It has been written here many, many times that is getting more and more difficult to build base generation power plants in the USA. I can’t imagine what it would take to actually start up a nuclear power plant right now. Besides the billions and billions of dollars your company will spend, it will be dragged through the courts over and over and over again by land owners, environmentalists and others. I simply don’t have the stones for that constant harassment.
Today I heard a story about a proposed wind farm in West Virginia. Seems that the environmentalists there are trying to stand in the way of the wind farm to save a bat – the Indiana bat to be precise.
So I guess I am wondering that if WIND isn’t even clean enough energy, where would the environmentalists say that we should get our energy from? Electricity doesn’t exactly just drop out of the sky (unless you could harness a lightning bolt somehow). Or is the end game simply the destruction of any and all forms of commerce as we know them? All in the name of a bat that may or may not be harmed. Hard for me to tell what the real agenda is anymore.
The agenda is to cripple the industrial world. My take is that what is called liberal democracy is increasingly a misnomer and that at some point other arrangements will supersede it with little regret on the part of the public. It may be better than what it replaces,but it won’t come near to matching what we improvidently threw away.
Their behavior makes sense is we assume that their primary motivation is dominate other human beings and that the bats vs windmills is simply the handiest means of doing so.
You also can’t dismiss the possibility of shakedown. Don’t be surprised if the issue is resolved when the windmill operator funds some research or bat habitat management or something else that will done by people connected to the lawsuit. Environmental groups make millions this way, often in very round about ways.
A lot of it is that things can look *perfect* as long as they are purely *theoretical*. (I think Burke wrote something alone these lines, but I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment)
So, wind power is great until you learn that it can kill birds and (maybe) bats…solar is great until you find out it’ll need long ugly transmission lines to connect the deserts to the cities.
A form of this phenomenon can sometimes be seen in business, where there is a “Project X” which may be a new product or a new manufacturing process, and is over-glorified and allocated an unreasonable level of resources vis-a-vis the *existing* products or processes, whose warts are already known.
Now I’ve seen it all. Save a bat.
Dan: Bingo.
An environmentalist is not a person who wants to solve the problem, he is a person who wants to be the problem.
Environmentalists realized back in the 70’s that the key to strangling the modern industrial world was to find a way to stop feeding the beast, and the “beast” needs energy to thrive. This was twofold: hamper domestic oil and gas production and stop building power plants and/or make them as expensive and as time consuming as possible. On the latter they certainly have accomplished their goals.
I witnessed this firsthand while working on a power project in the Bay Area back in 2001. A local utility was going to convert a gas fired boiler over to a combined cycle natural gas plant to replace the lost capacity of the Hunters Point closure. Mayor Willie Brown led a coalition of environmentalists and “community organizers” in opposition to the facility. The decade long legal battle ended in the utility scuttling plans to build the plant, and it will most likely abandon the entire site within the next decade. The money that would have been invested in the plant was used to upgrade a transmission and distribution corridor that feeds the Bay Area’s power demands.
This, ironically enough, is all good news to the countless well connected real estate developers who will surely move in and develop the scenic site, making billions of dollars in the process, and all at the expense of Bay Area rate payers.