next time somebody tells you that “science is pure”, show them this.

Wind Power is Not What they Said it Would Be!! It’s useless!

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Wind Power: Buying a Dog, but getting Sold a Pup

May 14, 2014 by 

border-collie-16

How many times have we believed the salesman’s pitch – got home and unwrapped our purchase – only to be disappointed when we discover that we’d spent our hard earned cash on a complete lemon?

Ending up with a frisky and inexperienced pup, when we’ve shelled out for a well-trained dog is always disappointing. Wind power brings with it precisely the same kind of disappointment.

You see, its proponents market it as a perfect substitute for on-demand power generation sources – like nuclear, coal, gas and hydro. However, wind power can’t be called a “substitute” for, well, anything.

The myth that wind farms provide (or are capable of providing) meaningful and consistent power output on-demand – provided there are hundreds of giant fans connected to the same grid and spread over large distances – was totally busted in yesterday’s post.

Now it seems that Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond – trading on precisely the same myth – is dressing up the Scottish wind power “Pup” so he can peddle it as the kind of Collie any Highland herder would be proud to call their own.

Here’s the Scottish Energy News with the latest on Salmond’s wind power hard-sell.

The Difficulty of Making Money from Wind Generated Electricity
Scottish Energy News
Jack W. Ponton (FREng, FIChemE)
12 May 2014

Although he has not recently described Scotland as “the Saudi Arabia of renewables”, First Minister Alex Salmond and other supporters of his wind energy policies are still claiming that it is possible for us to make money selling renewable energy to the rest of the world, as Saudi Arabia does with its oil.

Any comparison with Saudi Arabia is self-evidently silly. That country produces about 10 million barrels of oil per day. In energy terms this means that their energy output is at a rate equivalent to about 25kw per head of population. Meeting the SNP’s target of “100% electricity from renewables” would require an installed wind capacity of about 13.5GW, effectively 3.7GW because of wind variability, equivalent to about 0.7kW per head.

More significant than scale, however, is the fundamental difference between oil or gas and wind generated electricity. To sell something profitably, it must be possible to deliver it to customers when and where they require it.

Once an oil or gas well has started operating, production can be increased or decreased to meet changes in demand. Oil and gas are conveniently transported across continents in pipelines, and supertankers can carry up to half a million tonnes. Oil can be easily stored until required – the US keeps a strategic petroleum reserve of about 700 million barrels.

In contrast, wind generated electricity is only available when the wind is blowing.

It is expensive to transport; the controversial Beauly-Denny link will have a small fraction of the energy carrying capacity of a supertanker – at, incidentally, about four times the price. Electricity is also extremely difficult and expensive to store. The only practical means of storing large quantities is by pumped storage, for which there are four sites in the UK with a combined capacity equivalent to just 18,000 barrels of oil.

It is crucial to understand just who actually makes money from oil and how do they do it. There are two ways in which a country can make money from such a natural resource.

In principle, the most profitable should be to set up its own oil company. This is what Norway has done, giving it a GDP which is the highest for any “real economy” country in Europe.

Alternatively, governments can sell licences to private companies and charge them taxes or royalties on what they extract. This is what the UK has done with North Sea oil.

In terms of electricity, the UK has sold off its state-owned generators and so would have to adopt the licence and tax model to profit from renewable electricity. So has it auctioned licences to build wind farms and charged the companies royalties?

Quite on the contrary – the consumer is paying subsidies to renewable energy operators through Feed in Tariffs and Renewable Obligation Certificates!

It is not at all clear that a country, as opposed to company, can make money out of electricity unless the state owns the electricity company. While a number of countries are successful exporters of electricity, they all have particular characteristics which do not apply to Scotland.

For a start, their electricity is cheap to produce; it is usually hydro, but in the case of France it is nuclear. French nuclear reactors have been much cheaper than those built in the UK and France has the cheapest electricity in Europe.

UK renewable electricity is guaranteed a price at least twice the current wholesale market rate. If overseas customers do not choose to pay this premium, and it’s hard to see why the would, then our electricity exports would in effect have to be subsidised by the taxpayer.

Then their generation tends to be a controllable resource. Hydro is the most flexible form of generation and so can be sold when export demand is high attracting a high price. French nuclear is less flexible, but unlike wind it is controllable. France also has substantial hydro capacity.

Importantly, they also tend to have a choice of customers. Norway sells its cheaply produced hydro to Sweden, Denmark and Germany, France to Germany, Benelux and the UK.

None of these conditions apply to Scotland. Our wind generated surplus will be expensive, uncontrollable, saleable only to England and any profits will go to private companies – mostly owned by German and Spanish shareholders or the French government.

Denmark, with more than 20% of its capacity in wind, has the most expensive electricity in Europe. At times of surplus wind it is sold at the bottom of the market to Germany (whose own wind generation will be peaking as well) Sweden (which has plenty nuclear and hydro capacity of its own) and to Norway. On the other hand when the wind is not blowing and Denmark’s demand is high, they must buy in electricity at a premium price.

Norway is a major electricity exporter, having several times as much hydro capacity as it actually needs. It uses this for energy intensive industries such as aluminium smelting. Norway is happy to obtain nearly free extra power at the Danish taxpayer and consumer’s expense. This also makes a nonsense of the idea that we might build a link to Norway to sell them electricity at a profit.

The other great hope of renewable energy enthusiasts is that Scotland can build an industry to support wind power generation and sell expertise to the rest of the world. Alas, we are about 20 years too late to cash in on onshore wind power. That market is dominated by manufacturers in Germany, Denmark and the US.

The billions which Scotland has “invested” in wind turbines have mostly gone to these countries. What is spent locally is the relatively small proportion of the total cost in low-tech engineering and construction.

But what about the forthcoming boom in “marine energy” where we can hope to be leaders in the field?

Marine energy, in the form of offshore wind turbines, is now almost as well established a technology as onshore wind. And it is dominated by the same countries and companies as onshore. All the existing offshore wind is in a relatively benign environment like the southern North Sea. There is no particular difficulty in putting turbines in such locations (though there appear to be problems in maintenance) and there are plenty of suitable sites available, such as the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

It would be quite another matter to put turbines in a more demanding environment such as exists off most coasts of Scotland. In fact, no one has yet done this. Indeed, two companies, SSE and Olsen have recently pulled out of major offshore projects.

But even if we do manage to build a major wind power facility in deep and stormy waters, who else is going to want to do the same when there are less difficult sites?

The SNP’s regular boast that Scotland has so much of Europe’s marine energy potential is double edged – it also means that Scotland is itself most of the market for the relevant technology, and in the case of the most challenging and expensive, perhaps the only market.

Professor Jack Ponton is a member of the Scientific Alliance Scotland.
Scottish Energy News

Electricity is one commodity where its consumption is instantaneous, such that any serious contender looking to supply it simply has to guarantee households and businesses that it will be available “on-demand”. And that’s something that wind power cannot and will never be able to do.

To peddle it as anything but a “power-generation-pup” is to simply take power punters for a ride.

pup