RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ruling class’ obsession with building a carbon dioxide-free world has blinded it to material facts. The Al Gores and Gavin Newsoms and John Kerrys of the West believe they only have to bark orders and seize other people’s money and their green dreams will be realized. When are they going to understand their wishes are not everyone else’s command?

There are many examples of the ruling class’ failure to recognize its limitations in regard to energy. The electric vehicle backlash comes to mind. So do the many green “investments” that have turned out to be financial holes of a different color.

For this commentary, though, we’re focusing on the breakdown of the renewable infrastructure buildout. The hard truth is that people don’t want wind and solar farms overtaking their communities and chewing up rural land. The resistance is so forceful that a number of counties have banned the projects inside their borders.

“Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they’re being built,” says the USA Today headline from last week.

After the obligatory nonsense about how green energy is necessary because humans are setting the planet on fire, which is found daily across the hysterical mainstream media, the reporters note that “at least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both.” Through its nationwide analysis, USA Today learned that “limits come through outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build.”

And it’s not just local governments. Three states, ​​Connecticut, Tennessee and Vermont, have “implemented near-statewide restrictions,” according to USA Today.

The challenge isn’t unique to flyover country, where the main street Americans see the rush to green for what it is. Even some of the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County are off limits to utility-scale wind turbines. Residents of Antelope Valley in the northern reaches of the county don’t like the idea of “converting this beautiful land that was zoned” for agriculture “from our forefathers into industrial power plants.”

The “hostility” – USA Today’s word – toward the projects is easily explained. No matter what platitudes people might recite about renewable energy, they feel wind and solar projects are invasive. We see their point. They’re eyesores and nuisances to wildlife, whose habitats are threatened and then destroyed. The campaign to save the climate requires the eco-unfriendly acts of deforestation and extensive land clearing, leaving behind barren and gashed earth.

Renewable energy also stresses humans. “Turbine syndrome” is a condition recognized in Europe. In November 2021, a French court ruled in favor of a couple who had complained that a wind farm nearby caused them “headaches, insomnia, heart irregularities, depression, dizziness, tinnitus and nausea for more than two years,” says the Guardian.

The couple, Christel and Luc Fockaerts, fought the project for six years. Their “problems started in 2013 after a wood that acted as a buffer zone between their property and the turbines was cut down,” the London Telegraph reports. Their lawyer said the Fockaerts felt like they were enduring “a permanent thunderstorm.” They were also bothered by flashing lights.

While not as noisy as spinning sails the size of a 15-story building, there’s also a strong pushback against solar farms. The Guardian reported in 2022 that they were “being refused planning permission in Great Britain at the highest rate in five years.” One Guardian reader suggested that renewables projects should be placed in areas where it won’t negatively affect landscapes or communities. It’s an notion shared by many, but it’s no solution. Those solar and wind farms have to be connected to consumers through transmission infrastructure, which is no more popular than massive fields of photovoltaic panels and turbines.

NIMBY’s – those who say “not in my backyard” to development near their homes – “around the globe from Germany to Australia, California, New York, and Massachusetts are speaking loudly, and acting, to put a halt to the invasion of noisy wind farms in their backyards,” says Ronald Stein, founder of Energy & Infrastructure of PTS Advance. Simply put, “residents do not want their rural desert community” and other locales “littered with renewables.”

Convincing people to sacrifice for a cataclysm that isn’t going to happen is a hard sell. So at some point we should expect choice to be surrendered and replaced by directives from the ruling class. Fits in perfectly with the authoritarian left.