corruption

Report the Harm Caused by Wind Turbines…

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The Wind Industry’s Malicious & Unjustified Harm to Public Health

April 8, 2016 by

Wisconsin sign sick and tired

Wind power is a public health problem
Cape Cod Times
Lilli-Ann Green
7 March 2016

Wind turbine projects have previously been rejected in Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, Harwich, Dennis, Brewster, Barnstable and Bourne. Health concerns have been a major issue.

A Superior Court judge, hearing neighbor’ complaints that wind turbine noise constituted an intolerable “nuisance” that was causing “irreparable harm,” issued an injunction to curtail operations.

The “Falmouth experience” is not unique. Residents in at least 21 communities in Massachusetts (and hundreds of locations all over the world) have reported significant health problems as the result of living too close to wind turbines. Those problems include sleep disruption and deprivation, headaches, ear pressure, dizziness, nausea, problems with concentration and memory, fast heart rate, high blood pressure and panic episodes.

In a 2011 peer-reviewed journal article, Harvard-trained epidemiologist Carl Phillips wrote, “There is overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents … at a nontrivial rate. The bulk of the evidence takes the form of thousands of adverse event reports. … The attempts to deny the evidence cannot be seen as honest scientific disagreement, and represent either gross incompetence or intentional bias.”

Ambrose and Rand’s 2011 peer-reviewed journal article, presented at the InterNoise international conference, concluded there was “a strong correlation with wind speed, power output and health symptoms.” Research was conducted at one homeowner’s dream home in Falmouth, which was abandoned after wind turbines became operational nearby and cause health problems.

There is plenty of additional scientific and medical evidence of harm caused by wind turbines globally. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. The health impacts are real, and people report they become worse over time. It’s a dose response.

Affected people report not experiencing symptoms before wind turbines started operating near their home. The symptoms go away when they leave their homes. The conclusion is that wind turbines are causing their problems.

Many people living in the proximity of wind turbines are not informed about the potential health impacts of wind turbines by wind developers. Some people report they don’t start experiencing the symptoms until much after wind turbines begin operating. They don’t connect the symptoms they started to experience with wind turbines nearby, perhaps because of the dose response.

Approximately 13 wind turbines operate on Cape Cod and the Islands where people living nearby (over 1.25 miles away in several cases) have reported health problems.

What steps can one take?

It is important for those affected to report and create a record of the problem with their town health board and with Wind Wise Massachusetts (email lgreen@windwisema.org). Town health boards have the responsibility to residents and their families and to take action if there is a health problem in town.

Certainly most Barnstable County citizens don’t want to directly or indirectly cause harm to others. Furthermore, common sense dictates it shouldn’t be legally proper for one town to approve an industrial machine at its border with another town while knowing there is a potential to harm the health of residents of that town nearby.

The Cape’s state legislators have filed several bills to study health problems, educate health care providers and the public and to help people who have been adversely affected by wind turbines. It would be helpful if readers and local media supported the passage of these bills. Honest and unbiased research is needed so we can understand how to do no harm to people in the proximity of wind turbines by determining how close is too close. Only then could a regional comprehensive energy plan that does not harm the health and safety of people living and working nearby be drafted.
Cape Cod Times

Lili-Ann Green’s evidence to the Australian Senate Inquiry is available here: Lilli-Anne Green – no ‘Green’ Dupe – tells Senate: Wind Farm Health Impacts ‘Universal’

insomnia

Those with “Nothing to hide, hide nothing….Climate alarmists hide it all!

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Court Orders Release of White House Climate Documents

/  March 24, 2016

Holdren_polar_vortex

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has won a case against the White House, forcing the release of documents pertaining a climate video created by White House Science AdvisorJohn Holdren. When the content of Holdren’s climate video challenged under the federal Information Quality Act, the White House claimed the video was the “personal opinion” of John Holdren, not an official communication, and therefore not subject to the Act. The newly released emails allegedly cast doubt on this assertion.

On January 8, 2014, the White House posted a controversial video claiming that global warming causes more severe winter cold. Called “The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes,” it featured the director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), John Holdren, claiming that a “growing body of evidence” showed that the “extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States” at the time was “a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

This claim was questioned by many scientists and commentators. (See, e.g., Jason Samenow, Scientists: Don’t make “extreme cold” centerpiece of global warming argument, Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2014 (linking to objection by five well-known climate scientists in the Feb. 14, 2014 issue of Science magazine); Patrick J. Michaels, Hot Air About Cold Air, Jan. 16, 2014 (former state climatologist of Virginia rejected Holdren’s claim.))

In April 2014, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent a request for correction of this statement under the federal Information Quality Act, citing peer-reviewed scientific articles debunking it. In June 2014, OSTP rejectedthis request, claiming that Holdren’s statement was his “personal opinion,” not the agency’s position, and that it thus did not constitute “information” subject to the Information Quality Act, which excludes “subjective opinions” from its reach.

…

When OSTP produced the records on March 4, 2016 (they are at this link), they showed inconsistency in OSTP’s position over time. Although OSTP told CEI in June 2014 that Holdren’s claim was just his personal “opinion,” not “information” that is subject to the Information Quality Act (IQA), this was not the position it originally took in its draft response to CEI’s request back in Spring 2014.

Instead, OSTP described Holdren’s claim in these drafts as “information provided by the government [that] meet[s] ‘basic standards of quality, including objectivity, utility, and integrity,” and constituted “communications from the White House about climate science.” (see pages 1 and 5 of each draft). Accordingly, OSTP argued it complied with the IQA’s standards for the quality of official information.

Read more: http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/hans-bader/court-orders-wh-ostp-release-records-related-claim-global-warming-causes

The following is the video at the centre of this controversy.

If President Obama and John Holdren genuinely think the evidence supports their position, that Climate Change is a serious threat, why don’t they simply stand by the evidence which they believe supports their case? Why did John Holdren, in my opinion, attempt to hide behind legal technicalities, and do everything in his power to obstruct transparency, when challenged about the defensibility of alarmist statements he made about climate change?

Windpushers Destroying Economies World-Wide…Energy Poverty!

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How Massively Subsidised Wind Power Destroys Power Markets & Economies

March 22, 2016 by

economics101

Wind and solar have destroyed the ability of the market to signal price
The Telegraph
Rupert Darwall
7 March 2016

Before the election, high electricity prices made the Big Six energy companies everyone’s favourite whipping boys. A report by the competition watchdog exonerated them. Government-driven social, environmental and network costs were the main drivers of rising electricity bills, the Competition and Markets Authority found. Now the Big Six have put themselves squarely back in the frame.

A 125-page report by the electricity industry lobby group, Energy UK, supports phasing out cheap coal power and demands more subsidies for wind and solar.

It is a high-risk strategy. In capitulating to “Big wind” and solar, the Big Six energy companies have no one to blame but themselves for the heightened political risk caused by rising electricity prices and theinevitable consumer backlash.

Weather-dependent wind and solar power is inherently unreliable and high cost. In addition to subsidies, wind and solar need more grid infrastructure. When the wind blows and the sun shines, they swamp the grid with zero marginal cost electricity, forcing gas, coal and nuclear to reduce their output.

Lower prices and lower output demolish the investment case for building the gas-fired power stations the Government says are vital. These hidden costs are the real killer.

As Amber Rudd, the energy and climate secretary, observed in her “smell the coffee speech” last November, “we now have an electricity system where no form of power generation, not even gas-fired power stations, can be built without government intervention”.

Advocates of wind and solar claim falling costs mean renewables will soon reach “grid parity”. Anyone who knows anything about electricity understands this is highly misleading.

To its great discredit, the Big Six report peddles the grid-parity fib, which ignores the hidden costs imposed on the rest of the system. Rather lamely, the report calls for government and industry to conduct further analysis on the whole-system costs of weather-dependent renewables, something it very well could have done itself.

While the Government insulates wind and solar investors from the damaging effect their output has on the market, the report admits that wind and solar have destroyed the ability of the wholesale market to provide price signals to guide investment decisions.

It envisages more wind and solar on the grid, leading to more electricity priced as garbage that consumers are forced to pay someone else to take away during periods of negative prices.

Since last summer, almost 8.5 gigawatts of conventional capacity has closed or faces closure. In 2014, the Big Six made £556m from renewables and lost £1,615m on their gas and coal-fired power stations.

Without cheap electrical storage, wind and solar can’t keep the lights on. The report foresees storage as the “single most important technological breakthrough” likely in the next 15 years. One thing’s for sure. It hasn’t happened yet.

Thanks to government policies deliberately distorting the market, wehave over-invested in wind and solar. It has blighted investment in reliable capacity that can keep the lights on.

This is the crux of Britain’s energy crunch. Clearly it was a colossal mistake to have embarked on renewables with storage unsolved.

The Big Six could have drawn attention to a situation where, in a world awash with hydrocarbons, Britain has an increasing shortage of generating capacity. There is no shortage of energy in the world. Oil prices have been falling. Last month, the US started exporting natural gas for the first time. In the first decade of electricity privatisation, around half Britain’s generating capacity was renewed. The market worked.

Now that the market has been destroyed, the real choice is between finding a path back to the market or accepting the Government is running the show. Private ownership and state control is the worst of all worlds.

Political risk is borne by the private sector, which in turn means higher electricity bills. Financial efficiency would see new investment being funded off the Government’s balance sheet and reinstating the Central Electricity Generating Board. Instead, the Big Six report calls for more honesty about the impact of more renewables on electricity bills without providing any itself. For the industry, higher bills are primarily a PR problem to be solved by better communication.

Energy UK’s chief, Lawrence Slade, goes out on a limb in advocating a British equivalent of Germany’s disastrous Energiewende (Energy Transition). In 2004, the Green energy minister, Jürgen Trittin, claimed that the extra cost of renewable energy on monthly bills was equivalent to the cost of a scoop of ice cream.

Nine years later, CDU minister Peter Altmaier said Energiewende could cost around €1 trillion by the end of the 2030s. The cost of feed-in tariffs and other subsidies is currently €21.8bn a year; €20bn is being spent on a new north-south high voltage line and investment in other grid infrastructure is likely to double that number.

Thanks to the high volatility of wind and solar output, 25pc of Germany’s green energy is dumped on other countries at low or negative prices, destabilising the grid of Germany’s neighbours. At home, the situation is just as serious.

In 2013, 345,000 households could not pay their electricity bills. In January 2014, Deutsche Bank warned that Germany’s energy cost penalty was already eroding its industrial base.

In a 2013 survey by the German Chambers of Commerce, over half of industrial companies reported that Energiewende was having a negative or very negative impact on their competitiveness.

To see a successful energy transformation, you have to look across the Atlantic. In the most telling indication of the Big Six surrender to the green lobby, there is not a single mention of fracking and the US shale revolution. But, as the report states, it is assumed that the UK remains part of the European Union and continues to try to meet its legally binding renewable energy targets for 2020 under the 2009 renewable energy directive. The underlying message from the Big Six is clear: if you want lower electricity bills, vote leave.

Rupert Darwall is the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History (Quartet, 2013)
The Telegraph

Rupert Darwall

WindWeasels Hate to be Fair to Nearby Residents of Wind Projects….

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Wind Industry Howls ‘Wolf’ as Poles Finally Get a Few Half-Decent Wind Farm Rules

March 21, 2016 by

brat

****

A week or so back we covered a Bloomberg article on new rules set to be imposed in Poland, with the predictable – we’re “doomed” – response from the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers.

Here’s an analysis of what the new rules really mean.

Polish Wind Industry ‘Cries Wolf’ at First Attempt of Proper Regulation
Stopwiatrakom
Editors’ comment
8 March 2016

The Wind industry in Poland has had 15 years to become a responsible partner for rural communities. Now it cries wolf at first attempt of proper regulation.

The Polish and European wind industry lobby are railing against the draft law providing for setbacks of giant wind turbines from people’s homes.

A clear example is a report published by the influential international business news provider, Bloomberg.com (see:  Jessica Shankleman, “Wind farms now come with the threat of jail”, http://www.bloomberg.com, 3.03.2016 – http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-03/jail-and-new-fees-threaten-key-european-market-for-wind-turbines).

Their aim is to discredit the Polish draft law as motivated by an unreasonable, ideological bias against industrial wind power.

Keep in mind that the Polish chapter of European wind industry lobby, or the Polish Wind Power Association (PSEW), has been a vigorous player in the country since 1999.

That is plenty of wasted opportunities to demonstrate the industry’s commitment to being responsible partners in the sustainable development of Polish rural areas. Perhaps PSEW  should have been a little less single-minded in “overcoming barriers to wind energy development”, that is to say in its focus on securing remarkably generous, by European standards, public subsidies and privileged treatment in the Polish electrical energy system.

A more socially responsible and inclusive approach would induce an honest pursuit of fair negotiations with real hosts of their gigantic industrial installations. These are not primarily mayors and local council members, who according to the 2015 report of the National Audit Office (NIK) are disturbingly frequently beneficiaries of land leases for wind farms, but rather actual rural communities.

Stretching their comfort zone beyond expansion & profits issues would have helped the wind industry to focus on being good neighbours of residents living next to their industrial turbines.

Was it wise to defend the option of planning procedures that exclude any meaningful participation of local communities, to be applied when the local authority is sufficiently amendable?

With hindsight, making wind turbines exempt from any technical inspections or supervision, as has been the case to date, might have eased the imports of used German and Danish wind turbines into Poland but reflects badly on the wind industry’s regard for the country’s long-term interests.

Today the lobby is trying to scuttle the setback legislation. True to form, its arguments are based on half-truths or outright distortions.

1. The proposed legislation does not prevent the wind industry from carrying on its business or limit their freedom to undertake economic activity, but simply takes into account the social context (social externalities) of its expansion, in accordance with requirements of the Polish Constitution (protection of human health, proper spatial governance).

The legislation lays down a transparent criterion for siting wind turbines. It allows for the construction of new wind turbines on hundreds of thousands of hectares, in addition to the existing c. 3000 turbines. However, the proposed setback of 10 x turbine height does indeed foreclose the option of turning rural areas in Poland into an industrial zone for the wind industry – which is what the “European power house”, mentioned in the Bloomberg article, really amounts to.

The European wind lobby’s apparent hope for tens of thousands of giant wind turbines to be built in our country cannot be realised for the simple reason that it entails no protection for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of rural residents.

2. Contrary to what the title of the Bloomberg article implies (jail terms for wind farm developers!), the proposed law does not threaten wind industry with any special sanctions. This title is a sad testimony to an unbalanced reporting on an issue of great public importance.

The draft legislation includes ordinary enforcement provisions, in particular with respect to the technical inspection of giant machinery. In fact, the law would close the period when the wind industry enjoyed an extensive de facto legal immunity in Poland.  This applies in particular to the lack of any technical supervision whatsoever.

The status quo was documented in detail by the National Audit Office in its 2014 report on “Siting and Construction of Onshore Wind Farms”. The fact that European wind lobby spokesmen believe such legal changes to be prejudicial reveals the mindset of an industry claiming special legal privileges, unavailable to other economic operators.

The loopholes in the Polish legal system effectively deprive Polish citizens of their right to effective remedy, including before administrative courts, in cases relating to the functioning of industrial wind power installations.

The Polish wind power lobby should not criticize the costs attendant on the transition to a sound regulatory environment, considering that it has opposed the introduction of such legal regulations in the past. The scale and seriousness of existing irregularities was amply demonstrated by the cited report of the National Audit Office, produced under the previous government of the Civic Platform and Polish Peasant Party, that is before the recent political changes in Poland, and without any involvement or inspiration of the then parliamentary opposition.

3. Increased costs of pursuing industrial wind business are largely due to the expected rise in taxes payable to the local authority’s budget, resulting from the elimination of a legal fiction that has existed in this area to date.

The draft legislation simply provides that local taxes would be assessed in relation to the wind turbine as a whole, and not only to some parts, as was the case so far.  This means that wind turbines will be taxed just like any other commercial structures. In fact, the current practice constitutes yet another form of public aid or a de facto transfer from local budgets to the industry.

4. The “mitigation measures” to limit the negative impacts of wind turbines on residents that are proposed in the cited article by Bloomberg’s own analyst–as an alternative to the setback regulation–have proved not helpful in countless instances both in Poland and worldwide.

The power that local wind farm operators can exert on local communities, and in particular in their dealing with affected residents, makes any solution involving temporary shutdown of wind turbines to limit their noise emissions a largely theoretical possibility. This is because such measures would reduce the operator’s profits.  As a matter of fact, wind projects that exceed acceptable noise levels, for example during night-time, should not have been approved in the first place.

The failure of such remedies is evidenced by hundreds of families who have fled their homes worldwide and many thousands of people reporting health problems across the world.

Two Polish Commissioners for Human Rights have formally requested the Polish government on two different occasions to regulate the distance between wind turbines and people’s homes (in 2014 and again in February 2016).

The official website of the Commissioner’s Office explains that they receive “more and more letters from citizens complaining about a deterioration of their health due to the wind turbines’ influence”. This raises the risk of violation of the Constitution of Poland, namely of Article 38 (“The Republic of Poland shall ensure the legal protection of the life of every human being”) and Article 68 (“Everyone shall have the right to have his health protected”) .

Greenpeace Polska is well-known for its commitment to renewable energy. Nevertheless, their own investigation into the practices relating the siting of wind farms in Poland induced Greenpeace Polska to issue already in 2012 a statement “regarding the protests related to the construction of wind farms in Poland”. “Greenpeace takes the view that wind farms should be built where they do not disturb people or endanger the environment, and in particular at locations where construction of them serves the Planet without becoming yet another source of division among people”.

That 2012 statement described a number of needed reforms in wind farm project planning.  Practically none of these recommendations have been implemented since 2012.

5. To win assent of rural residents to a life overshadowed by giant turbines, Bloomberg’s in-house analyst suggests that local people should be encouraged to be become shareholders in wind farms–in Poland, such schemes come under the catch-all slogan  of “(green) energy grassroots democracy”.  For neighbours of giant turbines, this is a window dressing exercise, with serious social and financial consequences for rural communities.

How big a share in a multi-million euro wind farm can be acquired by a typical inhabitant of  Polish countryside? How much would have to come from a bank loan? Who would then be the actual stakeholder – the bank or residents? What will happen if the farm goes bust or fails to generate profits sufficient to guarantee any return on investment or even to cover monthly payments on the bank loan?

This is no scare-mongering, all of this we can see in Germany. Would the State step in with additional aid to keep the wind farm in operation and rescue local shareholders? There is plenty of evidence that shareholders of “citizen” or “community farms” are hardly kinder than big outside companies to complaining neighbours or pesky raptors when their dividends are at stake.

Currently, communities in Poland, just as worldwide, are split between land owners (who in Poland, as in Germany, France and elsewhere are frequently the very municipality officers who approved the local wind farm in the first place) benefitting from leases to wind companies  and the rest of nearby residents. Dividing the village between wind farm shareholders and the rest is not likely to improve community ties, either.

Back in the 1990s we had plenty of first-hand experience with employee share ownership schemes during the drive to privatise  state-owned companies in Poland. The lesson learned is that small minority stakeholders have no say in how the companies are operated, who gets elected to the board or in the choice of corporate policy.

The proper venue for local democracy, including “energy democracy”,  to flourish is the local  community meeting during which residents can make decisions about their common future in a free debate and on the basis of reliable information about the impacts and benefits of any proposed large-scale industrial projects.

6. Comparisons between the costs of wind energy or wind power sector as a whole and other forms of power generation, as presented in the lobby-inspired publications, are misleading. This is because a whole array of costs that are intrinsic to the expansion of wind power industry (especially on the scale hoped for by the wind lobby) are conveniently overlooked.

Wind lobby accounts exclude the cost of disorganisation of existing stable energy systems based on the supply of dispachable energy.  Such costs are visible wherever wind power is able to  “realise its potential”. Not mentioned are the costs, including those to the environment, of experiments in converting existing power generators into the spinning reserve for unpredictable wind turbines. Missing from such calculations are the costs of hundreds of kilometres of additional power lines and systems to manage suddenly unpredictable energy production and markets.

No consideration is given to the expense of setting up and operating programmes for exceptional emergency measures to prevent generalised blackouts when there is too little or too much wind, as are currently being introduced in Germany.  And what about the cost of building gigantic energy storage facilities, using technology that is yet to be invented, of which there has been no need before.

7. In the light of independent research on wind conditions in Poland, wind lobbyists’’ belief that the country represents excellent potential for the growth of wind power appears somewhat farfetched.

According to the data from Barometre Eolien – Eurobserver (February 2015), the capacity factor for Polish wind farms is 21.4%. This figure is among the lowest in Europe. When in summer of 2015 a heat wave raised the prospect of temporary shutdowns or even blackouts, the wind power industry made things worse, not better. “Of the circa 4000 MW of installed wind power capacity, the production of electrical energy from these sources was less than 10% of that figure, and in some hours it barely exceeded 100 MW”, according to the Polish network operator, PSE S.A.

Moreover, “the sections of Poland that are allegedly favourable to industrial wind power developments are mostly high nature value areas under the Green Lungs of Poland conservation programme [the North- East region containing 2500 lakes and largely forested], including buffer zones of several national parks, and also recreational highland areas and the Baltic coast; however, even there the wind conditions are not conducive to achieving capacity factors above  20%” (Prof. Marek Lebiedowski, “The Potential for Rational Use of Wind  as Energy Source in Poland”, 2016 –  http://kdepot.eu/lib/1146552) (in Polish).

8. And finally, the proposed legislation is not a product of ideological bias of politicians of the party in power, but rather a response to clear, long-standing demands of social stakeholders. The same demands impelled two different national Ombudsmen, both of whom were nominated by the previous government, to intervene in defence of residents living in the proximity of wind farms. In February this year, the current Ombudsman, dr. Bodnar asked the minister of the environment: “How can we help people who have wind turbines above their homes?”

Stopwiatrakom.eu

Faux-green crowd making a Killing from Carbon/Climate Scams!

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Canada may already be carbon neutral, so why are we keeping it a secret?

F. Larry Martin, Special to Financial Post | March 2, 2016 

Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Clement Sabourin/AFP/Getty Images
Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Here’s a seemingly simple question: Is Canada a net carbon dioxide emitter? You would think so from reading news headlines. We’ve earned the scorn of environmentalists, NGOs, and media outlets galore, labelled with such juvenile epithets as “fossil of the year” or “corrupt petro-state.”

Sadly, lost in all the hyperbole is the actual science. There is nothing quantitative about the vague idea that, as a “progressive nation,” Canada should be expected to “do more” to fight climate change.

But therein lies the rub; Canada is poised to immediately do more to combat climate change than almost every other country in the world. How, you ask? Well, by doing more of the same. If that sounds ludicrous, let me explain.

Most Canadians would agree that our response to climate change needs to be scientifically sound, environmentally sustainable and financially realistic, as well as global, comprehensive, and holistic. Right now, our approach is none of those things; the public discourse is driven by a myopic, ideological obsession with carbon emissions alone. What else is there, you ask?

The answer comes from the most recent report (2014) of the Global Carbon Project, which states that global human-induced CO2 emissions were 36 billion tonnes. Of that, 36 per cent stayed in the atmosphere, 27 per cent was absorbed by water, and 37 per cent was absorbed by land.

That’s right — absorbed by land! Not all CO2 emitted by people stays in the atmosphere. Much of it returns to the earth, mainly through the carbon absorption and sequestration power of plants, soil, and trees.

Enough Trees Cut Down in Niagara Region , to Do Damage, Irreparable for Decades…

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Niagara Region Wind won’t say how many trees they are cutting down

Posted on 03/15/2016

Niagara Region Wind Farm project co-ordinator Shiloh Berriman wouldn’t say how many trees would be cut on along the 45 km route laid out for the transmission lines.

 

“That’s not public information that we’re willing to give out. We haven’t finished out tree clearing yet, so I don’t actually have a number. And it’s not something public that we would like to give out,” she said.

1297813168809_ORIGINALBy Allan Benner, The Tribune
Andy Koopal frowned as he looked down at the freshly cut metre-wide tree trunk, recalling the majestic oak that it once supported. “That tree was over 150 years old,” he said. “It was a perfect healthy tree. There was no need for it.”

He said the tree – likely a sapling when Canada became a country – was one of eight old growth oaks that border his 10 hectares of farmland on Concession 6 in Wellandport, near Side Road 42. When the Fort Erie resident drove into Wainfleet recently, he said he was shocked to see that all of the trees were cut down and removed. “I came by here Saturday. Then I saw the damage they did,” he said.

Along with Koopal’s trees, likely hundreds more were cut throughout rural west Niagara to make room for transmission lines feeding into new industrial wind turbines being built near by Niagara Region Wind Farm, said Wainfleet’s engineering manager Richard Nan. The company is building a 230 Megawatt industrial wind farm, with wind turbines located in Wainfleet, West Lincoln and Lincoln. Read article

Dr. Sarah Laurie’s Speech to Citizens in Falmouth, Fighting Back, Against the Windpushers!

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Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your rally. I first wish to pay tribute to the long suffering residents of Falmouth USA, who lived or are still living near the wind turbines owned by the town. These people have made an incredible contribution to our knowledge of wind turbine acoustics, wind turbine adverse health impacts, and have shown true human courage and compassion for others in a similar situation – both in their own country and further afield.

We owe them, their acoustics and health professionals, and their supporters, a great debt of gratitude. Their lived experiences, which are now very much in the public domain, in part because of their determination to fight for their legal and human rights, are a window on the incredible suffering which excessive intrusive wind turbine noise can cause. These people are just like you and me but have had to suffer intolerably and disgracefully because of gross government regulatory failure and corporate bastardry, deceit and greed. They are simply trying to live their lives, free from the devastating adverse health effects resulting from what can only be described as an invasion of their home, resulting in acoustic trespass and noise nuisance, from pulsing infrasound and low frequency noise.

These frequencies have been known to be harmful for over thirty years since the seminal research work by Dr Neil Kelley and his team from NASA and other research organisations. Wind turbines are of course not the only source of this damaging sound energy, their body and brain don’t care what the source of the pulsing sound is – it is going to react anyway, at ever decreasing doses, until or unless they can remove themselves from that exposure. The only two options are turn off the noise OR move away. It is not humanly possible to go for long without good quality sleep and remain unharmed and as you all probably know, sleep deprivation from repeated sleep disturbance is the commonest problem reported by most residents living near industrial wind power facilities. This inevitably results in exhaustion, and consequently serious and predictable adverse physical and mental health effects. The Centre for Disease Control in America has recently stated the obvious – that insufficient sleep is a public health problem. Their website states the following: “Sleep is increasingly recognized as important to public health, with sleep insufficiency linked to motor vehicle crashes, industrial disasters, and medical and other occupational errors.1 Unintentionally falling asleep, nodding off while driving, and having difficulty performing daily tasks because of sleepiness all may contribute to these hazardous outcomes. Persons experiencing sleep insufficiency are also more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, and obesity, as well as from cancer, increased mortality, and reduced quality of life and productivity.”

So why are the most commonly reported symptoms of wind turbine neighbours, ignored by the American Health Authorities? Where are the public health physicians? Why has there not yet been even one detailed case study of one person, anywhere in the world, examining the full spectrum of acoustic exposures overnight, together with concurrent sleep study EEG and continuous heart rate monitoring? The Waubra Foundation has been calling for this precise research for the last five years. As you all no doubt know, US Acousticians Rob Rand and Steve Ambrose conducted the wonderful initial acoustic investigation in Falmouth, USA funded by the generosity of Bruce McPherson, which provided vitally important clues about the causes of the symptoms. This study is still of global importance, and is something which Falmouth residents should be very proud of.

Other acoustic investigators have followed, and made other significant contributions. But where are the medical and public health investigators? They seem to be in hiding; either ignoring important research evidence in the case of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council “expert panel” with members who had documented conflicts of interest, or in the case of Health Canada, deliberately choosing study designs which do not directly investigate the problems in the best possible way. For example any doctor knows that you do not make clinical judgements about someone’s blood pressure with a single once off measurement, yet that is what this Health Canada team did – with no concurrent measurement of the acoustic exposure at the time. You must repeat the measurement. This is junk science, and Health Canada know it, and are trying to hide it by dribbling the study results out slowly and in small “bites”, restricting access to the raw data and other results, making it very difficult for others to critically evaluate their results. I applaud Falmouth Psychiatrist Dr William Hallstein for his professional integrity, courage, and honesty – advocating so strongly for his patients, to whom he owes a professional and ethical duty of care, which he clearly takes seriously. Others need to follow his example. I also applaud Dr Nina Pierpont for her research, and her courage and integrity, and her work with Falmouth residents, helping them expose their stories to the public. But where are their colleagues? Why the silence? 1 http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssleep/ The silence of too many professionals, or indeed even active collusion with noise polluters to hide or ignore the evidence of serious harm, has allowed this serious abuse of the legal and human rights of residents in Falmouth, and indeed all over the world, to occur, and to continue.

But why are the public servants responsible for environmental health, planning and noise pollution regulation, seemingly so complicit with the harmful abuse of the rights of citizens? Is it ignorance or incompetence? Is it pure corruption? Is it regulatory capture? Is it ideological zealotry – an attitude that leads to the concept that people who are noise impacted from wind turbine noise are somehow acceptable “collateral damage”. Is it fear of being ridiculed or ostracized by colleagues?

I am very glad that you are showing such open and public support for the impacted Falmouth residents today, and I join with you in demanding immediate change before any more damage is done to vulnerable citizens. There must be full spectrum acoustic measurements inside and outside people’s homes, with the complete cooperation of the wind turbine operators so that on off testing can be performed to determine the true contribution of the wind turbines to the soundscape, and so the symptom triggers can be properly identified. If the turbines are disturbing sleep, they must be turned off at night. If health is being adversely impacted, there needs to be a resolution – two alternatives being property buy outs with compensation for nuisance, or wind turbines being deconstructed and removed. There are precedents for both. Planning regulations and siting decisions must in future taken notice of empirical acoustic and health data and ensure there is sufficient buffer zone in order to protect people. It’s time people’s health, and their human rights are properly protected – in particular the right to attain the best possible physical and mental health. That fundamental human right to the best possible health specified in most United Nations Human Rights instruments, is not possible if people cannot sleep.

Sarah Laurie, CEO Waubra Foundation

Winweasels Will Say Anything, To Try To Protect Their Scam!

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Orwellian Eco-Fascist Ideology Ramming Wind Turbines Into Everyone Else’s Backyards

February 22, 2016 by

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Those that accuse community defenders of being nothing more than self-interested ‘NIMBYs’ are hardly what you’d call ‘disinterested observers’.

No, it’s their willful ignorance and lack of human empathy that gives them away – that and the fact that they will never, themselves, have to tolerate a ‘life’, suffering incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Reminiscent of the porcine ‘elite’ that ran Orwell’s Animal Farm (with one of its central themes the promised construction of a windmill that was said by its piggy-proponents to offer ‘free electricity’, a life of leisure and wealth for the lower orders) in his obsession to carpet your patch of paradise with hundreds of whirling Danish-Dervishes, the eco-fascist is always ready to line you up to make the sacrifices that they themselveswouldn’t tolerate for a second.

Some might call it ‘green hypocrisy’: STT calls it an inexcusable form of malevolence of the very worst kind – one, long on sanctimony, and short on either scientific or economic logic. Precisely the attributes exhibited by Orwell’s selfish and mean-spirited barnyard overlords.

These days, the characters drawn by George don’t grunt, they rant – and use self-affixed titles such as “Friends of Mother Earth”. Here’s a run-down on how these characters roll, from Virgina.

Van Velzer: Botetourt ignores the hazards of wind energy
The Roanoke Times
Bill Van Velzer
15 February 2016

On Jan. 26, Botetourt County’s Board of Supervisors gave its unanimous blessing to the construction of 25, 550-foot tall wind turbines on North Mountain.

This decision has brought cheers from local environmentalists who identify themselves as “friends of Mother Earth.” As with the siting of any industrial facility, the proposed Rocky Forge project is replete with enough technical minutiae that any complete understanding of its true environmental and human impact requires tremendous attention to hours of intense study.

For this reason, Rockbridge County’s Board of Supervisors requested of Botetourt County a reasonable 90-day delay period. This delay was denied while the project was allowed to proceed.

Wind does not respect arbitrary political boundaries; neither do the impacts that industrial wind facilities have on nearby residents and wildlife. So when one of the speakers referred to a need to push wind turbines into the view sheds of “the wealthy Rockbridge elites,” one wonders if there is another agenda at work that has little to do with the facts of this issue. Unfortunately, this seems to be the world we live in nowadays.

Indeed, it seems that discussions of wind energy fit into a larger political matrix. We must avoid this. This issue — when properly vetted — should transcend political ideology and rest on factual evidence. Each of us has a right to define our own quality of life. When someone insists that their emotionally-driven opinion is more important than my factual analysis, I have to begin wondering if I’m getting too close to a larger ideological vulnerability.

Having said this, there are legitimate issues concerning both Botetourt County’s rush to judgement and the larger assumptions about wind energy. From local to global, here is where we are:

First is the issue of “unconstitutional taking of private property.” In short, your right to enjoy your private property cannot trump my right to the enjoy mine. This is an essential ingredient of American jurisprudence, originating in English common law. It is at the heart of how we define fairness. Yet the precedent set by the Botetourt Board of Supervisors allows 550’-tall wind turbines 605 feet from a neighboring property line, and 820 feet a from a neighbor’s home.

Moreover, the 60dBA noise limit “restriction” is commensurate with sound at a busy urban intersection. North Mountain is clearly a rural environment with an ambient noise level at exactly half of this figure. Will these allowances not impact neighboring property values?

Of course, these issues have everything to do with whether or not prospective purchasers of your property — should you decide to sell — would want to hear this cacophony of noise, and see spinning blades from your deck or picture window at all hours and days of the year.

Infrasound belongs to the above argument, but really deserves space of its own. The wind industry denies its existence like tobacco companies used to deny any link between smoking and lung cancer.

Not surprisingly, Botetourt County doesn’t recognize infrasound, either. This cannot and will not continue, due to the rapidly accumulating evidence that infrasound’s wave pulses are a much greater health concern than is audible sound.

Infrasound deprives people of sleep, causes irritability and loss of concentration, and general anxiety. Don’t take my word for it — scores of YouTube videos have documented the abandonment of homes due to this unforgivable negligence on the part of local government officials.

Impact on wildlife is the flip side of human impact. Infrasound impacts animals in the same way that it impacts humans; the difference is that wildlife simply leaves impacted areas.

sleep with turbines

However for avian populations, the destruction is more graphic. For this reason, wind turbines have been called “Cuisinarts of the air.”

“Windustry” denies this, while claiming that cats, windows and cars take far more birds and bats than do wind turbines. This is beyond disingenuous. How many house cats kill an eagle, a hawk, an owl annually? None other than the American Bird Conservancy documents bird and bat deaths in the U.S. as 573,000 and 888,000 respectively, as of 2012.

dead_eagle_at_base_of_turbine

The “kicker” here is that Botetourt County doesn’t require independent monitoring of bird and bat kills — even for resident eagle populations. Ditto for threatened and endangered bats. Is this prudent?

So while Rocky Forge supporters congratulate themselves, more deliberative minds ponder the future. Unbeknownst to most valley residents, Botetourt County’s master wind resource map identifies 11 ridges and mountains as potential industrial wind energy sites. I’ll leave the last assumption to you.
The Roanoke Times

lake winds

One Billion Dollars to “Fix” Mistakes that Should NOT Have Been Made!

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‘Saving’ South Australia from its Self-Inflicted Wind Power Disaster Needs $1 Billion Right NOW!

February 21, 2016 by

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Wind and solar create headaches for energy market operator
Australian Financial Review
Mark Ludlow
19 February 2016

State governments may have to spend billions of dollars to duplicate the electricity network to cope with the unreliability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, according to the national energy forecaster.

As the Australian Energy Market Operator released a report [press release here and the full report here: Joint AEMO ElectraNet Report_19 February 2016] that found there could be reliability issues for the South Australian market, which has embraced renewable technology, its chief executive, Matt Zema, said the rise of wind and solar could also create problems throughout the country.

“It is becoming more and more of a challenge. We might need to build another interconnector to the South Australian market to improve reliability and in the longer term another bigger loop across the nation to be a back-up,” Mr Zema told The Australian Financial Review.

Electricity prices spiked in South Australia late last year after problems with the Heywood interconnector to Victoria, effectively cutting off South Australia from the NEM. South Australia did not have enough of its own locally generated power to cope with demand, which significantly pushed up prices.

A joint report between AEMO and South Australia’s electricity transmission company Electranet found there will be ongoing issues with controlling reliability in the state’s power network either during or following any future loss of the Heywood interconnector and the closure of coal-fired power stations.

Interconnectors are high-voltage transmission cables connecting electricity markets.

“Measures can be taken in the short term to address some of the immediate operational effects, but as the power system continues to evolve, in the longer term there could be an increasing need for changes to market arrangements or infrastructure to continue to meet security and reliability expectations, particularly at times when SA is synchronously islanded [separated] from the remainder of the NEM,” the report found.

AEMO is conducting further studies to maintain power system security in South Australia if it becomes isolated from the NEM.

Grappling with implications

Mr Zema said state governments were still grappling with the implications of moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation. He said they may have toINVEST billions of dollars in a back-up “loop” of interconnectors to ensure there are not reliability issues which could lead to blackouts.

“South Australia is at the front end of this [renewable] curve, Tasmania is not far behind as they are finding out with Basslink connection to the mainland,” Mr Zema said.

“If you build another interconnector to Victoria you may well extend it from Victoria to NSW.”

A new interconnector between South Australia and Victoria which would cost about $1 billion.

Mr Zema said the only alternative to building back-up interconnectors or more gas-fired power stations to cover for wind and solar – when the sun isn’t shining or the wind is not blowing – would be to dismantle the NEM.

“You either strengthenTHE GRID and have more reliability and more paths or you break it up and its gets smaller and smaller and each state becomes an island,” he said.

“You either become better connected toTHE GRID or you become your own grid which would result in huge price fluctuations.”

South Australia is leading the charge towards renewable energy, especially with the closure of coal-fired power stations, including Alinta Energy’s coal-fired power stations at Port Augusta.

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill last year said the price fluctuations would not last and the state would benefit from leading the adoption of wind and solar power.

The precarious nature of the electricity network was further demonstrated by Tasmania also being isolated due to problems with the Bass Strait undersea power cable.

Victoria’s energy market could also be facing an overhaul with Alcoa’s Portland smelter – a large energy users – close to closure. It is negotiating with AEMO about an energy subsidy for its poles and wires.
Australian Financial Review

jay weatherill

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SA’s vapid Premier – a former worker’s compensation solicitor – wouldn’t be STT’s first pick when it came to sorting out a power market in absolute crisis and a grid on the brink of total collapse. His ‘belief’ that betting his beleaguered State’s failing ‘fortunes’ on more of the same smacks of child-like delusion, but, given more sensible (but costly) moves made recently (albeit under pressure) politically driven deception.

Contrary to Jay’s let’s all ‘hold-hands-around-a-turbine’ chanting Kumbaya – and Matt Zema’s line about “moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation” – SA’s Labor government has just signed their constituents up to throw $50 million a year in subsidies at the French owner of a mothballed CCGT plant at Pelican Point.

That panicked move is all about ensuring something like a reliable power flow (for the time being); and, at the political triage level, is an attempt to avoid any more ‘unhelpful’ wind power blackouts: like the one that plunged almost the entire State into Stone Age darkness last November; and that has businesses, like Uni SA coping with power supply ‘interruptions’ and total blackouts on a regular basis.

email ML

Once upon a time, thanks to the pragmatic vision of its longest-ever-serving Premier, Sir Tom Playford, South Australians enjoyed both energy autonomy and the cheapest and most reliable power in the Country – if not the world; and, with it, unparalleled growth in population, employment and incomes. Now, the reverse is true on all counts.

Always the mendicant State, SA’s Labor government – having willingly signed up to an economic suicide pact – will do what it does best: beg like fury for the Federal Government to bail it out, which means its neighbours will end up footing the bill for the most ridiculous power ‘policy’ ever devised.

tom playford-anzac-parade

Wind Weasels Don’t Care Who They Destroy!!

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Mexican Wind Farm Madness: Wind Industry Crime & Corruption Crush an Ancient Culture

February 2, 2016 by

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Renata Bessi is a freelance journalist and contributor the Americas Program and Desinformémonos. She has published articles in Brazilian media: The Trecheiro newspaper magazine, Página 22, Repórter Brasil, Rede Brasil Atual, Brasil de Fato, Outras Palavras.

Santiago Navarro is an economist, a freelance journalist, photographer and contributor to the Americas Program, Desinformémonos and SubVersiones.

Together they have determined to expose the wind industry in Mexico for precisely what it is: despicable.

The dark side of clean energy in Mexico
Truthout
Santiago Navarro F. and Renata Bessi
29 January 2016

A palm hat worn down by time covers the face of Celestino Bortolo Teran, a 60-year-old Indigenous Zapotec man. He walks behind his ox team as they open furrows in the earth. A 17-year-old youth trails behind, sowing white, red and black corn, engaging in a ritual of ancient knowledge shared between local people and the earth.

Neither of the two notices the sound of our car as we arrive “because of the wind turbines,” Teran says. Just 50 meters away, a wind farm has been installed by the Spanish company Gas Natural Fenosa. It will generate, at least for the next three decades, what governments and energy companies have declared “clean energy.”

Along with this farm, 20 others have been set up, forming what has come to be known as the wind corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The corridor occupies a surface area of 17,867.8 hectares, across which 1,608 wind turbines have been installed. The secretary of tourism and economic development of Oaxaca claims that they will collectively generate 2,267.43 megawatts of energy.

The Tehuantepec Isthmus stretches just 200 kilometers from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, making it the third narrowest strip of land connecting the Americas, after isthmuses in Nicaragua and Panama. In this area, mountains converge to create a geological tunnel, which funnels extremely high-speed winds between the two oceans. Energy investors have focused on the region after the government of Oaxaca claimed that it’s capable of producing 10,000 megawatts of wind energy in an area of 100,000 hectares.

“Before, I could hear all the animals living in the areas. Through their songs and sounds, I knew when it was going to rain or when it was the best time to plant,” Teran said with sadness and rage in his voice. “Now though, it seems the animals have left due to the wind turbines.”

What Teran does not know is whether the turbines, built in accordance with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as defined in the Kyoto Protocol, are generating alternative energy that will actually help to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of large corporations and industrialized countries. The main objective of these polluters is to prevent global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius before 2100, according to the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), better known as the COP21, which concluded in December 2015. “I don’t know what climate change is and neither do I know about the COP. I only know that our ancestral lands are being covered by these turbines,” Teran said.

At the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, participating countries passed the UNFCCC in response to climate change. With this accord, states set out to maintain their greenhouse gas emissions at the levels reached in 1990. At the third Conference of the Parties (COP3), held in Japan in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was approved by industrialized countries, with the aim of reducing national emissions to an average of 5 percent below the 1990 levels, between 2008 and 2012. In order to help reduce the costs of this reduction, three “flexibility mechanisms” were designed: emissions trading, joint implementation and the aforementioned Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), under which a large number of the wind farms in the Tehuantepec Isthmus have been constructed.

According to the Kyoto Protocol, these mechanisms are meant to permit industrialized countries and private companies to reduce their emissions by developing clean energy projects in other parts of the world where it is more economically viable, and later include these reductions into national quotas. The second period of engagement of the Protocol is 2013-2020. In this period, countries in the European Union (excluding Iceland) have agreed to a collective emission reduction of 20 percent with respect to 1990 emission levels.

The Clean Energy Extraction and Energy Transition Financing Law statesthat Mexico will install technology to generate 25,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2024. “Mexico has an obligation to limit the electrical energy generated by fossil fuels to sixty-five percent (from the current eighty percent) by 2024,” the law states.

Teran continues sowing his corn while we ask him about the benefits he’s gained from the wind corridor and, a bit irritated, he responds: “They have not provided me or anyone in my family a job, and I don’t want anything to do with these companies or the government; I just want them to leave me in peace on my land. To let me live as I did beforehand.”

Wind Farms for Sale

2016_0129energyIstmus-Corredor-2

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The US Department of Energy and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with the justification to help accelerate the use of wind energy technologies in the state of Oaxaca, developed an atlas published in 2003, which mapped the wind potential in the state of Oaxaca. The mapping confirms that the isthmus is the region with the largest wind potential.

“This wind resource atlas is an important element of the Mexican strategy to ensure availability of the necessary information and to define specific renewable energy projects as well as tools access to financing and development support,” according to the atlas document.

The paper organizers say they will not share specific maps related to the respective areas of wind potential due to the confidentiality required in possible contracts signed between companies and the government of Mexico. Although more than a decade later, with the arrival of more parks in this territory, it has become clear which of these sites are mainly located on the shores of Laguna Superior.

For all the good intentions the United States had to cooperate with Mexico to invest in renewable energy, USAID made another document in 2009, called “Study of Export Potential Wind Energy of Mexico to the United States,” which confirms that the greatest potential of this energy is concentrated in the states of Oaxaca (2,600 megawatts) and Baja California (1,400 megawatts). In August 2015, the government of Mexico officially announced that the wind farm “Energía Sierra Juárez” in Baja California, the first wind project between Mexico and the United States, will export energy to California. And they are waiting for an interconnection to export the energy produced in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

“This mapping is only one part of a series of mega-projects that are designed for this area,” said biologist and coastal ecology and fishery sciences professor and researcher Patricia Mora, of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Integral Regional Development of Oaxaca (CIIDIR Oaxaca) based at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional.”Not only is it wind energy, but also oil and gas, and also mining, an infrastructure for the movement of goods. Therefore, this wind mapping is only a pretext to map the full potential of this whole geostrategic area, which functions as a type of catalog to offer it to businesses.”

The wind corridor was designed from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1994 by Mexico, the United States and Canada, subsequently given continuity with the international agreement, Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), and now remade into Proyecto Mesoamerica. The project’s main objective was to “create favorable conditions for the flow of goods, oil, minerals and energy.”

“Clean energy is part of this context. It’s part of the continuity of the exponential economic growth of capital; it is not something alternative to it. It’s another link that is painted green,” Mora said.

Not-So-Clean Energy

Two-hundred kilometers connect the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic. Photo archive of the first consultation that occurred in the Isthmus, specifically regarding Southern wind farm.

To set the turbines, hundreds of tons of cement that interrupt water flows are used. “It is worth mentioning that they are using the cement company Cemex, who also has a wind farm in the Isthmus,” Mora said.

The population of Venta, where the first wind farm was built, was literally surrounded by turbines. Insufficient with the already installed complex, under the argument of self-sufficiency and with a capacity of 250 megawatts, the park called Eurus, built in 2009, was auctioned off with capital from the Spanish company Acciona and transnational construction materials company Cemex.

It seems that Cemex is the role model of the CDM, a clean and responsible company that has registered several projects this way. In its 2013 report, Cemex boasts of expanding their projects with the CDM model. “Six new initiatives were registered as CDM in 2013, which include four alternative fuel projects in Mexico and Panama and two wind farms located in Mexico, among those Eurus and Ventika.”

In 2015, the Eurus wind farm won the prize awarded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB Infrastructure 360​​°) in the category of “Impact on Population and Leadership,” which recognizes outstanding sustainability practices in infrastructure investments in Latin America and Caribbean.

In February 2015, community activists from the organization Defenders of the Earth and Sea announced, “about 150 wind turbines owned by Acciona and located in the Eurus wind farm and Oaxaca III, have spilt oil, from the blades and main coil, which has polluted the ground and the water, affecting several farmers and ranches surrounding the area.”Both wind farms have 1,500-megawatt turbines, which need 400 liters of synthetic oil, while the 800-megawatt turbines only need 200 liters of oil per turbine per year.

The Costs of Clean Energy

Archaeological remains found by farmers on their land.

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The dominant development model in the production of electricity from wind power in the Tehuantepec Isthmus is stated as a formula in which everyone wins – the government, developers and industry. The model has been of self-supply, in which a private developer of wind power generates energy production contracts for a wide portfolio of industrial customers (Coca-Cola, Cemex, Walmart and Bimbo, for example) for a certain period. In this way, companies can set prices lower than the market for the long term, and separately they enjoy the financial benefits of carbon trading, which on one hand, allows them to continue polluting and, secondly, to speculate on the sale of these pollution permits to other companies. Developers can access financing schemes for “green” projects through organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the UN.

The communities are also presented as winners in these projects for the development of self-sufficiency and the income they receive from the lease of their land.

Why the Resistance?

Community women demonstrate against the wind projects on their ancestral land.

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In November of 2012, the consortium Mareña Renovables set out to build the largest wind farm in Latin America in the Barra de Santa Teresa, in San Dionisio del Mar, Oaxaca. The Barra is a strip of land between two lagoons that connects to the sea in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Here the Indigenous community of Binni Záa (Zapotec) and Ikojts (Huave), together with the community of Alvaro Obregon, opposed and blocked all access to this strip of land. In response, the state sent about 500 troops from the state police to unblock access, acting with extreme violence. The Indigenous community resisted until the government suspended construction of the wind park. In response to constant harassment and persecution,the Alvaro Obregon community created a community police force called “Binni Guiapa Guidxi” on February 9, 2013.

What was known as Mareña Renovables has changed its name and its form several times. The Spanish energy company, the Preneal Group, which had signed exploration contracts and obtained permits from the state government, sold the rights to the project for $89 million to FEMSA, a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company and the Macquarie Group, the largest investment bank in Australia. These companies quickly sold part of their stakes to Mitsubishi Corporation and Dutch pension fund PGGM, signing at the same time a power purchase agreement with FEMSA-Heineken for 20 years.

They also sought to speculate with the reduction of 825,707 tons of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to the emissions of 161,903 cars.

“Mother Earth is sick; the disease is global warming. They want to profit with the same disease that they have caused to Mother Earth,” said Carlos Sanchez, a Zapotec activistwho participated in the resistance against the installation of the wind farm in Barra de Santa Teresa Park and the installation of a park by Gas Natural Fenosa in Juchitan de Zaragoza.”Under the pretext of reducing global warming, they come to our territories to control our forests, mountains, our sacred places and our water.”

Sanchez is also founder and member of the community radio station Totopo, created to report on mega-projects in the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During an intermission of his radio programming, we asked Sanchez about what the Zapotec people know about the CDM. “It is a discourse between businessmen. They are labels exchanged between companies to justify their pollution and do not explain anything to Indigenous peoples,” he said.

“Could we, with our forests, also sell carbon credits, bypassing these companies? Who will buy?” Sanchez asked. “It is no coincidence that only those who understand these mechanisms are the only ones who benefit as employers and the state.”

He added, “We do not even benefit from the energy produced. If you walk by the communities you will notice what the clean development they have brought consists of, and I challenge one of the owners of the companies to see if they want to live in the midst of these turbines.”

Following the demonstrations made by Indigenous peoples on May 8, 2013, the secretary of tourism of the state of Oaxaca, José Zorrilla Diego, announced the cancellation of the proposed Renewable Mareña in the Barra de Santa Teresa. Shortly after the announcement of the cancellation, the state government said the project would continue in other areas of the isthmus.

Human Rights Violations and Perspectives

Community organization against the wind farm in the Barra de Santa Teresa was the first major resistance against the ways in which these companies are developing their projects on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Sanchez reports that, not coincidentally, it is in this period that the companies began hiring hit men, with the backing of the state.”We see gunmen escorted to the state police. Some of us have been persecuted with absurd lawsuits, accusing us of kidnapping, attacks on the roads, and damage to other people’s private property. The radio station has undergone several attempts at closing, with the invasion of the federal police and Navy,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez reports that since 2013, he does not go to public places. His mobility is restricted to the community. “We endorse the protection mechanism of the Ministry of Interior. But we have realized that their task of protection has been given to the state police, the same people who attacked us. I do not know whether they have come to protect me or arrest me. So I rejected this protection mechanism and started a small personal protection protocol,” Sanchez said. “The state supports the wind companies,” he added.

The Committee for the Integral Defense of Human Rights Gobixha (CódigoDH) Oaxaca demanded the immediate intervention of the federal and state governments to stop the wave of violence against supporters of the Popular Assembly of the People of Juchitan who have been victims of threats, harassment, persecution and attacks, including the murder of one of its members. This followed the conflict rooted in the construction of the Bii Hioxo wind farm, according to CódigoDH. But there was no response.

The company Gas Natural Fenosa rejects the accusations, ensuring, “While certain groups have filed several allegations regarding violations of human rights of communities affected by the project, Gas Natural Fenosa says they are unfounded, that they lack objective justification, and are incompatible with the commitments made by the company’s Human Rights Policy.”

New Strategy, New Park, Old Problems

Many homes have been surrounded by wind farms across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

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It did not take long for the government’s 2013 promise – to relocate the project from the Barra de Santa Teresa toward another zone in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec – to take shape. In 2014, the company Mareña Renovables, now called Eolica del Sur (Southern Wind), found a new place to develop clean energy and contribute to the goals of reducing greenhouse gases in Laguna Superior.

In 2016, the project foresees the installation of 132 wind turbines of three megawatts each in an area of ​​5,332 hectares, avoiding the emission of 879,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to the company.

An independent report released by researchers from different fields and universities points out various inconsistencies in the environmental impact study submitted by the company and approved by the Secretariat of Environmental and Natural Resources (SEMANART).

The first contradiction is in regards to the company that made the study. The company responsible is Especialistas Ambientales (Environmental Specialists). And according to the constitutive act of the company, it was possible to determine that the founding partner is the engineer Rodolfo Lacy Tamayo, current undersecretary of planning and environmental policy of the SEMANART.

The document warned that there are many inconsistencies with respect to the surface of Baja Espinoza Forest (Selva Baja Espinosa), which is to be cleared for the construction of this project. Evaluating the information available on the environmental impact statement’s (EIS) own field research, “our analysis shows that the developer intends to cut 100% of the tree surface without proposing any measure of compensation.”

“This is particularly worrying,” according to the document. “The Selva Baja Espinoza connecting the Priority Marine Regions: Continental Shelf Gulf of Tehuantepec, and Upper and Lower Laguna; and Terrestrial Priority Regions: Northern Sierras of Oaxaca Mixe and Zoque-La Selva Sepultura.”

According to Eduardo Centeno, director of the Eolica del Sur company, the EIS is submitted in accordance with Mexican law and contains mitigation measures and preventive measures for the environment, including reforestation.

Another concern of communities is in relation to water pollution in the lagoon and sea area as a result of the oil that will drain on the beaches – 300 liters per wind turbine. Biologist Genoveva Bernal of SEMANART explains that the institution responsible for approving the EIS says the park will not affect Laguna Superior at 3.9 kilometers. “With this distance, it will not have an impact,” Bernal said.

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Alejandro Castaneira, professor and researcher at the National School of Anthropology and History, who participated in the creation of the report, says the SEMANART authorized an environmental impact study that was wrongly produced. “It is announced that parks are generating clean energy. Are we going to use clean energy to produce Coca-Cola and Lay’s chips while poverty continues?” Castaneira said.

A Far From Participatory Process

There is currently no established wind farm that respects biodiversity. (Photo: Renata Bessi) There is currently no established wind farm that respects biodiversity.

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After the events of 2013, Eolica del Sur and the state convened for the first free, prior and informed consultation, under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization for Indigenous peoples, 22 years since the arrival of the first wind farm in Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This consultation was initiated in November 2014, and completed in July 2015, and is regarded as an essential element for the project to become effective.

On the one hand, both the federal and state governments (as well as the company) claim that the consultation fulfilled its role, which justifies the project, since most of the participants approved. On the other hand, there is enormous pressure for the cancellation of the same consultation because of the irregularities.

At a press conference, Bettina Cruz Velázquez, a member of the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Defense of Land and Territory, said that the consultation was carried out after local and federal permits and approvals of land use had already been given by authorities. This shows the federal government’s decision to strip Binni Záa(Zapotec) of its territory. “The consultation is a simulation. They do not respect international standards,” Cruz Velázquez said.

A petition for relief was filed for the 1,166 Indigenous Binni Záa in order to protect Indigenous rights and defend their territory against the wind project. On September 30, 2015, the judge issued an order to suspend all licenses, permits, goods, approvals, licenses and land use changes granted by federal and local authorities, until the final judgment is issued.

“The state allows these projects on the one hand, allowing all the state and federal agencies to expedite permits,” said lawyer Ricardo Lagines Garsa, adviser to the community. “Yet Indigenous peoples are not aware of these legal proceedings, so that they can actually participate in decisions. The whole isthmus territory has been divided between companies [due to] the lack of awareness of the peasant and Indigenous communities who live here.”

Who Benefits From “Clean” Energy?

According to documents from the Commission for Dialogue with the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, international experience has shown that remuneration paid by energy companies erecting wind farms on leased land oscillates between 1 and 5 percent of the gross income of the energy produced by the turbines. “However, the case of Mexico is drastically different if you take into account the much lower value compared to international standards: here, remuneration is between .025 and 1.53% [of gross income].”

The Tepeyac Human Rights Center states that “because there is no organization that regulates the value of land in Mexico, energy companies pay landowners far less than the actual value, which can provoke tension in communities in which wind farms are set up.”

The criteria that have been used to justify the implementation of wind parks in Mexico as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as total energy production, are insufficient to determine the benefits, risks and broader implications of wind energy production, according to the Commission for Dialogue with the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico. “The criteria ignore or underestimate the complexity and cognitivist and ethical uncertainty of the risks and impacts created by wind parks on a large scale,” the commission stated. “They cannot be seen as a viable energy alternative if they continue to reproduce and deepen socioeconomic and environmental inequalities between countries and between social groups within individual countries.”
Truthout

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