Good to See Sanity Returning to Britain….

UK’s Wind Industry in Meltdown: Cameron to Flush-Out DECC’s Detritus

SWITZERLAND-WEF-DAVOS-CAMERON

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The wind industry’s current form reminds STT of Simon Pegg’s character in ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People‘, Sidney Young – blunt, gormless, and ready to pull out all stops to ensure every one who counts hates him.

Now that they’ve lost the grip on the game in countries where they thought they had things sewn up, they’ve been reduced to abusing those who have the ability to make or break them. STT thinks they’re just working through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (see our post here).

David Cameron has just won an election promising to end all subsidies to on-shore wind power:

UK Elections: Brit’s Deliverance from its Wind Power Disaster

In the US, ‘wind power’ states have cut their state based subsidies to wind power outfits (or are well on the path of doing so); and Republicans are out to prevent the extension of the Federal government’s PTC wind power subsidy:

2015: the Wind Industry’s ‘Annus Horribilis’; or Time to Sink the Boots In

US Republicans Line Up to Can Subsidies for Wind Power

In Germany, consumers and industry are fed up with escalating power prices:

German’s Top Daily – Bild – says Time to Chop Massive Subsidies for Wind Power

And, on Vesta’s home turf, Denmark, the government’s brewing and massive legal liability to wind farm neighbours has resulted in a full-blown moratorium on planning permits for new wind farms:

Denmark Calls Halt to More Wind Farm Harm

brat

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The response from the wind industry has been just what you’d expect from a bunch of immature brats, that couldn’t survive for a second without a massive and endless stream of subsidies filched from taxpayers and power consumers. Here’s yet another childish wind industry outburst – this time from Britain.

Cameron Puts Wind-Farm Opponent at Junior U.K. Energy Post
Bloomberg Business
Alex Morales
12 May 2015

Prime Minister David Cameron named a vocal opponent of onshore wind farms to a junior post in the U.K. energy department, reinforcing his Conservative government’s effort to halt the spread of turbines in rural areas.

Andrea Leadsom, who has campaigned against “intrusive wind farms” in South Northamptonshire constituency in central England, will report to Amber Rudd, who was named as the Cabinet minister in charge of energy on Monday.

The two will work to balance Britain’s growing energy needs and stricter pollution rules against the demands of rural voters who voted overwhelmingly for the Conservatives. Some of those voters have raised concerns about the spread of wind farms that they say blight the landscape under the previous two governments, which encouraged the technology as the cheapest way to generate low-carbon electricity at scale.

“Whilst renewable energy has an important part to play in providing energy for our 21st century needs, we have got to stop building incredible insensitive and intrusive wind farms on top of local communities,” Leadsom says on her website. “In the future, I want to see a proper consultation process and the opportunity for communities to say no.”

Rudd, who was promoted from a junior ministerial role to lead the Department of Energy & Climate Change, worked with the Liberal Democrats in the previous coalition government and stuck closely to the government script encouraging all forms of energy, especially renewables and nuclear power.

If Rudd’s appointment reassured the renewable energy industry about the continuity of government policy to cut carbon emissions, Leadsom’s elevation is a reminder of the manifesto promise Cameron’s party made to halt subsidies to wind developments on land.

Before the election, those promises prompted Ecotricity Group Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Dale Vince, a donor to the opposition Labour Party, to call the Conservatives “an existential threat to the renewable energy industry.”

Leadsom’s appointment was announced on the Twitter feed of Cameron’s office. Her role hasn’t yet been defined, and so far she’s the only junior minister to be named at DECC. Previously, two ministers Rudd and Matthew Hancock, served as junior ministers at the department.

Hancock was moved to a role at the Cabinet Office in charge of civil service reform.
Bloomberg Business

Just a tiny whiff of panic from the wind industry’s parasites there. And just what you’d expect from Ecotricity’s Dale Vince, when he wails about the Conservatives being “an existential threat to the renewable energy industry.” We’ve covered Dale Vince’s faux claims to be the environment’s best friend:

The Guardian Caught Out Pumping Dale Vince’s Bogus Wind Power Propaganda

Although, this time around, we can’t fault Vince’s analysis: Vince and his cronies are doomed.

Cameron’s Tory-Only line up gives him the chance to follow through on the clear-as-crystal promise to “halt subsidies to wind developments on land”.

It’s that humungous policy shift that spells the beginning of the end for the wind industry in Britain.

The promise to allow communities to reject wind farms adds nothing, in practical effect – a bit like stabbing a corpse, really. Without an endless stream of guaranteed subsidies, rent-seekers like Dale Vince will disappear in a heartbeat; the wind industry will die a natural death.

With Britain turning on the wind industry, pretty soon it’ll have no “friends” left to alienate anywhere at all.

Andrea Leadsom

When a Community Sticks Together, They Can Win the Wind-War!

STAY STRONG, WIND WARRIORS!

WE ARE RIGHT WITH YOU ALL THE WAY!!!

WE NEVER GIVE UP OR SURRENDER!!!

‘A group which raised £90,000 to successfully fight two appeals against wind farms in the Vale of Belvoir is gearing up for another battle.

Belvoir Locals Oppose Turbines (BLOT) and Melton Borough Council – which also spent £100,000 at appeal – successfully fought against plans for an eight-turbine wind farm at Normanton, near Bottesford, in 2010.

An appeal by another company for a 10-turbine wind farm less than a mile away two years earlier was also rejected.

The inspector at that appeal said: “This part of the vale is unusually rich in the number of historic assets of the highest grades within it.

“Harm to the historic qualities of the landscape would result of such significant and unacceptable magnitude as to outweigh the electricity generation benefits of this particular scheme in its entirety.”

Speakers against the application at the second public inquiry included Rutland and Melton MP Sir Alan Duncan and Frances, Dowager Duchess of Rutland, the widow of the 10th Duke of Rutland.

Planning inspector Christopher Frost said: “I consider that effects on landscape, heritage and residential amenity are of sufficient moment to justify rejecting this scheme, despite its capacity to contribute towards renewable energy production.”

Now, protesters are fighting plans for six 361ft turbines in the same area, near Normanton.

BLOT campaigner Pandora Mawer said: “We are forced into the ludicrous situation of fighting another application for industrial wind turbines here in the Vale of Belvoir.

“The latest wind farm application is on exactly the same site as the wind farm previously dismissed at appeal in 2008 and less a third of a mile from another wind farm, also dismissed at appeal in 2010.”

She added: “BLOT was professionally represented by a QC and barrister, landscape experts, noise experts and a planning expert, all paid for from the generosity of local donations.

“Not to mention the hundreds of hours of unpaid work undertaken by numerous volunteers and the thousands of pounds spent by two local councils defending their original decisions to refuse.”

She added: ” The previous appeal decisions were dismissed mainly due to the severe impact industrial-sized wind turbines would have on the rich heritage assets and the unacceptable harm imposed on the historic landscape of the beautiful Vale of Belvoir.

“BLOT believe the Sewstern Lane application should be refused on the same grounds. Heritage assets will still be severely impacted.”

Jake Surman, Director at Whirlwind Renewables said:

“Wind energy projects are essential if we are to meet international and national targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Onshore wind is the cheapest low carbon generation available and the Sewstern Lane Wind Farm would produce enough electricity to meet the needs of up to 9,658 homes each year, which is equivalent to 6.4% of all households in South Kesteven.’

“We have carried out public consultation on our proposals with the local community and if the scheme is consented, we are committed to establishing a community benefit fund which would provide a guaranteed income of at least £90,000 per annum over 25 years, for local residents to spend on community projects and initiatives.”

Windweasels in Australia, Prove They are Hostile Witnesses!

Thai Turbine-Terrorist, RATCH Scores Monumental “Own Goal” during Senate’s Wind Farm Inquiry

head slap

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The Australian Senate’s Inquiry into the great wind power fraud resumed on 18 May in Cairns, Far North Queensland.

One of the main topics for the day was the arrogant and high-handed misconduct of RATCH; and its efforts to ride roughshod over the rights of communities on the Atherton Tablelands – surrounding its threatened Mt Emerald wind farm. Although, given that its Thai parent is looking to ditch its Australian “asset” – as if it were a new, more virulent form of herpes – RATCH won’t be around long enough to follow through on the pending debacle:

Wind Power Ponzi Scheme Implodes: IFM Investors Ditches Pac Hydro & Pac Hydro, AGL and RATCH Ditch Wind Farms

Over 90% of locals are bitterly opposed to, yet another, pointless, economic and environmental disaster (see our posts here and here). No surprises there.

Confirming what locals have known all along, RATCH’s goons, true to form, behaved like a band of ham-fisted prats – starting with an attempt to cover up “pre-emptive” land clearing efforts.

Mount Emerald wind farm poisoning claims aired at Senate hearing in Cairns
ABC Online
Kirsty Nancarrow
18 May 2015

A Senate committee hearing on wind turbines has heard claims of poisoning on the site of a proposed wind farm in far north Queensland.

About 50 Atherton Tablelands’ residents opposed to the Mount Emerald wind farm attended yesterday’s hearing in Cairns.

The Queensland Government recently approved a controversial proposal to build 63 wind turbines at Mount Emerald but the project is yet to gain federal approval.

Tablelands regional councillor Marjorie Pagani told the hearing, it appeared clearing began on the site before RATCH Australia received State Government approval for the project.

“There are poisoned tracks either side of the creek,” she said.

“It’s very clearly depicted. Cracking of the trees which is caused by poison, a stench of poison in all the waterways and if one goes outside the turbine proposed circles it’s thick, lush cypress pine vegetation and undergrowth.”

A noise specialist, Robert Thorne, told the hearing, the conditions placed on the wind farm could not be enforced.

Dr Thorne, who previously studied sound levels on Mount Emerald for the Tablelands Regional Council, told the hearing, there were flaws in the current regulation of wind farms.

“They can’t be enforced, they’re impractical, they’re ambiguous, in basis they’re unreasonable both to the wind farm operator, because it doesn’t say how long this has to work for, and the residents, because there’s no complaints process,” he said..

RATCH rejects wind farm site poisoning claims

RATCH’s Anil Nangia said it would investigate the poisoning claims but rejected the allegations.

“There’s certainly not been any poisoning or chemicals put on site that we’re aware of,” he said. “We certainly haven’t done any land clearing that we’re aware of. “The turbine site hasn’t been finalised. We’re still going through the conditions of the DA [development application] which requires us to have a 1.5 kilometre setback from the nearest residence.” He said he was confident the company could comply with any regulations. “We’re happy to work with the committee. If there is some scientific basis for new conditions we will comply with those,” he said.  “We believe that there’s already been eight inquiries in the last five years into the wind farm and all of them have found that wind farms are operated under the required rules and regulations and there’s been no issues with the wind farm’s operation and maintenance.”

The Senate committee is due to report in early August.
ABC Online

Hmmm … it wouldn’t be the first time that RATCH’s operatives have been caught gilding the lily. One of their “best” – Nick Valentine – was caught out using a fictitious handle – Frank Bestic – in order to infiltrate RATCH’s opponents at Collector in NSW (see our posts here and here and here).

Arrogance and hubris aren’t normally seen as beneficial attributes for employees in the main; save in the wind power business, where they’re obviously essential prerequisites, as this story (also from the Cairn’s Senate hearing) proves.

Comic fail by Tableland wind farm developer
The Cairns Post
Daniel Bateman
19 May 2015

THE developer of the Mt Emerald wind farm has caused outrage by tabling a cartoon that ridiculed opponents of wind turbines at a Senate hearing in Cairns – and then asked Senators to colour it in with pencils.

About 60 people – a majority residents from the Tableland – packed the public hearing yesterday morning to hear Ratch Australia questioned by the Select Committee on Wind Turbines about the regulatory governance and economic impact of the $380 million project.

The wind farm, to be built near Walkamin early next year, was granted State approval last month.

The joint venture with local property developer Port Bajool has faced stiff local opposition for about four years from residents concerned about potential adverse health and environmental effects from the turbines.

During the inquiry, Ratch Australia project development manager Joseph Hallenstein presented a First Dog on the Moon cartoon from news website Crikey that portrays the anti-wind turbine lobby as conspiracy theorists that fear wind farms could cause them to fall off horses.

“I printed out black and white copies and I thought that maybe you could get some coloured pencils from reception and colour them in later on,’’ Mr Hallenstein told the hearing.

Committee chairman, Victorian independent Senator John Madigan, said it was disappointing the developer had attacked people’s legitimate concerns about wind farms.

“It reflects quite poorly upon the company when one of their representatives engages in this sort of behaviour,” he told the Cairns Post.

“Any serious business, when there are questions about the product they are providing is causing harm, would seek to establish whether that is the case, and take reasonable precautions against it occurring.

“We have received compelling evidence, as a Committee, that there actually might be an issue with infrasound.”

Ratch Australia business development manager Anil Nangia later told reporters the company did indeed take the Senate inquiry seriously.

“The cartoon was meant to bring a bit of humour to the debate,’’ he said.

“It was not meant to show any disrespect to the Senators and it was just meant to show that this topic can be dealt in a mature way, with a bit of humour as well.

“It doesn’t need to be taken so seriously.”

The company was also questioned by the committee on whether any government subsidies it would receive from the development over its 25-year lifespan – estimated to be more than $500 million – was a good deal for taxpayers.

Mr Nangia told the hearing the funding would be spread throughout Ratch’s other properties across Australia.

Mr Canavan said the money should be spent on further studies to determine whether there were health impacts associated with wind farms.

“A few million would help fill the scientific gap,’’ he said.
Cairns Post

senate review

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What a fine piece of advocacy from RATCH’s Joseph Hallenstein!

His efforts at ‘persuasion’ went down like the Hindenberg – suddenly and in a fiery mess: “gormless”, doesn’t quite cover it.

One of the general rules of pitching a case is to know as much about your intended audience as possible, before clearing your throat and launching off on your mission to convince them of the merits of your argument.

Had Hallenstein bothered to do even a little rudimentary homework, he would have noted the attitude of the Senators to the wholly unnecessary adverse health impacts being suffered by wind farm neighbours going into the hearing. He would have noticed comments in the mainstream press by the likes of SA Senator, Bob Day describing the moving evidence given at Portland by Pac Hydro’s victims as “harrowing”:

Australian Senators – Day, Leyonhjelm & Canavan – Line Up to Can Big Wind

Not that it matters much, given what the Senators have already heard, and the hundreds of submissions made to like effect, but the efforts of the clowns from RATCH have only served to stiffen the Senators’ resolve to smack into the systematic regulatory failure and insidious institutional corruption at every level of government.

STT’s happy to call it an “own goal” – and to thank RATCH for putting forward people that can only serve to reinforce what STT followers have long ago concluded, about the stench that pervades an “industry” that’s rotten to its subsidy-soaked core.

own goal

Climate Change Scare, is nothing but a tool, for Wealth Redistribution….

UN Negotiating Text For Climate Agreement Opens Up Gravy Train

How the UN is 'breaking bad' with taxpayer money.How the UN is ‘breaking bad’ with U.S. taxpayer money.In December the United Nations will convene in Paris, for the purpose of hammering out an international agreement on climate change. Reaching an agreement has become a“legacy issue” for President Obama, and his administration is devoting enormous resources towards the successful completion of this task.

In March the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change distributed draft language to serve as options for the agreement that may be decided in December. In a previous IER post I showed how the two climate change goals adopted in the UN text could not be justified, using the UN’s own scientific reports, and how the draft language opened the doors to massive international bureaucracies.

In this post I’ll focus specifically on the enormous wealth transfers from rich to poor countries that are being proposed in the draft—as high as annual transfers in excess of $100 billion from the United States alone, according to some of the language.

To be sure, at this stage these ludicrous suggestions are merely a “wish list,” but average Americans should realize just how much of their money will be on the buffet line when the UN delegates meet in December. In November President Obama already pledged $3 billion for such efforts, and the new UN proposal shows how much more the most zealous advocates have in mind.

The UN’s $100 Billion+ Bonanza

Anyone with the stamina to click on the link and skim through the UN’s draft language will see that the 90-page document is very redundant. However, the following excerpt gives a good sampling of a theme reiterated throughout:

  1. [Scale of resources provided by developed country Parties shall be based on a percentage of their GNP of at least (X per cent) taking into consideration the following:
  2. The provision of finance to be based on a floor of USD 100 billion per year, and shall take into account the different assessment of climate-related finance needs prepared by the secretariat and reports by other international organizations;
  3. Based on an ex ante process to commit quantified support relative to the required effort and in line with developing countries’ needs… [UNFCCC Negotiating Text, p. 43]

Later on, in section 96, the document states, “a. Developed country Parties to provide 1 per cent of gross domestic product per year from 2020 and additional funds during the pre-2020 period to the GCF [Green Climate Fund]…” (bold added).

Thus we see that this negotiating text contains more than a simple pledge for various countries to cap their emissions—it also includes enormous transfers of money from rich to developing countries. If the particular suggestion quoted above from section 96 were to be implemented, it would entail some $175 billion annually in transfers from Americans (because U.S. GDP is currently above $17.5 trillion). Note that this is in addition to conventional foreign aid programs—the UN document makes that clear, elsewhere. The sole (ostensible) purpose of these dedicated funds is to help poorer countries deal with climate change. The recipient countries will no doubt be quite creative in justifying all sorts of infrastructure and other spending projects necessary to combat climate change.

Now, a reasonable reader might think, “Well, supposing the ‘pause’ in global warming continues, they’d probably scale back the funds needed for adaptation, right?” But such common sense would be mistaken. On page 22 of the document we learn that “since adaptation efforts will need to be undertaken far in advance of the temperature rise,” therefore “planning for adaptation and undertaking adaptation should be based on an evaluation of temperature scenarios that are expected to result from particular levels of mitigation action…

In other words, the authors of this proposed treaty language want the transfer spigot turned on with no accountability. So long as they can point to future damages that occur inside a computer simulation, the United States and other wealthy countries will be expected to cough up billions of dollars to fight the computer-projected threat of future climate change damage.

Already, the Green Climate Fund is beefing up staff, with openings ranging from “gender social specialist” to“marketing consultant” whose duties include “helping to shape the brand of the fund.” It is quite clear from the bureaucratic progress of the Green Climate Fund that they mean business (of some kind) and are counting on the money to fund their multiple activities.

Conclusion

The UN has released the Negotiating Text of the possible treaty that may come out of talks in Paris in December. Americans should familiarize themselves with the main items contained in this document. In a previous IER post I showed that the UN document adopts climate change goals that the UN’s own reports can’t justify, and furthermore would create a huge new international bureaucracy.

In the present post, I quoted from the document to show the desire to fund these unaccountable extra-national organizations with an enormous flow of money taken from rich countries. Although the demands are so ludicrous that they should be viewed as a “wish list,” it is nonetheless instructive—and alarming—to see just how expensive they could be. According to one idea contained in the text that the UN has released, the U.S. would be expected to contribute more than $175 billion annually into the giant pot of money. President Obama in November already pledged $3 billion to such an effort. How far do Americans want to go along?

Source

The Horrific Slaughter of Birds, Even Endangered Species, is Hidden by the Wind Industry.

Covering up the massacre

GRULLA MONTES CIERZO
European crane.
Unlike cats, cars and buildings, wind turbines kill cranes, eagles, storks etc.


Wind farms: a slaughter kept hidden from the public
15 May 2015


Submission to the Australian Senate – updated version
WIND TURBINES SELECT COMMITTEE
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600


Subject:
Impact of wind turbines on bird and bat populations



Distinguished Senators of the Commonwealth of Australia,


Australian members of our organisation have complained to us that mortality predictions being used in Australia to assess the impacts of wind turbines on birds and bats are minimised to a level that thoroughly misleads decision makers. To wit, in a widely used report prepared for the Australian Government by consultant Biosis Research Pty Ltd, we read: “the additional mortality predicted for the cumulative effects of turbine collisions for wind farms within the range of the Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle (TWTE) is likely to result in the additional death of approximately one bird per annum” (1). Yet, actual eagle mortality at just one of the 7 wind farms considered by the study turned out to be 3.2 eagles per year, according to the operator of the Woolnorth wind farm (2). Dr. Stephen Debus puts the number at 5 TWTE per year (3). As the 6 other wind farms have not been monitored, “there might be tens of eagle deaths per year in Tasmania” (from blade strikes), adds Dr. Debus. Of these, the vast majority concerns the TWTE: at the Woolnorth wind farm, from 20 eagles killed in 4 years, 17 were TWTEs and 3 were white-bellied sea eagles (2).


The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle, a (bigger) sub-species of the Wedge-tailed Eagle, numbered only 130 successful breeding pairs in 2010 according to the state’s National Parks and Wildlife Service (2) – and obviously less now, as the killings are allowed to continue. It is classified as “endangered”. The result of the misleading assessment of Biosis will be to condemn to extinction the largest of Australia’s eagles.


I analysed the Biosis TWTE study in 2010, and found disturbing “errors” in it, huge ones at that, totalling two orders of magnitude. So I wrote an open letter to the authors (4). They failed to reply. Australian ornithologists, which had been copied on it, also kept silent. The letter generated record levels of traffic on the Iberica 2000 website that had published it, but nobody responded, no one. Apparently, nobody wanted to hear the bad news, let alone acknowledge them, especially ornithologists, bird societies, and even the media, enthralled as they all are by the “goodness” of wind turbines. In fact, I realised that everyone had an interest in continuing business as usual. And business as usual it has been, in the five years that followed to this date. As we speak, mendacious mortality predictions from eager-to-please consultants continue to be used to promote wind farms across your great country.


The Tasmanian situation was resolved by making sure that no more news of eagles killed by wind farms on the island would be published by the media. This cover-up is now 5 years old, and has been quite effective: no news of eagle mortality has transpired from Woolnorth or any other Tasmanian wind farm.


I shall come back to the matter of unethical consultants and bird societies later, but I would like to cite another example briefly, to make my point. It’s about the Macarthur wind farm, in Victoria. Before the project was built, consultants had estimated that the level of bird activity was low in the area, and that the impact on birds would be insignificant. But after construction, a monitoring surveycounted the carcasses and estimated the death toll at about 1500 birds in one year, including nearly 500 raptors – among which 6 wedge-tailed eagles) (5). So much for the negligible bird mortality…


This scenario is repeating itself at wind farms all over the world, wherever post-construction monitoring surveys are performed. My experience has been that predicted rates of mortality are often two orders of magnitude (100 times) lower than reality. The monitoring surveys themselves play their part, by never reflecting the full extent of the death toll (for technical reasons – e.g. the insufficient size of the area searched under each turbine * – as well as conflicts of interest).
* search area: a 50-meter-radius circle around each mast, whereas a 150-meter-tall wind turbine can project the body of a small bird 200 meters away and beyond).




MANIPULATED MORTALITY STATISTICS


It is my duty, as President of the World Council for Nature, to bring to your attention the true extent of the carnage which is taking place at wind farms around the world, including Australia. The deception being staged by consultants in order to fool people and their governments will have unfathomed consequences for wildlife, biodiversity, natural habitats, and the health of forests and agriculture. We are facing widespread corrupt behavior, which is putting private interests ahead of the common good.


In Australia, but also elsewhere, consultants mislead decision-makers by predicting insignificant mortality. We have seen the case of the Macarthur wind farm. In Europe it is much the same, e.g. in France the official mortality estimate is about one bird/turbine/year (6). Here again,consultants willing to please the wind industry, their main employer, are the source of the deception.


In the US, the latest nationwide windfarm mortality estimates are Dr. Smallwood’s 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats per year, i.e. almost 15 birds and 23 bats per turbine (7). But there are also European estimates of interest: for instance, extrapolating to Germany the findings of reknowned Dutch biologist J.E. Winkelman, ornithologistBernd Koop had calculated that annual mortality would be 60,000 – 100,000 birds per Gigawatt of installed wind capacity (8). For today’s Germany, which has 39 Gigawatts, this would add up to 2,340,000 – 3,900,000 dead birds a year.


The Koop estimate is much closer to reality, which was revealed in 2012 by a comprehensive evaluation of wind farm mortality by the Spanish ornithological society SEO-BirdLife (Sociedad Española de Ornitología). In response to a request based on the right to information in environmental matters (Aarhus Convention), SEO has obtained copies of 136 monitoring studies of wind farms, studies that the Spanish government had filed without publishing. Having analysed them, SEO researchers estimated the mortality as follows: Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines kill on average 6 – 18 million birds and bats a year. Considering that wind turbines kill roughly twice as many bats as birds, this comes to a death toll of 100 – 300 birds and 200 – 600 bats per turbine per year (9). Averaging these numbers, we can say that, on average, each wind turbine kills 200 birds and 400 bats a year. For the Macarthur wind farm: 200 birds x 140 turbines = 28,000 birds a year, as opposed to 1,500 estimated by monitoring consultants.


These figures are actually shy of the first estimates of two decades ago. In a study published by an agency of the California government, the California Energy Commission, we can read as follows: “In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al. (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden(10). We are very far indeed from the 1 bird per turbine/year being routinely predicted by some remarkably mendacious consultants or government agencies.




THE COVER-UP


Something obviously happened between the high mortality found in the early days of wind farms by biologists such as Winkelman, Benner, Lekuona, Everaert etc. and present estimates as low as 1 bird per turbine/year being “predicted” in Australia, France, the UK etc. Could it be that actual mortality has come down to such a low level?
– Not in the least: if you need convincing, see the mortality at Altamont Pass, Macarthur, Wolfe Island etc.


What actually happened was that powerful political and financial interests have worked together towards deceiving our perception of mortality from wind turbines – i.e. putting in place a cover-up. To succeed in this mystification, it was essential to obtain the cooperation of ornithological NGOs. This was generally done by way of donations, and a plethora of attractive contracts: impact studies for wind projects, monitoring avian mortality once the projects are built, modelling ornithological mortality etc… In countries with high penetration of “green” energy, the wind industry quickly became the main employer of ornithologists.


In Spain, Iberdrola and Banco Triodos (the renewable energies’ bank) used to make donations to SEO-Birdlife amounting to nearly 25% of its budget. After a number of years, this finally caused some dissension among members, eventually resulting in the departure of the General Manager, Alejandro Sánchez, in 2010 (11). Less than two years later, the ornithological society published its estimate of windfarm mortality in Spain, revealing the enormity of the massacre (9). But their report was neither published nor mentioned by ornithological societies in other countries –what better proof of the collusion between wind interests and ornithology?


An average of 200 dead birds per turbine per year is not at all surprising: it is less than one bird per 24 hours. It could easily be more, considering that song birds migrate at night, to avoid overheating. On moonless nights, all they can see from the turbines are the position lights on the nacelles, while the blades are slashing through the air at up to 300 km/h, invisible, up to 30, 40 or 50 meters away…


Accidents also happen during the day, particularly in the case of those species that are attracted to wind turbines(12). This attraction puts their lives in danger, because the blades can reach speeds of 300 km/h at the tip (see further below). It is the case for swallows, swifts and other birds that catch insects on the wing; Professor Ahlén found that they look for insects that are themselves attracted to wind turbines (12).

THE CASE OF RAPTORS


It is also the case of raptors, which are attracted by dead or wounded birds or bats that lie under the turbines, or by the mice and rabbits that live there. Indeed, rodents find plenty of food in these open spaces covered in gramineae; also, it is easy to dig burrows where the soil has been softened up by foundation work – see picture below.

cottontail Altamont
Rabbit in front of its burrow, Altamont Pass wind farm, California – (first generation turbines).



Perched on the still blades (picture further below), or on the nacelles, birds of prey have a commanding view of this exceptional hunting territory. Many will hunt successfully without getting struck by a blade. But their very success will cause their brains to establish a connection between wind turbines and great hunting opportunities. Thus, when they spot some wind turbines, which may be seen from many miles away, they will be attracted to them. Young, unattached raptors will therefore visit many windfarms, and so will adults on migration. Breeding adults, on the other hand, will only visit the wind turbines within their territories, but will do it over and over again. In either case, the more time they spend near the turbines, the greater the chances they will be struck by a blade, the speed of which it is very easy to misjudge .


For birds as for humans, the blades appear to be moving at a leisurly pace. Yet, they travel at up to 300km/h at their tip. Here is the calculation for a 2.3 MW ENERCON Model E-70: 71m (diameter) x 3.14 = circumference of 223m x 21.5 revolutions per minute (in winds above 45 km/h) = 4.794m travelled by the tip of each blade in a minute x 60 minutes = 287,640m travelled in an hour, i.e. at a speed of 287km/h. In low winds, the speed is of 100 – 200 km/h. The difference between apparent slowness and actual high speed, plus the attraction they exert, are what turn wind turbines into deadly traps for birds and bats.


Raptors, experience has shown, are prone to be decimated by wind turbines (13). Yet these birds are very useful to us, as they control certain animal populations (rats, mice, rabbits, and nest plunderers such as magpies, crows etc.). They also eliminate sick or dead animals, thus preventing epidemics and contributing to the health of many species. Their role is important for the maintenance of natural balances, biodiversity and ecosystems. Yet, a new peer-reviewed study is alerting us that wind turbines are partly responsible for the coming extinction of some species of raptors (in southern Europe). One of them, the Egyptian Vulture, is seeing its population of breeding adults decline by 3-4% per year (14). This spectacular glider is already very rare in Europe, and millions of euros have been spent for its protection (and its reintroduction in France).

2_blade_perching_tubular
Photo: Red-tailed hawk perched on a blade, Altamont Pass, California.





Perching opportunities make wind turbines attractive to raptors, so does the prey or carcasses to be found under them (as we commented above). Here are more pictures (15), and videos (25 and 26) proving the point. But consultants promote the fiction that raptors “avoid” wind turbines, and the ornithology profession turns a blind eye to that baseless assertion, all of which is helping their common employers: wind farm promoters. But if raptors avoided wind turbines, why would so many be killed by their blades? (13).


Consultants use a wide array of deceptive tricks, which they developped over the years. I listed some of them years ago in an article, “the Shame of Scotland” (16). One of these tricks has been pushed to unprecedented levels in Australia: the “core-range manipulation” (16). There, consultants have decided, based upon unscientific, biased and unpublishedobservations, that wind turbines can be safely erected as close as 300 meters from the nests of eagles or other raptors. For instance, in the Bulgana Windfarm Flora and Fauna Assessment Report No. 13051 (7.6), page 97, we read: “Previous studies on wind farms have shown that resident Wedge-tailed Eagles are able to successfully nest and raise young on wind farms, if turbines are located at least 300 metres away (BL&A unpublished data )”.

Years ago, I debunked an identical assertion which was based on 24 searches spread over two years at theChallicum Hills wind farm – hardly constituting solid scientific evidence, to say the least. Biosis even admitted:“the work does not discount the possibility of WT eagle collisions” (17). Yet the fiction perdures, and wind turbines continue to be erected in Australia as close as 300 meters from eagle and other raptors’ nests. Nowhere else in the world are protected birds being treated so carelessly. We have seen the tragic results of this attitude at Woolnorth, Macarthur, Starfish Hill, etc. Australia’s eagles are being slaughtered, but the cover-up keeps Australians uninformed.


By contrast, Scottish raptor expert Michael J. McGrady recommends a 5 km buffer zone for the Golden Eagle, in the peer-reviewed study “A model of golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) ranging behavior”, J. Raptor Res. 36 (1 Supplement): 62-69 – by McGrady, M.J., Grant, J. R., Baingridge, I. P. & David R.A. McLeod D.R.A. (2002) (18). This study and its recommendation are mentioned in SEO-Birdlife’s guide for the assessment of windfarms as regards bird life, in which one can find the buffer zones recommended by scientists for various protected bird species (18). The shortest is 1 km, for the smallest of the kestrel species. For eagles, they vary from 5 to 10 km (18). Ospreys (“Águila pescadora” in Spanish): 2 km. Peregrine falcons: 2 – 4 km. Cranes: 10 km.




PLUNDERING NATURE WITH PUBLIC FUNDS


Out of control windfarm development is hurting many protected species, riding as it does on the optimistic estimates put out by hired consultants, government agencies, bird societies, the wind industry and its agents, pro-wind activists etc. It is also facilitated by considerable flows of public money, in the form of subsidies, tax credits, special loans, carbon certificates, etc. These millions of dollars (billions in those countries that have thousands of wind turbines) enable private interests to remove all obstacles to their greed, and this includes overriding nature protection legislation. Migration routes and stopover areas, shrinking habitat of threatened species (e.g. brolgas), high bird-traffic areas bordering natural reserves (e.g. Bald Hills, Victoria), nothing is sacred: the plunder has no limits.


Planning authorities which give the green light to wind projects rarely have other bird data at hand than what’s reported in impact studies prepared by unethical consultants. I read about a hundred of these reports over the past 12 years, and none concluded that the impact on the environment would be unacceptable, even when the project was to be located inside a protected nature reserve, or was threatening an endangered species with extinction. None of them was honest, without errors or omissions, and free of manipulations.




MITIGATION


To obtain approval for wind projects that will highly impact protected species, consultants usually suggest applying some techniques for avoiding, minimising, or attenuating the risks of collision. They call these “mitigation”. But we must be aware that none of these schemes, none of these formulas have proved effective. Wherever they have been implemented, they have failed (Altamont Pass, Woolnorth, Smola, Tarifa). The President of the French bird society LPO-Birdlife acknowledged the fact that mitigation does not work (19).


In situations where opponents to a wind project have raised the issue of bat mortality, consultants often propose a mitigation which consists in increasing the cut-in wind speed to, say, 6 meters per second. This means not letting the blades rotate unless the speed of the wind exceeds 22 km/h. The idea is that, as few bats fly when the wind exceeds that speed, mortality will be reduced by about 90%. We would comment on this particular mitigation as follows:

First observation: the promised reduction in mortality to 90% has not been verified. To our knowledge, no wind farm has put this measure into practice and published the results.

Second observation: a 10% residual mortality is considered by consultants to be negligible, as if it were acceptable to kill 1.2 million bats per year instead of 12 million (supposing a country that has, or will have, 18,000 wind turbines as in Spain). Most bat species are endangered, all are extremely useful. Killing them in such numbers is irresponsible. Also consider that the figure of 1,2 million will be much higher, as a) the reduction to 10% is unproven, b) only few wind projects contemplate “bat mitigation”.

Third observation: the practical application of such a measure is not verifiable . Indeed, who would make sure that, during 25 years, the computer program controlling the feathering of the blades a) reflects that mitigation, b) is in good order and c) is being applied? The interest of the windfarm owner is to not apply it, as it reduces his income. Thus, inspectors would be needed, but who would pay them during 25 years? It would have to be the State. And who would ensure that the operators of the wind farms will not “convince” these civil servants to turn a blind eye? Indeed, wind farms are often associated with corruption (20).




BATS


Thus, mitigation of bat mortality is doubtful at best. Yet bats are killed in bigger numbers than birds – about twice as many, i.e. circa 400 per turbine/year, or one bat per turbine/night. According to a study published in France, bats“are the most valuable fauna group” (in French:«constituent le groupe faunistique ayant la plus forte valeur patrimoniale» )(21). Indeed, bat species are very useful to humans, but they all are in decline. To make things worse, their populations cannot recover easily, most females only raising one pup a year.

Many of the chiropter species are classified as threatened with extinction. This is especially worrying because, without bats, farmers, the forest industry, and national forestry administrations would have to use more pesticides to control insects that attack trees and crops. This would lead to undesirable effects on prices and on the health of citizens. Services rendered by bats to US agriculture have been valued at $3.7 billion – $53 billion annually (22). That we know of, no evaluation has been made for services rendered by chiropters to forestry, but their usefulness in controlling some forest pests is recognised (23). Yet they are being killed in their millions by wind turbines. This is causing considerable harm to the environment.


In this video (24), we see bats getting hit by turbine blades, and others falling to the ground due to “barotrauma” (fatal injuries in the lungs caused by large pressure differences created around the blades).




COMPENSATION


The ineffectiveness of mitigation resulted in wily consultants proposing yet another deceptive scheme: “compensation”. This stratagem is useful to businesses that are causing serious harm to nature as a result of their activities. So much so that “offset programs” (27) are being set up, fooling people into believing that destroying more nature can be compensated. “No net biodiverity loss” is the publicised goal, but it is yet another scam to facilitate more plundering of nature. It boggles the mind to see most ecologists and bird societies support this. Here again, ethics vanish where there is money to be made…


Natural wetlands cannot be replaced by man-made reservoirs, any more than destroying primary tropical forests can be compensated by planting eucalyptus, nor killing birds of a protected species can be offset by giving money to a bird society. This scheme of redeeming one’s ecological sins with money is not without parallel with the indulgences that were sold by the Church in the Middle Ages.


Compensation is increasingly being used in the windfarm business. For instance, it is being alleged that, if new hunting areas for raptors are created nearby, it is acceptable to install wind turbines in their breeding territories. But this only works on paper. It hasn’t been successful anywhere in the world. The example of Beinn an Tuirc, Scotland, is sometimes quoted by some consultant as a reference. But this example is anything but conclusive. I exposed its false claim to success years ago (28).


The since-discovered fact that raptors are attracted to wind turbines further proves the ineffectiveness of this compensation. A wind farm is a giant bird trap which acts as a population sink, attracting its victims from many miles around. Nothing can compensate this ongoing massacre. Creating new hunting grounds next to it is as absurd as “killing the children but building orphanages”. .


No government in the world has considered objectively the cumulative effects of so many wind turbines, each of them an ecological trap attracting and killing many protected species. Some residents report that, since wind turbines were built, there are no more bats where they live; others noted that they see fewer and fewer raptors. Swallows and swifts are becoming rarer too, according to others.


The situation is serious, if only because these species are of great benefit to humanity. Natural equilibriums are also at risk, and so is quality of life. Are we willing to replace our countryside with industrial landscapes, our birds and bats with crop dusters? Where are we headed, with this “green” ideology which destroys nature by calling for a new, unnecessary industrial revolution, and misleads people into thinking it’s for the greater good of the planet?


What an awful mess are these ideologues making of our world, under the pretext of saving it… The wind industry has never been able to prove it can achieve its goal of significantly reducing harmful emissions. The wind’s intermittency stands in its way. The German experience is far from being conclusive in this regard, to say the least (29). A few years from now, when all the expensive tinkering will have failed (more power lines, international connections, smart meters, giant batteries, reservoirs and pumping stations, etc.), the Germans will have to face the harsh reality: wind intermittency has no economically viable solution.


Independent engineers keep repeating it (30), but stubborn governments are not listening. Through the famous “revolving door” of politics, wind power subsidies help finance political parties. Thus, cutting subsidies would be suicide for the party that would decide to do so (30). The wind industry clearly calls the shots, be it in Canberra, Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Paris or Washington.


The renewable energy bubble has burst in Spain and other southern European countries. It occurred when the cost of subsidies became unaffordable, i.e. when these countries became technically bankrupt and HAD to cut down on government expenses. When this happened, the so-called “green jobs” vanished. The countries were left with households impoverished by the high cost of “renewable” electricity. Some companies relocated abroad due to this cost, or are contemplating doing so. Tourists looking for nature, landscapes and relaxation choose other destinations. In the countryside, residents are poorer as their homes are worth a fraction of their normal value. Many live unhappy lives because of the Wind Turbine Syndrome, shorter too as they suffer chronically from high levels of cortisol. As for the birds, they keep being chopped up year after year…


Mark Duchamp
Chairman, World Council for Nature
Tél: +34 693 643 736 wcfn@live.com


References:


1) –http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2d42fcbd-31ea-4739-b109-b420571338a3/files/wind-farm-bird-risk.pdf page 32 of TWTE modelling study


2) – http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/deaths-of-rare-eagles-rise-20101116-17vy7.html


3) –http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/eolica/BIRD_MORTALITY/Yaloak_South_Debus_comments.pdf


4) – http://www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=4382


5) –http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/news/national/wind-farm-turbines-take-toll-on-birds-of-prey/story-fnkfnspy-1227066199577


(6) – http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/2007/03/19/01008-20070319ARTFIG90140-l_effet_des_eoliennes_sur_les_oiseaux.php


(7) –http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.260/abstract


(8) – (Koop B., 1997. Vogelzug und Windenergieplanung. Beispiele für Auswirkungen aus dem Kreis Plön (Schleswig-Holstein). Naturschutz und Landschaftsplanung 29 (7): 202-207).


(9) –http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/releases/spanish-wind-farms-kill-6-to-18-million-birds-bats-a-year.html


(10) –http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/EOLICA/REPORTS/Dave_Sterner_2002.pdfPage 12, 1er paragraphe.


(11) –http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_S%C3%A1nchez_P%C3%A9rez


(12) – http://wcfn.org/2013/07/24/biodiversity-alert/


(13) – Some of the eagles killed by wind turbines (tip of the iceberg)
http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=3071 – Last updated in 2006

– Some of the ospreys killed by wind turbines (tip of the iceberg)
http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/843-2.html

– Effects on red kites
http://rapaces.lpo.fr/sites/default/files/milan-royal/63/actesmilan150.pdf (pages 96, 97).


(14) – Study “Action on multiple fronts, illegal poisoning and wind farm planning, is required to reverse the decline of the Egyptian vulture in southern Spain”
Ana Sanz-Aguilar, José Antonio Sánchez-Zapata, Martina Carrete, José Ramón Benítez, Enrique Ávila, Rafael Arenas f, José Antonio Donázar (a).
Study published on April 21 2015 by ELSEVIER, Biological Conservation, Volume 187, July 2015, pages 10–18
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320715001408


(15) – –https://savetheeagles.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/raptors-attracted-to-windfarms-2/


(16) – The Shame of Scotland:http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=3426
See –> ” 3 . THE CORE RANGE MANIPULATION ”


(17) – http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=4313
See –> ” 4 – The precedent of Challicum Hills ”


(18) – https://www.seo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MANUAL-MOLINOS-VERSION-31_WEB.pdf
See –> Annex II, pages 106 and 107
Literature review of recommended buffer zones and sizes of home range for eagles and other raptors.


(19) –https://conseilmondialpourlanature.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lpo-et-systemes-de-dissuasion-avienne/


(20) – http://wcfn.org/2015/04/22/huge-wind-farm-corruption-scandal-in-spain/


(21) –http://www.aude.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/Etude_d_impacts_CVO_21-06-2013_Partie2_cle55bcf8.pdf
See –> page 89


(22) –
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2743#.VU4hv_ntmkp


(23) –http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4186828/


(24) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/bats-struck-by-wind-turbines.html


(25) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/vulture-struck-by-wind-turbine.html


(26) – VIDEO http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/vultures-killed-videos.html


(27) – http://bbop.forest-trends.org/


(28) –http://www.iberica2000.org/Documents/eolica/BIRD_MORTALITY/Critique_Beinn_an_Tuirc_report.rtf


(29) –
http://online.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602 Available upon request to wcfn@live.com


(30) – http://www.epaw.org/documents.php?lang=en&matter=backup


(31) – http://en.friends-against-wind.org/realities/windfarms-are-only-good-for-financing-political-parties



X X X

Climate Alarmists Do Not Like Facts….They Only Get In the Way!

Another pre-COP21 Attack by the Shrill

Posted: 16 May 2015 01:08 AM PDT

As we approach Paris COP21 in December, the Alarmists have a problem. The Public are deserting the ranks of the true believers. The planet hasn’t warmed for around 20 years.

As Marine Biologist Walter Stark wrote last year: (Link Quadrant On Line)

Be scared, the experts tell us, be very scared. Well there is certainly cause for concern, but not about those “rising” temperatures, which refuse to confirm researchers’ computer models. A far bigger worry is the corruption that has turned ‘science’ into a synonym for shameless, cynical careerism.

So that the delegates to COP21 have something to fall back on, the Shrill are getting shriller.

Take the attack by Daily Kos’ Judah Freed on International Climate Science Coalition’s Tom Harris.

Tom posted a reply but it disappeared faster than a white ant in sunlight. Curiously, Mr Freed’s piece was titled “Facing the Facts and Fictions of the Climate Change Deniers.” Curious, because Mr Freed’s piece lacked facts and was full of fiction.

Here is some of Mr Harris’ responses. (LINK)

Mr. Freed writes: “Please see through this misleading public relations campaign by paid climate change deniers.”

Tom Harris responds: I am not now, nor have I ever been involved in a “public relations campaign,” paid or otherwise.

Freed writes: “Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) is touting guest editorials across North America that it is “ridiculous” to think that only industry-funded “deniers” are claiming that climate change is not real.”

Harris responds: We are not climate change deniers. Climate change has been “real” since the formation of the atmosphere billions of years ago. We advocate helping people adapt to the sometimes dangerous impacts of climate change and continuing the research so that someday we may be able to forecast future climate states. We have essentially no chance of controlling them, however.

Freed: “What’s ridiculous is that Harris and the ICSC themselves are industry-funded climate change deniers.”

Harris: ICSC funding has been 100% confidential since I took over as Executive Director in March 2008. This is obviously to protect our donors from attacks by aggressive climate campaigners….

How often do the Shrill resort to this untruth. The Alarmists funding far exceeds the pittance that we realists receive.

Harris:  I find it interesting that he seems to have no problem with climate campaigners who share his point of view receiving industry funding. I have no problem with that either, which is why we do not criticize them for it. It would be a motive intent logical fallacy to do otherwise. Indeed, we are jealous of their access to the vast resources of corporations.

Freed: “Harris himself had been the Ottawa operations director of the High Park Group, a Toronto-based public policy and public relations firm specializing in energy industry clients like the transnational Areva nuclear power group, the Canadian Electricity Association, and the Canadian Gas Association.”

Harris: For five months in 2006, I worked for High Park Group out of my basement office in Ottawa. Their clients included solar and wind power companies as well as those Freed names. Would this make them biased in the direction of the climate scare? No, they were just a communications company doing what communications companies do—conducting communications for their clients. I have never been involved in public relations or lobbying.

Freed: “According to geochemist and U.S. National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science (Columbia University Press, 2011), rather than supporting open-minded scientific inquiry, closed-minded “denier organizations like the ICSC know the answers and seek only confirmation that they are right.””

Harris: The exact opposite is the case. ICSC repeatedly calls for “open-minded scientific inquiry” in which all reputable points of view are given a fair hearing. Perhaps Powell was speaking about climate alarmist groups when he spoke about entities that “know the answers and seek only confirmation that they are right.”

Freed: “Harris and the ICSC have promoted a skeptical climate change report produced by the Heartland Institute, identified by SourceWatch and others as a front for the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers, the primary backers of the Tea Party.”

Harris: According to the Heartland Web page http://blog.heartland.org/2014/04/response-to-a-critic-of-climate-realists-and-the-nipcc-reports/:

“None of the NIPCC reports — ZERO — have been funded with corporate money. They are funded by family foundations that have no interest in the energy sector. The Funding for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change reports (see www.climatechangereconsidered.org) comes from two family foundations.”

Note: Heartland have repeatedly stated that the only funding they have received from Koch was $25K for healthcare-related matters, not climate or energy.

It doesn’t matter how many times the funding lies about Heartland are debunked, the Shrill still repeat them. Shame. Another oft repeated falsehood by the Shrill….

Freed: “Harris does not reveal that Dr. Ball today is a paid science policy advisor to oil companies…”

Harris: Dr. Ball has previously explained that this statement is a complete falsehood. The death threats against Ball are, sadly, very real, as are those against some other scientists we work with.

Not content with those slurs, Mr Freed moves on….

Freed: “Among the tactics too often deployed to suppress evidence-based logic and critical thinking, the misleading irrationality and fear-mongering by Harris and ICSC smacks of the McCarthyism in the 1950s that repressed progressive post-war urges for social justice and open democracy.”

Harris: This is a complete straw man argument. We encourage rational thinking and a mature, respectful dialog, taken proper account of the importance of social justice and open democracy, discussions that are free of logical fallacies and name calling. I have written about this often; see http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/5257712-errors-in-thinking-are-sabotaging-climate-change-discussion/, for example.

Freed: “In the eyes of the climate change deniers, apparently, yesterday’s scary reds are today’s greens.

Harris: That may be true for some on our side of the climate debate but it does not apply to me or ICSC since I have never made that point. Indeed, I am not even right wing and regularly criticize Canada’s Conservative government for stupidity and even dishonesty on the climate debate.

Mr Harris may not say “yesterday’s scary reds are today’s greens,” However, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has stated it quite plainly.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, left the Green Movement when the Green Movement was taken over by Refugees from the fall of World Communism (link)

Patrick is the author of Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist in which he wrote that, after the collapse of World Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the environment movement was hi-jacked by the “political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology.”

Mr Harris closes with:

So, practically nothing that Judah Freed writes above is correct or even makes sense. It is good to see the attack though, as it shows we are right over the most effective target, the most vulnerable weakness of climate crusaders: the immature and highly uncertain science of climate change. It is revealing that Mr. Freed did not have anything to say at all about any of the science we promote. His piece, the parts that were not completely wrong, was mostly just logical fallacies.

Read all Mr Harris reply – HERE

On the Daily Kos site there is a poll showing that their small readership doesn’t believe fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change.

Since 1990 Satellites show World not warming as much as the models say.

Posted: 15 May 2015 08:51 PM PDT

The scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville are known throughout the environmental community as being skeptical that climate change (or global warming) will have a catastrophic effect on the earth. The crux of the matter is that their research, using satellite data to measure temperatures in the atmosphere, disagrees with climate models they say that overstates the earth’s warming. (link)

What John Christy and Roy Spencer (who then worked for NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center just down the street from UAH) announced at that press conference on March 29, 1990, was that their study of temperature data from satellites indicated the world was not warming as much as was believed.

Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville appeared before the US Congress Committee of Natural Resources.

Christy said that

  • they agree, that there is climate change;
  • they agree, humans play a role in that climate change;
  • No, they agree, it’s not a catastrophic event.
It was virtually the silver anniversary of Roy Spencer’s career-defining moment. John Christy said he had no idea that a discovery announced in 1990 would not only still resonate 25 years later but would be at the center of a raging debate.
The date was March 29, 1990. That was the day – though unbeknownst to either Christy or Spencer – they publicly became climate change skeptics.

“We had no clue at that time, 25 years ago, we would be in the center of a huge controversy almost 25 years to the day with congressional investigations, the secretary of state, the vice president telling us we don’t even believe in gravity. Who would have thought that 25 years ago?”

“I think we knew it was going to be an important new way of monitoring the climate. But you just never know if something like that is going to have legs scientifically. Whether somebody will come up with a new way of doing it better in two years.

Looking back, I’m kind of surprised this is still the leading way of doing this. Really our only competitors in the field have the same answer we do, very close to the same answer.” (link)

Alabama site AL.com interviewed Christy and Spencer. (LINK)

Eric Schultz / eschultz@al.com)

Some extracts:

AL.com: President Obama recently said that Republicans are going to have to change their opinions on the dangers of climate change. Is this a partisan issue?

Christy: Numbers are numbers. That’s what we produced. Those aren’t Republican numbers or Democratic numbers. Those are numbers. Those are observations from real satellites. Roy and I were the pioneers. We discovered how to do this with satellites before anyone else did. You can see this very strongly in the administration. Secretary of State John Kerry comes out and says it’s like denying gravity. The attack on skeptics was ramped up in the past month.

As this blog has noted before, the Shrill Alarmists are getting shriller.

AL.com: How do you respond to the perception that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change? (The Wall Street Journal in 2013 reported on the “myth”of the 97 percent).

Christy: The impression people make with that statement is that 97 percent of scientists agree with my view of climate change, which typically is one of catastrophic change. So if a Senate hearing or the president or vice president says 97 percent of the scientists agree with me, that’s not true. The American Meteorological Society did their survey and they specifically asked the question, Is man the dominate controller of climate over the last 50 years? Only 52 percent said yes. That is not a consensus at all in science.

Recently Astrophysicist Dr Gordon Fulks wrote:

Science is NEVER about consensus and belief in any form.  Those who invoke such arguments are operating in the realm of politics and religion, probably because their science is weak.  We would never say that the earth is round because the majority of scientists believe it is.  We would simply produce a photo of the earth taken from the moon!

For those who refuse to understand that science is not a consensus activity, I like to talk about Albert Einstein, Alfred Weggner, Harlen Bretz, Barry Marshall, and Robin Warren, among others.

For those who think that the professional societies are the ultimate authority, I like to remind them that they are really labor unions looking out for the best financial interests of their members.

On renewables.

AL.com: What about the value of renewable energy sources?

Christy: I am for any energy source that is affordable and doesn’t destroy the environment. If carbon dioxide was a poisonous gas, I’d be against it. Carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem.

On satellite data.

Christy atmosphere temps
Paul Gattis | pgattis@al.com

AL.com: Why is your research using satellite data a more effective way of measuring climate change than surface temperature? After all, humans live on the surface, not in the upper atmosphere.

Christy: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When you put more of it in the atmosphere, the radiation budget will respond appropriately. It’s just that what we found with the real data is that the way the earth responds is to shed a lot of that heat, not keep it in, which climate models do. So I’d rather base policy on observations than on climate models.

Read More at AL.com

Windpushers Lie about CO2 Abatement from Wind Turbines. Top Physics Professor Disputes Their Claims.

Wind Industry’s CO2 Abatement Claims Smashed by Top Physics Professor – Dr Joseph Wheatley

lies

****

The mandatory RET has seen the cost of around $9 billion worth of Renewable Energy Certificates added to retail power prices and recovered from all Australian power consumers.

Under the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target, a further $45 to $55 billion will be transferred from power consumers to wind power outfits via the REC Tax/Subsidy over the next 17 years; depending on whether Ian “Macca” Macfarlane and his youthful ward, Gregory Hunt strike a deal with Labor to cut the ultimate annual target from 41,000 GWh to 33,000 GWh (see our post here). The ‘deal’ is aimed at saving their mates at Infigen, Vestas & Co – and is doomed to fail, in any event (see our postshere and here).

With that phenomenal cost being added to already spiralling power bills – there will be many more households who will be unable to afford power; adding to the tens of thousands of homes already deprived of what was once a basic necessity of (a decent) life. And thousands more destined to suffer “energy poverty” as they find themselves forced to choose between heating (or cooling) and eating:

Victoria’s Wind Rush sees 34,000 Households Chopped from the Power Grid

Casualties of South Australia’s Wind Power Debacle Mount: Thousands Can’t Afford Power

If our political betters in Canberra don’t get a grip and line up to kill the LRET very soon – in less than a decade – Australia will have created an entrenched energy underclass, dividing Australian society into energy “haves” and “have-nots”.

For a taste of an escalating social welfare disaster, here are articles from Queensland (click here); Victoria (click here); South Australia (click here); and New South Wales (click here).

There’s something deeply troubling about thousands of Australian households descending into gloom after dark – unable to afford the power needed for electric lighting; or troubling, at least, for those with a social conscience.

The ONLY justification for the massive stream of subsidies filched from power consumers and directed to wind power outfits is the claim that wind power reduces CO2 emissions in the electricity sector and, therefore, provides a solution to climate change (or what used to be called “global warming”). The former proposition is a proven fallacy (seeour post here). And, because the planet hasn’t reached boiling point (in bitter defiance of the IPCC’s models), the once concrete relationship between CO2 emissions and increasing global temperature now seems murky, at best.

Claiming the “global warming” moral high ground, wind power proponents continue to blindly chant the mantra that wind power reduces CO2 emissions – although they rarely, if ever, talk about the actual cost of the claimed reductions.  Probably because there are, in fact, no reductions.

STT has focused on the fact that industrial scale wind power does not – and will never – reduce CO2 emissions simply because it is intermittent; being delivered at crazy, random intervals, such that 100% of its capacity must be backed up 100% of the time by fossil fuel generation sources (see our post here).  Accordingly, we call it an environmental fraud.

Because wind power fails to deliver on its primary claim (and the wind industry’s only reason for existence) the $billions in subsidies purloined from taxpayers and power consumers have been received on an utterly false premise. Accordingly, we call it an economic fraud. Wind power, whichever way you slice it, is not, and will never be, a meaningful power generation source.

With that in mind, power consumers and taxpayers are clearly entitled to ask whether the subsidies received by wind power generators represent a cost-effective means of reducing CO2 emissions; if, indeed, there is any such reduction at all.

One such group is the Association for Research of Renewable Energy in Australia (ARREA): a band of hard-hitting, pro-farming and pro-community advocates, with a mission to ensure Australia gets the sensible energy policy it needs. Rather than the present policy fiasco, foisted on power consumers and rural communities by eco-fascist nutjobs – that wouldn’t know the first thing about markets and/or power generation – and the rent-seekers from the wind industry and its parasites that profit from the useful idiots they pay handsomely to run cover on their behalf: like yes2-ruining-us, GetUp!, the Climate Speculator and ruin-economy.

On that score, ARREA’s latest effort is to put some facts before the Senate Inquiry into the great wind power fraud – that kicked off in Portland on 30 March, and which continues at a clip this week in Cairns and Canberra.  ARREA’s submission is available here: sub372_ARREA

ARREA has a very solid crack at the most colossal industry subsidy scheme in the history of the Commonwealth; and the fact that, despite the ridiculous cost of the LRET (set up as a $3.8 billion a year subsidy for wind power), there has never been any cost/benefit analysis of the policy in its 15 years of operation.

ARREA also takes a well-aimed swipe at the ludicrous claims by the wind industry that each and every MWh of wind power dispatched to the grid results in the abatement (or reduction) of 1 tonne of CO2 gas in the electricity generation sector.

It’s that relationship that is said to justify – what Greg Hunt calls – the “massive $93 per tonne carbon tax” imposed on all Australian power consumers under the LRET (see our post here).

Under the LRET, a REC is issued for each MWh of wind power dispatched to the grid, on the assumption that it in fact reduces or abates 1 tonne of CO2, that would otherwise be emitted by a conventional generator. The figure of $93 talked about by Hunt as a 1 “tonne carbon tax” is the full cost of a REC, that will be reached when the shortfall penalty starts to apply: the full cost of the REC is added to retail power bills.

STT hears that young Greg has taken to arguing that there is no such assumption: his argument appears to be that a REC is issued for a MWh of wind power, irrespective of whether any CO2 is abated elsewhere in the electricity sector; which simply begs the question as to what Australians are getting for their $93 per MWh electricity tax? Hmmm …

ARREA’s submission also picks up on the work done by Dr Joseph Wheatley, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in condensed matter physics from Princeton University. Here’s a little primer on Dr Wheatley’s submission from Graham Lloyd.

Emission cuts due to wind power ‘not so big as claimed’
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
16 May 2015

Carbon dioxide emissions savings from wind turbines were 20 per cent less than claimed, leading to the overpayment of renewable energy certificates worth about $70 million last year, according to an inter­national analysis of Australia’s national electricity market.

The study found wind farm inefficiencies were likely to grow as more turbines were added to the grid under the renewable energy target.

Joseph Wheatley analysed the output of 256 generators connected to the national electricity market last year. His research, funded by private individuals through the Association for Research of Renewable Energy in Australia, found that while wind provided 4.5 per cent of national electricity generation, it reduced emissions by only 3.5 per cent.

“This represents a significant loss of effectiveness,” Dr Wheatley said. His research found the possibility that wind power was 100 per cent effective in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, as is the current basis for issuing renewable energy certificates, was not supported by evidence.

“The evidence in this study suggests that effectiveness in the national electricity market would fall to less than 70 per cent if the proportion of energy provided by wind is doubled from 2014 levels,” the report says.

Dr Wheatley said more data was needed on actual fuel consumption at coal-fired power stations but there were several reasons for the inefficiencies of wind in abating emissions.

“Lower emissions gas and black-coal plant were displaced more than brown-coal plant,” he said. “Displaced thermal generators operating under part load were less efficient on average and wind power also tended to be subject to larger system losses.”

Dr Wheatley is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in condensed matter physics from Princeton University. He has worked as a researcher at Cambridge University. A report of his findings has been submitted to the Senate inquiry into wind turbines and health issues.

The Clean Energy Council said it would not respond to the detailed findings in Dr Wheatley’s paper. But Clean Energy Council policy director Russell Marsh said “the vast majority of Australians support renewable energy and would be better served by objective scientific analysis rather than a group of grumblers brainstorming imaginary problems”.

ARREA is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2013 by a group of senior businessmen including former liquidator, Tony Hodgson. ARREA spokesman Rodd Pahl said the group believed “the behaviour of wind farm companies and the level of subsidies they are given is the result of bad policy settings and sloppy administration”.
The Australian

Nice ‘work’ there from wind industry spruiker, “Rusty” Marsh!

STT followers will remember Rusty as the creator of the “Atari defence“, which he conjured up in answer to the highly relevant work done by NASA in the 1980s, that proved the direct causal relationship between turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound and adverse health effects, and which Rusty and his ilk have spent 30 years covering up, ever since (see our post here).

Now, Rusty appears to be more than just a little flummoxed by the hard-hitting qualifications of Jo Wheatley and what he has to say. So, as is the wind industry fashion, he sets out to attack the boys at ARREA, instead. Clever!

Jo Wheatley’s submission to the Senate Inquiry is available here:sub348_Wheatley

STT thinks that Dr Wheatley is on the right track – he’s travelled the path before (see his paper on the Irish situation here).

However, his findings are estimates, based on assumptions, rather than a complete set of actual fuel use data. As is noted in the piece above, where Dr Wheatley says: “more data was needed on actual fuel consumption at coal-fired power stations”. For that reason, his finding that the chaotic delivery of wind power connected to a coal/gas fired grid might reduce CO2 emissions in the electricity sector as a whole is a form of polite flattery.

The coal and gas generators have never been that keen to hand over their fuel use data; the ‘carbon’ tax set up under the Green/Labor alliance would have seen them liable for a much greater whack if they did. And, with the threat of such a tax always on the horizon, they have no incentive in opening their fuel use books to public scrutiny, any time soon.

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And it was for that reason that, STT Champion, Hamish Cumming ran into a brick wall, as he set about thumping the wind industry’s wild claims about CO2 abatement. Hamish – a farmer and grazier and engineer with 20 years of international experience – has already given evidence to the Inquiry about the wind industry’s bogus CO2 abatement claims:

Senator LEYONHJELM: Thank you. I have a couple more questions, and then I will give someone else a go. Mr Cumming, in your submission you say that the Loy Yang A power station annual report shows a rising carbon intensity, which is increasing proportionally to the increase in wind turbine output. Why is this so?

Mr Cumming: If you look through the annual reports from 2005 report through to about 2013 you will see that carbon intensity has continued to rise. Off the top of my head, it was something like 1.14 tonnes of carbon per megawatt and it is currently running at about 1.35. If you look at all the power stations, you will see where you can get the information – it is very hard to get some of it – and you will see that it is happening across the board, even in Queensland.

The Queensland power stations are the same. It is all to do with backing up wind farms and making the grid safe so that it will not blackout. The more wind farms that come on, the higher the backup has to be. In 2005, it was something like 600 megawatts and now it is over 1,000. Nothing has changed in the grid. In fact, demand is less. The reasons for having it should be less. Industry is less. And it is all in line with wind farms coming on line.

Senator LEYONHJELM: So you think Loy Yang, Yallourn and Hazelwood burn more coal now than prior to the penetration of wind energy capacity into the grid?

Mr Cumming: Very much so. The data for Loy Yang is very clear and very public – much to their horror when I point it out to them. Now they have even changed the way they do their carbon intensity calculation. They have removed a third of the input data to try and make it look smaller, but it is very public for Loy Yang.

If you look at the savings that they have made in thermal efficiency and other in-house savings of performance of the plant and then you look at the coal-led burning, there is a gap for Loy Yang of six million tonnes of coal a year today versus 2005.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Did you hear the evidence of Pacific Hydro this morning?

Mr Cumming: No. I was not here for that, sorry.

Senator LEYONHJELM: They basically put a completely alternative point of view to us on that.

Mr Cumming: Did he use Loy Yang’s annual reports and public data?

Senator LEYONHJELM: He did not provide any data. The view was simply that there was no increase in spinning capacity.

Mr Cumming: That is incorrect. You have to look at the documents that the industry runs on. There is a guy called Hugh Saddler, who works for Pitt & Sherry. He does what are called CEDEX reports, ACIL Tasman reports. That is what the industry is always based on. All the emissions, all the RECs – everything – is based on that.

It is all reverse calculated. It is all calculated from what power is sold through theoretical thermal efficiency and data. It has a number of errors in it, including a seven per cent error for the Yallourn power station. When I highlighted this to them, they said, yes, they know. It is the closest thing they have got, whereas carbon intensity is actual fuel burnt. You cannot get away from it.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Do you think the Clean Energy Regulator’s reports of emissions reductions are accurate?

Mr Cumming: No, not at all.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Why is that?

Mr Cumming: Because they are relying on the CEDEX reports and the ACIL Tasman reports and those are all based on reverse calculation. None of it is based on fact. The fact has to come from the actual carbon, the actual fuel burnt –

Senator LEYONHJELM: The actual fuel burnt?

Mr Cumming: The actual fuel burnt. If you have actual fuel burnt for a half-hour period and then you use the AEMO data for the same half-hour period, you can see exactly what is happening.

And this was highlighted in my submission on 4 July 2013, when Macarthur, Lake Bonney and another one went off line at the same time. The power was instantly picked up, without a flicker of a light bulb, without down time of any industry. It was picked up by New South Wales and Queensland coal-fired power stations – 450 megawatts. That is a massive amount of power. It is bigger than the largest Victorian single generating plant, and it was picked up instantly. The only way they can do that is if they are burning the coal already and venting for steam as backup. None of that is covered in the reports that are used officially by government.

Senator LEYONHJELM: Do you have a view on how effectively the Clean Energy Regulator is performing its legislated responsibilities?

Mr Cumming: My personal belief is that they cannot perform their responsibilities if they are not using facts. If they are using reverse calculated data estimates, they cannot perform their responsibilities. They have got to get the facts.

Senator LEYONHJELM: What would you do? Would you broaden their responsibilities or change the way they calculate what they are supposed to calculate already?

Mr Cumming: I would change the rules so that they have to use base data from the entire power industry. That will force the generators to provide the hourly coal feed, gas feed, fuel feed data.

At the moment there is no regulation to enforce those companies to provide the data – and it is not in their interests to because it affects how they get paid. If they tell the truth about what they are doing then the investors are not going to allow AGL to buy more wind farms or build more wind farms when AGL owns Loy Yang A. It is the same with the other power stations. They all own wind farms, power stations and coal seam gas. It is in none of their interests to tell the truth.

Hansard, 30 March 2015

Hamish hits the bulls-eye! The actual fuel use data needed to make any definitive statement on the purported ability of wind power to reduce CO2 emissions just simply isn’t made available, in order to protect the commercial interests of all parties involved. However, getting at that data is very much on the Senate Inquiry’s radar.

No wonder the wind industry and its spruikers, like the CEC’s Rusty Marsh are working in a pool of cold sweat, as they try to deflect, diminish, deny and otherwise attempt to throw cold water on the work of ARREA; and the likes of Jo Wheatley and Hamish Cumming.

STT predicts that this week will see the wind industry, its parasites, spruikers and their institutional aiders and abetters enter a new world of pain, as the Senators on the Inquiry start smacking into the lies, treachery and deceit, that defines the greatest fraud of all time, with an unparalleled zeal for the task.

STT will bring you blow-by-blow descriptions of the carnage; it won’t be pretty, but, in a “let’s get it over with”, kind of way, it will be fun.

“Bring it on”, as the REAL contenders say.

Ali Vs Patterson

Human-hating Eco-fascists Want to Send Us Back to the Dark Ages!

The Fossil Fuel-Free Fantasy: Robert Bryce Hammers Harvard’s Human-Hating Ecofascist Hit Squad

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Robert Bryce picked the wind power fraud for what it is from the very beginning.

In his 2010 book “Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future” (Public Affairs), Bryce skewered every one of the myths relied upon by the wind industry to peddle its wares; and went on to predict the massive benefits of the US shale gas revolution – in terms of both cheap energy – operating as a boost to a flagging economy – and as a method of reducing CO2 emissions in the electricity sector.

We’ve covered some of his recent writings on US energy policy and the wind power fraud (see our posts here and here and here).

Bryce recently published another cracking book “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong” (Public Affairs) that loads up on the nonsense that is US energy policy today: we covered a review of Bryce’s latest by the New York Timesin this post.

Robert also gave a brilliant lecture here last year, which is worth revisiting, as the lunatics from Getup! & Co work themselves into an astroturfing eco-frenzy selling (at a handsome mark-up – worth over $1 million, so far) the myth that the world can happily run on millions of giant fans and a lot of ‘luck’ (such as the wind Gods agreeing to blow at a constant 11m/s 24 x 365, say):

Robert Bryce: Want to live in Stone-Age Poverty? Then tie your future to Wind Power

In the post above, Robert lays out the key arguments as to why cheap, reliable sparks are critical to the growth, wealth and development of Nations.

While access to power is something we – in the developed world – smugly take for granted, for the billion or so at the bottom of the development heap it is the ONLY path out of poverty. And for those struggling to escape deprivation and darkness, the answer is most certainly not insanely expensive and unreliable wind power. To the contrary, reliable and affordable power is a guarantee of both wealth and freedom.

Energy policy has been over-run by “green” ideologues who are determined to ensure that the poorest remain that way by wedding the world to the fiction that wind power provides a meaningful answer to growing energy demand, while “solving” the climate change “problem”.

Robert picks up the theme in this piece from the National Review in response to the fantasy that the world could operate, as it does, on the strength of a friendly (occasional) breeze – and goes on to hammer the misanthropy of an intellectually dishonest elite, who would – on the strength of little more than an ideological whim – deprive the poorest on the planet that, which they happily take for granted.

The Environmentalists’ Civil War
National Review
Robert Bryce
17 April 2015

It’s a manifesto smackdown, a fight among the members of the green Left for the intellectual and moral high ground. It’s also a fight that reflects the growing schism within American environmentalism. On one side are the pro-energy, pro-density humanists. They call themselves ecomodernists and are led by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist, Oakland-based environmental group. On Wednesday, it released what it describes as an “ecomodernist manifesto,” a document that, at root, states the obvious: Economic development is essential for environmental protection.

On the opposite side are the anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists. Their views are evident in the ongoing protests this week in Harvard Yard. A group called Divest Harvard is pushing the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body, to divest the school’s $36 billion endowment of any investments in companies that provide coal, oil, and natural gas to consumers. This group’s manifesto, issued in February, demonizes energy use.

The absolutists like to use the squishy term “climate justice.” They believe that the threat of climate change trumps all other concerns, including the welfare of people living in energy poverty. For the absolutists, the only path to salvation is through the exclusive use of renewable energy. And in that regard, Divest Harvard falls smack in the middle of mainstream liberal-left environmentalism in America.

The anti-energy, pro-sprawl absolutists — a designation that, in my view, fits the Sierra Club, 350.org, Greenpeace, and Natural Resources Defense Council — are anti-nuclear, anti-hydrocarbon, and anti-hydraulic fracturing. They routinely peddle slogans such as “fossil-free” and continually claim that we can rely solely on increased efficiency and renewable energy.

They push these claims despite overwhelming evidence from Germany and Japan that shuttering nuclear power plants and relying too much on renewables results in higher electricity prices and decreased reliability. (For more on that, see this April 13 Reuters piece about the potential shuttering of dozens of conventional power plants in Germany.)

The absolutists are anti-energy. In a Divest Harvard video posted on YouTube, the group stated that its goal is to “stigmatize the fossil fuel industry.” The absolutists try to do that all the time. Just last week, the Sierra Club announced the expansion of its “beyond coal” campaign.

The group’s backers — who include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg — have pledged some $60 million in funding for the effort, which aims to shutter half of U.S. coal plants by 2017.

Celebrating the fundraising effort, the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, declared, “Dirty, outdated, deadly coal is a thing of the past.” Never mind that coal remains the world’s fastest-growing source of energy and that it has been the fastest-growing source of energy since 1973. Never mind that countries from Germany to Bangladesh are building hundreds of gigawatts of coal-fired power plants. Never mind that the United States has more coal reserves than any other country does. Coal must be stigmatized.

Based on the logic that the Sierra Club and Divest Harvard put forward, companies such as Coal India Limited must be stigmatized. Coal India is deemed untouchable because it provides coal to generation stations in a poverty-stricken country that gets about 70 percent of its power from coal. Coal India provides fuel to 82 of India’s 86 coal-fired generators. Therefore, it must be stigmatized. Never mind that more than 300 million Indians — a group approximately equal to the entire population of the United States — lack access to electricity.

To be clear, the absolutists at Divest Harvard don’t mention Coal India in their manifesto. But the open letter published in mid-February and signed by about three dozen Harvard graduates — including 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author Susan Faludi, former U.S. senator Tim Wirth, and actress Natalie Portman — condemns investment in what it calls the “dirtiest energy companies on the planet.”

The manifesto lays bare Divest Harvard’s anti-human outlook. They write: “Global warming is the greatest threat the planet faces . . . . This issue demands we all make changes to business as usual — especially those of us who have prospered from the systems driving climate change.”

Who might be included in “those of us who have prospered” from the use of coal, oil, and natural gas — fuels that, when burned, emit carbon dioxide and therefore contribute to climate change? My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it would include nearly every person in America, (approximately 319 million), as well as anyone who has ever made money by taking a car, bus, plane, or ship to work, baked a loaf of bread, or delivered a piano. In all, the number of who’ve prospered thanks to the availability of hydrocarbons probably totals 3 billion to 4 billion people.

Despite energy poverty that afflicts hundreds of millions of people in countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia (all of which, by the way, are in the process of adding huge amounts of new coal-fired generation capacity), the absolutists equate energy use with evil.

In their February manifesto, the absolutists claim that selling the Harvard’s investments in hydrocarbon producers will make the school “accountable for the future” and that the school should divest because “Harvard eventually divested from apartheid, from tobacco, and from the genocide in Darfur.”

By comparing energy producers (and therefore, energy consumers) with the people involved in racist repression and mass murder, the absolutists are, in effect, saying that consumers who use gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity are as morally bankrupt as those who aided racial repression and mass murder.

This is nonsense on stilts. Even if the divestment push at Harvard were to succeed — and dozens of other institutions were to follow suit — it wouldn’t halt the consumption of any hydrocarbons. It won’t give us a “safe climate.” The investments that Harvard sells will simply be purchased by another entity.

To argue that divestment of companies that produce coal, oil, and natural gas will make a difference on climate change is akin to arguing that if investors sell their equity in a McDonalds or Burger King franchise, hungry people will quit buying cheeseburgers.

The divestment movement is predicated on the fantastical assumption that we humans can, as the organizers of 350.org have repeatedly claimed, live “fossil free.” And they continue to claim, wrongly, that the world can be run on nothing more than solar panels and wind turbines.

The absolutists claim that we only need to “do the math” to understand their position. Okay. Let’s do some math. And by doing so, we will show how the absolutists favor sprawl and therefore the destruction of the very environment they say they want to protect.

To make it easy on the Harvard grads, let’s focus solely on Massachusetts, which consumes about 56 terawatt-hours (1 terawatt-hour is equal to 1 trillion watt-hours) of electricity per year. To create that much electricity solely with wind energy would require, in rough terms, about 31 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity. (The annual productivity of wind energy, based on the BP Statistical Review 2014, is 1.8 terawatt-hours per gigawatt of capacity. That’s the average over nine years, from 2005 to 2013.)

The power density of wind energy — as I have repeatedly proven — is 1 watt per square meter. Therefore, the land area needed to produce that much renewable electricity would total about 31 billion square meters or 31,000 square kilometers, which is about 12,000 square miles. Put another way, just to meet electricity demand in Massachusetts with wind energy would require an area larger than the state itself, which, including water area, covers about 27,000 square kilometers, or 10,500 square miles.

And remember, these calculations ignore the essentiality of oil for transportation and home heating. The latter is important because about 30 percent of all Bay State residents rely on heating oil to stay warm in the winter. Staying warm can be a challenge in the Boston area, which got about 100 inches of snow this past winter.

The absolutist, pro-sprawl outlook touted by McKibben and his allies provides a stark contrast to the pro-human outlook the ecomodernists support. Perhaps the key line of their manifesto is in the concluding sentence, which says they want to “achieve universal human dignity on a biodiverse and thriving planet.”

Toward that end, the 18 signers of the manifesto — a group that includes Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, as well as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, and the University of Tasmania’s Barry Brook — support increased energy use. They note, rightly: “Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives.” That’s it exactly.

While the absolutists want one of America’s most prestigious universities to sell some of its investments — with the only goal being to stigmatize the world’s biggest and single most important business — the ecomodernists are arguing not only that greater global energy consumption is inevitable, but that it’s good, that more energy use will allow more people in the developing world to live fuller, freer lives.

As part of that, they are adding, rightly, that nuclear energy must be a central element of climate policy if we are going to reduce the rate of growth in global carbon dioxide emissions. The ecomodernists oppose sprawl. Their manifesto talks of the need to intensify “many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”

Increasing density, they continue, “is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts.” The absolutists don’t have any credible plans for producing the vast quantities of energy the world demands. They not only ignore energy poverty in the developing world, they also have worked to block the American government from providing any financing for coal-fired power plants in developing counties. (See my 2013 piece on that issue here.)

At the same time, they promote landscape and wildlife-destroying schemes such as wind energy that will result in unprecedented sprawl. That’s the very same energy sprawl that property owners all over the world are objecting to. (Among the property owners who don’t want wind turbines near their property, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Divest Harvard proponent vociferously objected to the Cape Wind project, the now-dead proposal to install more than a hundred 440-foot-high turbines in Nantucket Sound, near the Kennedy family’s vacation compound at Hyannisport.)

The manifesto smackdown exposes our need to rethink what it means to be an environmentalist. The ecomodernists have laid out a thoughtful position paper that dares the absolutists to go beyond sloganeering and stigmatizing. I will be pleasantly surprised if Divest Harvard, 350.org, Sierra Club, and their allies respond to that dare. But I’m not holding my breath.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.
National Review

A solid analysis from go to whoa, as we’ve come to expect from Robert. What he does better than most is to throw the spotlight on the malign aspects of an ideology that has all the hallmarks of an insidious, quasi-religious cult.

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The concept that one can – by ticking a box, or signing up to an outfit like GetUp! etc – become “fossil-fuel-free”, is up there with belief in the tooth fairy or Father Christmas; which requires an intellect so soggy that it hasn’t got the ability to connect the creation and production of things – like the steel and aluminium in their hipster, urban commuting devices –  with the fuel and resources incorporated in them, or needed to make them.

It’s a point well made by Ian Plimer in his book, Not For Greens, available from News Weekly Books (see our post here).

The worship of wind power also runs into the same paradox, for the “faithful”.

Far from being an antidote to the fossil fuels they dread, and are at pains to publicly eschew, fossil fuel producers are delighted with the opportunity to make wild profits, on the back of a meaningless power source, that requires 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time with conventional generation sources, which, in practical effect, means coal, gas and diesel:

Why Coal Miners, Oil and Gas Producers Simply Love Wind Power

What people like Plimer and Bryce do so well is throw a little reality back at the fantasists, who are happy to live with every modern convenience, product and device made possible by oil, gas and coal. But, in the same breath, are quick to deny the lifestyle, they take for granted, to anyone, anywhere in the world with the simple human ambition to live just a little better than their parents did. “Green” hypocrisy is hardly a crime (more a symptom of intellectual infancy, really); but when its energy impoverished victims run into the millions, it gets mighty close; and becomes even harder to defend, on any level.

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Advice that Inspired me, To Fight The Windpushers, With Everything I Have In me!

How to Fight the Big Wind Onslaught

Calvin Luther Martin, January 2009

Yesterday I turned 61. I’ve been fighting the wind bastards well over 4 years. Four years devoted to almost nothing else. Put a big book on hold with Yale Univ. Press for this. In those years I’ve answered thousands of emails from people around the world. Japan. Cyprus. Norway. Sweden. Czechoslovakia. Australia. New Zealand. Ireland. England. Wales. France. Canada. Many states of the Union. On and on.

In those years (which included years of fighting the wind thugs in three or four different iterations) in my backyard and beating the sons of bitches (at least for now), I’ve learned some valuable lessons. I oughta write a book. Consider this the first installment of that book.

I am no longer an academic. I’m a writer. Writers write to convey something in the most appropriate language for the matter at hand. For wind energy the most appropriate language is profanity, vulgarity, and obscenity. The louder the better. These are not honorable people. Wind energy is not an honorable enterprise.

Big Wind is obscene, profane, and vulgar.

Okay, rough draft of book:

Chapter 1. Courtesy doesn’t work.

Chapter 2. Questions don’t work. Stop going to meetings and asking questions. Problem is, you’re asking questions of the wind sharks. This is akin to the hens asking questions of the foxes who are about to pounce on the henhouse. Wake up!

Second, stop expressing your concerns at meetings. Weenie word. Your biggest rhetorical enemy in this fight is this word, concerns. Drop it! The media (see below) loves to describe you as concerned. (“The hens expressed some concerns to the foxes.”) Screw concerned and start getting angry and defiant. And stop asking the windies questions and start informing them of the fact they and their goddam monster turbines and substations are not welcome in town. This is the your conversation with them: Get the hell out of Dodge!

Chapter 3. Real evidence doesn’t work. The wind sharks fabricate their own, using whorish little companies to perform noise measurements and do environmental impact studies, including bird and bat studies. Companies often consisting of four guys with sweaty balls and BS degrees from nondescript bullshit state colleges, from which they graduated three years ago. But they’ve got a website and stationery and PO Box — and they’re rarin’ to get those permits for Big Wind. Give me a break!

Chapter 4. Meetings with state senators, governors, premiers, department heads, county commissioners, the media, other various and assorted lawmakers — don’t work.

Chapter 5. Following the rules at public meetings does not work. The meetings are (a) a charade, (b) a farce, (c) a hoax, and (d) altogether a mockery of public participation. The fix has already been made, the deal bought and paid for. Refuse to be silenced by Robert’s Rules of Order. Screw Roberts! Major Henry Martyn Robert never had to abandon his home to a wind turbine!

Chapter 6. Lawsuits don’t work. They might appear to initially, but ultimately, at some level of court, they fail. With very few exceptions, lawyers and lawsuits are a waste of time, money, and mostly strategic advantage. You’re barking up the wrong tree with a lawyer. Your town board and county commissioners are poised and prepared for you to take them on legally; they’ve got attorneys on retainer and they can swallow you whole in the byzantine legal process.

Don’t bother going down that road. Dr. Martin Luther King (see below) didn’t use lawyers. Neither did Gandhi, who was a trained lawyer. Wrong strategy. If you think the Big Wind Onslaught is not on the scale of a Gandhi and King, but just a minor issue — think again. I suggest you do some reading on the English Enclosure Movement. Look for parallels. The Big Wind Onslaught is a big deal. Stop imagining otherwise. This from a (retired) professional historian (see attached c.v.).

Chapter 7. Wind energy is bullshit. Nitwits who begin their case by telling the local newspaper, “Well, Gee, we fully support renewable energy, including wind energy, and we feel wind turbines are marvelous so long as they’re placed in the right spot” — nitwits who start off their campaign with this are doomed. Wind energy, folks, is horseshit. From beginning to end. Fairy Godmother economics. Right up there with the Easter Bunny. This is 4.5 years of reading thousands of documents, yes, much of it on the physics and economics of wind energy. (By the way, my BA is in science and I did several years of graduate training in hard core science. Science doesn’t scare me.) Wind energy, when subjected to Physics 101, falls apart. It’s laughable. Buy a textbook in introductory physics. Start reading.

Chapter 8. Wind energy works because of (a) carbon credits (an unspeakable scam), (b) federal and state subsidies of various sorts, (c) a slow bleed from your monthly energy bill (check it out), (d) PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) arrangements with communities, and (e) huge tax write-offs for wind investors, including big Wall Street banks. It does not work because it is economically feasible — it’s not — or because it produces meaningful electricity — it does not. And if I hear that it “gets us off foreign oil” I’m gonna scream. For that statement, you need not a beginning physics text, you need your head examined.

Chapter 9. Wind energy companies are bullshit. I guarantee you, you know virtually nothing about that wind company that’s been schmoozing your town board. You know nothing about their financial records, background, credit, or trustworthiness. Nothing. In fact, you know nothing about 98% of their personnel, including what they like to call the Principals. (You will love the pretentious names they bestow on themselves.) These people just drop out of the sky — like snake oil salesmen in the Old West. No different. They’re carnies, carpet baggers, grifters, and cons. All of ’em. Including more than a few Enron re-treads. Amazing, in fact, how many are from Ireland. (I’m Irish.) To treat these people with respect is hilarious. Like treating the Three Stooges-who-turn-out-to-be-your executioner with respect. One more thing: most of these companies are 200% leveraged (no money of their own).

Chapter 10. Most of the jerks who sign wind leases either (a) don’t live there, or (b) if they do, their property’s big enough they make sure those turbines are next to your house, not theirs, or (c) they’re so stupid and such losers and so desperate for money they’d sell their first-born for several grand a year. Successful, smart farmers don’t sign wind leases. Except for a slight modification. It’s called the Domino Principle. It’s insidious. Consider Farmer Brown. He’s smart, he’s successful. But he’s surrounded by Farmers Jones, Smith, and Martin — all of whom are losers and pikers. Jones, Smith, and Martin have signed on with the windies. Brown realizes he’s gonna be looking at these damn things and listening to them whether he “hosts” them or not. So he turns to Hortense, the wife, “Jeez honey, we might as well have a couple and make some money, too, since we’re gonna have to be dealing with these friggin things anyhow.” Nasty, yes. Remember, it’s called the Domino Principle. Windies play this game every day. It’s their favorite strategy for winning the hearts and minds of the community.

Chapter 11. We need to take a look at Economics 101. This is a long one. I apologize. America (insert any nation here, as you wish) is in a profound recession. Profound in the sense it has exposed a systemic, structural flaw within the nation’s economy. A strong argument can be made that America’s economy has for decades (probably since WWII) run on “bubbles.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the “bubble” ratio in the overall economy has grown since WWII.

The most recent bubble, the housing bubble, accounted for a surprisingly large part of the nation’s economy. To wit, people used their homes as piggy banks, and Wall Street rode this bubble (mixing metaphors, but we’ll let it pass).

My point is for you to notice that at the bottom of a bubble is something which appears to have real value. Your house. Or that house you’re thinking of buying over there and which you know will increase dramatically in value, real quick. (Remember, the USA no longer has a gold standard, so gold ain’t it.) There was a whole financial sand castle built on the back of your house. But, alas, the sea inexorably came in and washed away the sand castle (Wall Street, mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial), and your house has gone back to being worth far less than you dreamed it was. (Or your house is on its way to readjusting to its more realistic value. May not have reached that level yet.)

Now listen. We need another thing that gives the appearance of value. That seems tangible, solid, ubiquitous, and can somehow enter the nation’s financial account, funny numbers, Enron-esque imagination, and bizarre Wall Street lingo. And, on the back of this New Basis of Bubble we will build the Next Big Bubble.

I’m here to strongly suggest that your property value has become, and is becoming, the basis of the Next Big Bubble.

Consider Barbara Ashbee, in rural Ontario. You can read about her plight on the windturbinesyndrome.com website. Barbara’s a realtor, which makes this story even more poignant. Barbara and husband Dennis are just like you and me: our major investment is in our home and property. Notice this: she just had her property value stolen from her. Bam, just like that. Her property, to her, is now nearly worthless. Same with Daniel d’Entremont (Nova Scotia), Gerry Meyer (Wisconsin), Jane and Julian Davis (England), Charlie Porter (Missouri), Cheryl LeClair (New York State), and so on. Hundreds of people? Nope, thousands. Or more.

Now, think: Who just gained from Barbara Ashbee’s loss? The wind developer. Worthless wind power and worthless turbines have now acquired something worthwhile and real, something tangible, something that gives the appearance of value — the value of your property (even though you are not “hosting” turbines) and, even more so, the value of “host” properties.

More than this, wind companies now control the value of whole communities. Churubusco, NY (next door to me), Chateaugay, NY (next door to me), Bellmont, NY (next door to me), Ellenburg, NY (next door to me), Altona, NY (next door to me). All these communities have become (or are becoming) industrial wastelands — in my eyes and yours. But not so for wind developers and their stockholders and the banks that own them: this is now financially controlled and financially-manipulable land. Read those lease contracts.

Even without a contract your property value plunges when turbines go up in your community. Land use has now changed from “lovely rural bucolic I want to live here and raise my kids it’s so quiet and nights are dark and magical we’ve farmed this land for eight generations and I want to pass it on to my kids” to “I can’t stand living here I hate these turbines the noise drives me nuts and the spinning blades are horrible and the whole landscape looks surreal and nobody in his right mind would move here and my kids won’t live here when they grow up and dear God I pray the developer buys me out.”

In Enron and Wall Street economics, the value of your community — a value that has now shifted to Enron-spawned wind companies and Wall Street banker control — is something that can be traded, bought and sold, reassigned, financially speculated in, financially gambled with, sold as hedge funds, investments, preferred stock.

I’ll stop with this, since it gives you the gist of what I believe is happening. I admit I don’t have the details worked out fully, and one can certainly make corrections and additions and refinements to my argument, but I suspect you, dear reader, are creating the basis for the next bubble. The Renewable Energy Bubble (read, Wind Bubble), built on the stolen value of your land and your town’s value.

Anyhow, ponder this and consider that this forms yet another reason to stop being polite and cordial and reasonable with the wind/Wall Street sharks. Wall Street: You don’t believe me that big banks are heavily invested in that cutely-named wind company that’s moved into town? Better look harder, buddy.

Chapter 12. Given the last chapter, why on earth do you think any lawmaker or other government official or agency is going to listen to your pleas about not building wind turbines in your backyard? Are you nuts? Wind energy is the perfect storm, as I keep saying: it’s our solution to Global Warming, The Energy Crisis, Jobs, The Economy, The Recession, Environmentalism, Foreign Oil, General Electric’s Bottom Line, and Fill-in-the-Blank. (Note to Barbara Ashbee: Wind energy is the answer to Ontario Premier McGuinty’s most fervent wish and fantasy. Even Obama, clearly an intelligent man, has embraced Big Wind with the devotion of a Born Againer.)

One of the problems with nukes, by the way, is that they don’t provide a basis for a New Bubble: nuclear plants don’t rob millions of people of the value of their land, which land the wind developers in a weird sense now control (for trading and investment purposes).

I have been paying attention to the feverish activity of little wind companies going around and snapping up “wind leases” even as the bum economy prevents them from building “wind farms,” as yet, on those properties. One company in particular, whom I won’t name, has been working New England and the Midwest (now Minnesota) even as this company, to our eyes, appears to be bankrupt. Hmmm. Interesting.

(Here’s a tip to anyone unscrupulous reading this: Wanna get in on the ground floor of The Next Bubble? Form a bullshit wind energy company and start buying up wind leases which, I believe, also control underground rights. There you get into natural gas and fracking. Fracking? Look it up and be prepared to be horrified. Fracking is now about to move to the Marcellus Shale, NY State and indeed much of the Appalachian region, from the West and Southwest.)

Okay. What works, and the only thing that’s going to work, is . . .

Chapter 13. Civil disobedience. Use it imaginatively, floridly, boisterously, loudly, and as obnoxiously, extravagantly, creatively, and brilliantly as you possibly can. Start this weekend.

Here is exactly what I mean by civil disobedience. Signs, placards, banners, handbills, marches, demonstrations, picketing, shutting down public meetings both large and small and both high falutin’ and low falutin’, shouting matches, getting arrested for refusing to shut up and sit down. As Rosa Parks did, when she sparked the Civil Rights movement: you need to refuse to give up your seat to the wind bastard on the bus. Do this with the wind sharks and your town officers, all the way up to state and federal government.

Here is exactly what I don’t mean by civil disobedience: Breaking the law. Nor am I advocating violence. I detest violence. For me, violence is not only illegal; it’s abhorrent, it’s inelegant, and nothing can be stupider. It accomplishes nothing good. Ever. I say this as a former professor of history. I stand with Gandhi and M.L. King on this matter. My sympathies lie with Quakers, not jihadists.

I believe in working within the system, and the system includes the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

This is all you need. Add in the right to vote, by the way. Working within these parameters, apply what Martin Luther King in his letter from the Birmingham jail called direct action.

“The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation …. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action …. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored …. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

None of the public agencies and bureaucracies will take seriously any of your marvelous evidence about the follies and dangers of wind energy (including Nina Pierpont’s, or Rick James’s, or Glenn Schleede’s, or God’s for that matter) until — à la Martin Luther King — you demonstrate to them that they are going to have to take your evidence seriously.

The operative word is demonstrate. This is not done by reason or argument or a sense of fairness or justice. Sorry to disillusion you, and sorry to shoot down one of the cornerstones of academia: that “the truth will set you free” and “reason prevails over ignorance.” Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King all knew the vital word in their struggle was demonstrate.

Dr. King had plenty of sociological and economic and constitutional and statutory and even theological evidence in his briefcase — but it was going nowhere until he showed Alabama and the nation and the US Attorney General and Congress: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are all going to take my evidence of racism and Jim Crow and lynching and economic and political harassment and general disfranchisement very seriously, okay? And to drive home my point that you whities are gonna take the evidence seriously, we colored folks are gonna get in your face about it until you take us seriously.”

It’s precisely for this that he wound up in the Birmingham jail.

Let me rephrase. You can have all the Nina Pierponts and Rick James and Glenn Schleedes you want, yet they amount to nothing if you have failed to convince your audience (lawmakers) that they are going to have to take this seriously. This is the role of civil disobedience. Reason, meetings, arguments, fairness, justice: reliance on these will not and does not work. Civil disobedience. King’s “direct action.” Nonviolent tension that’s “so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door” to being listened to. This is the route to follow.

The wind developers and their shills? You will never convince them. They are not your audience. Don’t make the blunder of imagining them to be your audience, and don’t argue with them. Cut them out of the discourse! Don’t rise to them! The people whom you need to impress with your nonviolent tension are not the developers; it’s the lawmakers.

By the way, stop reading wind developer websites. These carpetbaggers are not your audience: I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s like reading the handbills distributed by snake oil salesmen at 19th-century carnivals. Why bother? For entertainment, yes. But for truth, use your brain. As in, “If it smells like a turd and looks like a turd and tastes like a turd, chances are it is.” Likewise, “if it sounds almost too good to be true: it is.”

The media? Simpering assholes who have all gone with the wind. (Don’t you love it when they interview the smilin’ smirkin’ salesman sayin’ “Them turbines, folks — why them turbines is gonna electrify 35,000 American homes” — except nobody mentions it’s only if the wind’s blowing 25-35 mph 24/7, 365 days a year. That’s my all-time favorite line, right after “Don’t you worry ’bout them turbines and noise. No louder than a hummin’ ‘frigerator, and God’s my witness!” Newspaper reporters always fall for this crap. Always. Everywhere.)

Anyhow, media. This is where you need to place large, costly, frequent ads in the local newspaper. And start your own website.

You’ve got your facts, your figures, your data. What you don’t have is civil disobedience. Till you do, your facts, including your Wind Turbine Syndrome facts, are valueless. Remember M.L. King. He knew his facts (Jesus, he even had the law on this side!) were worthless until he began marching and picketing and getting in their face.

Whether you call it civil disobedience or direct action, I suggest that before you begin, check with your local police department and find out the local regulations on peaceful demonstration. (Matters like not blocking public access, not blocking automobile traffic, etc.) If you need a permit, get one. Police and the courts are not your enemy. Police, the law, and the courts are not the issue; the issue is demonstrating to lawmakers that your evidence and your plight must be taken seriously.

Second, when elections come round in November, it is essential you run anti-Wind candidates for town board, county legislature, state senator, etc. But mostly town board. Work within the electoral process: it works! To elect these people means you’re going to have to do a lot of leg work and advertising. Lots of door to door. Pamphlets. Leaflets. Public meetings to meet the candidates. It works.

Many people seem to think the Big Wind Onslaught doesn’t call for such measures. People are being driven from their homes, and made ill besides — and they don’t seem to think these measures are appropriate. They write letters to bureaucrats. They speak politely at town meetings where the Wind Mafia are “presenting.” These thugs need to be shouted down. These meetings need to be legally obstructed to the point where they can’t function.

Best of all — ready for this? — get arrested. Before TV cameras: arrested. Hundreds of you. Old ladies, ministers, college professors and deans, doctors. Arrested. Little kids too. Then, watch to see how the county commissioners and the conniving lawyers — watch how they come around. It’s miraculous how they change.

Big Wind is being given a free pass to destroy communities and lives and homes and health. Pretend these assholes are Martians, with little antennae and a Mother Ship parked somewhere, and they’re taking over your community. (When you survey an operating windplant, the analogy is not far fetched.) What would you do then? Still discuss the matter politely with your county commissioners and health commissioner and department of environmental conservation and town board? Still “follow the usual channels”?

Hell no! You’d take to the barricades and the streets and shout to these commissioners, “Hey, wake up! We’ve been invaded!”

My apologies for being cranky. I’ve been playing games with wind bullshit for too many years. I’ve seen too many sheep led to the slaughter. Sheep now have to take up the instruments of civil disobedience. Otherwise sheep is toast. (Mixing metaphors again.)

One last time: What doesn’t work in this mass movement (which I’ve outlined above in caricature) is polite discourse. Nor do letters to politicians berating them for not doing “their job.” Their job! Their job? Their job, dear reader, is to promote big business and big ideas and panaceas. That’s their job. To think otherwise is naïve.

Politicians hate (make that HATE) public demonstrations. Nothing worse. They hate marches and banners and slogans and placards and picketing. The television crew arrives with cameras rolling, the klieg lights suddenly switch on, and the town board, minister of the environment, county commissioner, state senator — writhe.

Consider Barbara Ashbee’s home. It’s worthless. Toxic. She’s a realtor; she knows better than I that she could not give away her home. Nor can she bear to live in it. She’s now in the horrible world of the d’Entremonts: Abandonment.

Abandon your home: that’s really the only option for many people, isn’t it? Or get bought out by the so-called developer. (Isn’t there a more appropriate name for people who do this to you?)

Big Wind picks you off, one township at a time. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, what have you got left? You’ve got your pen, you’ve got your voice, your wits, and your anger. Use them effectively.

Calvin Luther Martin

Ph.D. (History) 1974 University of California, Santa Barbara

Author, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (California 1978). Winner of the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award 1979 for the “best book of the year in American History.” Subject of Shepard Krech, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Georgia 1981).

Editor, The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford 1987)

Author, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time (Johns Hopkins 1992)

Author, The Way of the Human Being (Yale 1999). Winner of the Westchester County Library System’s Anne Izard Storyteller’s Choice Award 2000. See Calvin Luther Martin, Insanin Yolu, Turkish trans. by Ayse Sirin Okyayuz Yener (Phoenix 2002).

Author, The Language of Wildness (Yale, probably. Slowly forthcoming)

Hartwick College, assistant professor 1974

Rutgers University, assistant professor 1975, associate professor (with tenure) 1978

Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada), visiting professor 1978

Dartmouth College, visiting professor summer 1983

Alaska (Native) Moravian Seminary (Bethel, Alaska), visiting professor 1995-1996

Hartwick College, Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Humanities, 2000-2003

Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian 9/73-6/74

Henry E. Huntington Library, summer 1976

Henry E. Huntington Library, June 1980

National Endowment for the Humanities, July and August 1980

National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship 7/81-6/82

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship 7/82-6/83

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship 7/86-6/87

http://www.aweo.org/Martin.html

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Wendy-Heiger-Bernays PhD talks About Sleep Disruption, from Wind Turbine Noise.

Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD- Falmouth Wind Turbine Sleep Disruption

Massachusetts

Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD of Boston University School of Public Health explained that “it is possible that living too close to wind turbines can cause annoyance and sleep disruption, but we don’t have measurements that can show levels that disrupt sleep.”

She agreed that sleep disruption can bring on a whole host of adverse health impacts.”

http://www.safesetbacks.com/page4/styled-23/page82.html

MA DEP/DPH Expert-Falmouth Wind Turbines “are too close”

Falmouth, MA – Last Wednesday eight Falmouth wind turbine neighbors traveled to Waltham to hear three Department of Environmental Protection [DEP] / Department of Public Health [DPH] expert health panel members present their Wind Turbine Health Impact Study report.  That document, released only two weeks ago, caused great controversy not only in Falmouth but also across the Commonwealth. … [panel member] Wendy Heiger-Bernays PhD of Boston University School of Public Health explained that “it is possible that living too close to wind turbines can cause annoyance and sleep disruption, but we don’t have measurements that can show levels that disrupt sleep.” She agreed that sleep disruption can bring on a whole host of adverse health impacts.”

Dr. Heiger-Bernays is to be commended for her statements.  It is a step in the right direction and acknowledges what the neighbors in Falmouth know.  Sleep is being disturbed.  Yet there is much more to be acknowledged which has nothing to do with sleep deprivation.

It is unfortunate that the Expert Panel was unable to acknowledge in their report a most compelling fact presented in the case-study Bruce McPherson Study reports [1,2].  From [2],

“The investigators were surprised to experience the same adverse health symptoms described by neighbors living at this house and near other large industrial wind turbine sites.  The onset of adverse health effects was swift, within twenty minutes, and persisted for some time after leaving the study area.  …  This research revealed that persons without a pre-existing sleep deprivation condition, not tied to the location nor invested in the property, can experience within a few minutes the same debilitating health effects described and testified to by neighbors living near the wind turbines.  The debilitating health effects were judged to be visceral (proceeding from instinct, not intellect) and related to as yet unidentified discordant physical inputs or stimulation to the vestibular system.”

I understand that what the investigators experienced in their case-study may inadvertently fall into a branch of analysis called “time-series”.  Before they arrived at the study site, they felt fine.  Soon after they arrived at the study site they soon felt debilitated.  Later when they left the study site, they started to feel better.  When they returned to continue work their health worsened.  When the turbine stopped and they left, they started to feel better.  It took some time for them to regain full health (days to weeks).  The reports’ figures and tables illustrate the health changes experienced by the investigators with an unexpectedly clear correlation to wind turbine operations.

While the Bruce McPherson study was limited in time, the experiences of the two investigators will remain compelling.

The study confirms that large industrial wind turbines can produce real and adverse health impacts and suggests that this is due to acoustic pressure pulsations, not related to the audible frequency spectrum, by affecting the vestibular system especially at low ambient sound levels.  The study results emphasize the need for epidemiological and laboratory research by medical health professionals and acousticians concerned with public health and well-being.  This study underscores the need for more effective and precautionary setback distances for industrial wind turbines.  It is especially important to include a margin of safety sufficient to prevent inaudible low-frequency wind turbine noise from being detected by the human vestibular system.

Sincerely,
Rob Rand, Member INCE

1.  Peer-reviewed journal: Robert W. Rand, Stephen E. Ambrose, and Carmen M. E. Krogh, Occupational Health and Industrial Wind Turbines: A Case Study. Published online before print August 22, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0270467611417849, The Bulletin of Science Technology & Society, August 22, 2011.

2.  Stephen Ambrose and Robert Rand, The Bruce McPherson Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise Study: Adverse Health Effects Produced By Large Industrial Wind Turbines Confirmed. December 14, 2011.

http://randacoustics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Bruce-McPherson-ILFN-Study.pdf