Clearing the way for a mountain top windpark. (Photo credit: Mountain Talk)
Just a few miles away from my hometown, Green Mountain Electric Power Company of Vermont and Quebec’s Gaz Metro are now building a monster mountain-top wind park that will be home (for 25 years) to twenty one 135-meter tall turbines that will go into operation by the end of next year.
To build the windpark they are now busily deforesting acre after acre and literally blasting off the top of the mountain, thus permanently disfiguring in a matter of weeks what took nature and the ice ages (climate change) hundreds of thousands of years to sculpture. Suddenly the environmentalists are fuming mad. Not this way, they insist.
Protesters even launched a website called Mountain Talk and are now making their presence known on the mountain.
Last week two protesters were arrested by the police for allegedly trespassing on the site. The two are reported to be students from nearby Sterling College, which according to its website is a “small, progressive, liberal arts college” that is committed “to grassroots sustainability”.
Were once enthusiastic supporters of renewable energy
What’s strange is that for years Vermont environmentalists railed against carbon based fuels and pressured legislators to produce “clean” energy. Never mind that over 90% of Vermont’s electric power was CO2-free to start with (hydro from Quebec and nuclear from Vermont Yankee). Vermont even elected Obama, giving him a whopping 68% of the vote. Let’s go green was the message. Now windparks are naturally getting installed on Vermont’s beautiful ridgelines. Doing that, though, isn’t easy. It involves massive deforestation to clear land for access roads and the windpark itself. Because Vermont mountains are ruggedly uneven, a good amount of dynamiting is part of it.
Suddenly environmentalists have woken up and are fuming mad about what they had for years enthusiastically endorsed. Many will deny this and claim that they never supported wind turbines. But looking at the website of Sterling College, where the two protesters attend, we see the following under Global Field Studies:
“Research environmental and cultural sustainability by comparing current ecological practices in Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Local scholars and experts serve as guides as we explore alternative energy sites, investigate eco-villages and industries featuring green technology, and study…”
Either the protesters in Vermont are just plain hypocritical, or terribly confused. Sterling students even went to Japan (by plane) and saw this:
“Explore environmentally sustainable practices on the northern island of Hokkaido through visits to managed forests, organic farms, native Ainu communities, and Zen gardens. Conversations with students and professors at Hokkaido and Obihiro Universities lead to in-depth investigations into land use practices.”
That’s sure some amazing land-use in the photo above, wouldn’t you all say?
Protesters blame corporations and not the lawmakers for all the mountain mutilation
Okay, the protesters woke up awhile back and now realize that the green dream is in fact a nightmare. You’d think they’d vent their anger at the politicians who cleared the way for this energy transition. You’d be wrong. Throughout the Mountain Talk website, all you hear is a lot of whining and moaning aimed at…the corporations. At this point, I’d say they are confused.
If these protesters ever sat down down with energy managers, the first thing they’d hear is that there are lots of other cheaper, easier, cleaner ways of generating electricity than to blow up mountains and install monster turbines. Windmills and solar are hardly at the top of the power company’s wishlist for ways of generating electricity. They aren’t blowing the tops off mountains because they want to, but because they are being regulated to do so.
It’s too bad the protesters can’t get that through their skulls.
Protesters are turning to the politicians, begging them to stop the evil corporations. Pardon me, but it’s the politicians with the zany green ideas that need to be stopped. Mountain Talk quotes US Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders here:
We are trying to save the world.”
In trying to “save the world” from a scientifically unsubstantiated doomsday, they are all ruining Vermont.
I truly do hope that the protesters succeed in stopping future mountain top windparks. If they pull it off, it’ll be what I like to call “One stupidity killing another.” Nowadays you have to take the victories anyway you can.
======================================
Hat-tip Benny Peiser: Wind-farms-are-useless-says-Prince-Philip
It is a complex web that supports large-scale wind and solar. But politicians only follow their masters, either corporate or popular. Enron can be found at the beginning, both buying environmentalists and convincing politicians of the value of greenwashing to make their wind business profitable. The greenwashing was latched on to by the public as well: “We have a solution! We can save the world!” This solution, of course, meant no change in lifestyle or even change in using other sources of energy. The evidence of its futility has been used only to show that we need to build more, which is a clear case of madness, like the people of Rapa Nui building giant heads to ward off the environmental calamity they had brought on themselves.
Alas, even in Vermont, many of the new “green” opponents of Big Wind still say it’s OK out west: Destroy prairie and desert ecosystems, just not our mountain. Which is only a slight modification of their earlier support: Some mountains will have to be sacrificed in symbolic honor of saving the world and in the name of energy independence. They woke up only when, as you so clearly describe, their words and actions came back to slap their own faces.
Thanks for writing.
As I said, I wish the protesters lots of success. Anything else would mean an environmental landscape disaster of dimensions Vermont has never seen.
I just wish the protesters had thought a little more about the consequences and been more critical with the data behind global warming (temperatures have not risen in over 10 years and are projected to drop over the next 20 years) before following goody two-shoe nutjobs like Bernie Sanders.
Even if one thinks greenhouse gas emission are bringing about the apocalypse, it’s clear that giant wind turbines aren’t changing anything and never will. Except to accelerate the destruction of what little remains of our rural and wild areas. Enriching the few and leaving the rest of us (and nature) with less and less.
Leaders invoked something called “The Quechee Analysis” as justification for their good intentions with respect to Vermont’s scenic landscape. This project is an example of ‘watch what we do, not what we say.’
http://publicservice.vermont.gov/energy/ee_files/wind/vissering_report.pdf
Wind Energy and Vermont’s Scenic Landscape
A Discussion Based on the Woodbury Stakeholder Workshops
By Jean Vissering, Landscape Architect
Vermont’s “awakening” to the massive Green Scam that has been perpetrated on citizens World-Wide is being repeated daily on such a scale that this will go down in history books as the “Dark Ages of Misguided Environmentalism”.
Sad days my friends…….educate our young and make sure they don’t repeat the “Sins of their Fathers”!
Windmills, are a solution?
A solution to ………………what is the problem?
Even if, there was any truth in the AGW myth [which there isn’t]. Planting windmills on the top of magnificent forested peaks under any circumstances should be regarded and just ‘plain stupid’ but then all of this: using risibly inefficient white elephants to counter a non existent problem is kinda logical in a perverse sort of way.
In life, in Vermont [Green mountain – ironic huh?] always the people [do they return a Democrat Senator?] should be careful for what they wish for…….. .
These protesters are deluded. From their website: “…when they realized the extent to which the laws and regulations that are supposed to protect us from corporate domination of decision making in Vermont had been entirely co-opted.”
Well, it was the explicit wish of Green pressure groups the world over to excempt Green industries from the kind of regulations that apply for evil, dirty industries.
Someone should tell them about the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
Unintended consequences – yes indeed Dirk.
They [Brit’ energy company] have a biomass plant [dear God isn’t that what coal is??] awaiting planning and government permission[s] to go ahead in Lincolnshire, a wheat and arable crops area, they will burn the stubble [+ other crap], trouble is it will mean 40 truck loads per day, that’s 80 actually – unintended consequences indeed.
Unintended consequences and purblind stupidity = alarmist eco-nut-jobs and EU commission policy.
I went hiking to Mount Mansfield a couple of days ago, not far from Lowell mountains – where the project is taking place. Conditions at the top were really windy (more than 50 km/h), which is typical at these altitudes in the mountains (and similar to my previous visits). No windmill would be operation in these conditions.
Lowell mountains are probably not as high, but I kept wondering if they monitored the conditions all year long for at least 1 or 2 years, in order to find out if it was a good spot or not.
What a mess.
Mt Mansfield is something like 4300 ft elevation – highest peak in Vermont. I climbed it just last summer. Lowell Mountain is about 2200 ft. You can forget them putting up a windpark on Mt Mansfield, Camel’s Hump, or across the Lake Champlain in New York’s Adirondacks. The problem with these locations is that they are clearly visible from Spear Street in South Burlington…where all the green fat cats live. NIMBY! That’s why Northeast Kingdom has been identified as the place to put them in vermont. Nobody important lives up there.
I do know that a 150 ft or more mast with anenometer(sp?) and other instruments gets set up a year or two before and measures windspeed, direction etc. The data are all recorded electronically and then later evaluated. If they show not enough wind, then the project is scrapped. Otherwise the site gets marked as suitable for a wind park.
So if you see a new tall mast on peaks and ridgelines somewhere that has been set up recently, then it means a windpark may be on the way.
Welcome Vermont. To the industrialization of landscapes thanks to the green dream.
When people are deluded by their dreams, it’s hard to wake them with reality.
Seems that explosives do a good job. But then they’re so frightened that they can’t figure out that it was their dreaming that caused the problem. In present times, it’s fashionable to seek out somebody else to blame for one’s own lack of forethought. Or failing to listen to those people who were trying to tell them what a pathway to hell they were paving.
It’ll take nature 100,000 years to restore what environmentalists have caused to be destroyed wastefully in the space of a human lifetime. How many future generations will mock those environmentalists is hard to predict. Now we can best serve those future generations by documenting the names of the people who incited wanton destruction; just to make themselves feel good for a little while.
Hi Bernd
Yes, dynamite has a way of waking people up. Well said.
The mysterious FOIA has dropped a present at Tallbloke’s.
Once again, selected e-mails.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/breaking-news-foia-2011-has-arrived/
Juicy.
” Rahmstorf:
You chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out
in Medieval times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10
solar forcing”
RE: FOIA & selected emails: here comes Climategate 2.0:
Via the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15840562
“‘New release’ of climate emails”
“What appears to be a new batch of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has been released.
Contents include more than 5,000 emails and other documents, some relating to work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A similar release in 2009 triggered the “ClimateGate” affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed.
Now, as then, the release comes shortly before the annual UN climate summit.
The university has yet to comment on the document cache, which is posted on a Russian server.”
“Reviews of “ClimateGate” in the UK, of the IPCC, and of Michael Mann’s work by Penn State authorities, have all cleared scientists of fraud and malpractice, although recommendations were made on increasing openness.
The writer of the “FOIA 2011″ file claims to have 220,000 more emails, but says he/she will not be releasing them.”
GWPF has a fuller report – a first dip into the pile of s**t that ahs come to light:
http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/4399-here-comes-climategate-part-ii-.html
I suppose it would not really be something of an exaggeration to say that s**t has hit the fan:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/#more-51549
“Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!
Posted on November 22, 2011 by News Staff
UPDATE: 8:20 AM PST These emails have not been verified yet, and this story was posted by one of my moderating staff while I was asleep. Until such time they are verified, tread lightly because without knowing what is behind the rest of the zip file, for all we know it’s a bunch of recipes and collection of ipsem lorem text files. I’m working to authenticate these now and will report when I know more – Anthony Watts
UPDATE2: 8:45AM PST The Guardian has a story up be Leo Hickman, and this excerpt suggests they may be the real deal:
Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.
The emails appear to be genuine, but this has yet to be confirmed by the University of East Anglia. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages.
UPDATE3: 9:25 AM PST – Having read a number of emails, and seeing this quote from Mike Mann in the Guardian:
When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
I’m going to conclude they are the real deal. I’ve posted a BitTorrent link to the file below. One big difference between Climategate 1 and 2 is that in 1, it took days for the MSM to catch on, now they are on top of it.
UPDATE4: 9:45 AM PST I’ve changed the headline from Climategate 2.0 to Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular! with a hat tip to Jerry Seinfeld. The relevance of that headline is particularly interesting in the context of where Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has his office in NYC.”
[…] The Green Wave — How Vermont Protects the Environment Last fall I wrote about how self-anointed environmental mastermind politicians in my homestate of Vermont bulldozed public opposition, lots of trees and finally the top of Lowell Mountain to make way for “climate-saving” 450-foot industrial wind turbines. Read here and here. […]