The latest hardcopy issue of flagship news magazine Der Spiegel reports how Germany’s green energy revolution has bitterly divided the country’s environmental movement.
Enoch zu Guttenberg, one of Germany’s most prolific environmentalists has become an outspoken critic of wind energy in Germany, and believes children in the future will be able to see Germany’s idyllic landscape only in paintings as developers clear hill-top forests to make way for skyscraper-size industrial wind turbines.
Guttenberg, a symphony conductor, told Spiegel the movement against wind turbines has exploded over the past months and years and that his speeches against wind turbines are attracting ever larger crowds: “When I started 60 or 70 would come, now there are more than 1000.”
Moreover Guttenberg talks of “hundreds of local citizens’ initiatives” that are now mobilizing against wind projects. Spiegel writes of a whole “new quality” of resistance that governments now need to confront as many traditional environmentalists now rail against what they view as a “corruption of green party members, environmental groups, local politicians and city councils“.
So divided the environmentalists have become that Germany’s powerful BUND (Friends of the Erath Germany) launched a slander lawsuit against Guttenberg after he accused the organization of having “merged” with the Wind Lobby. BUND later dropped the suit. Since then Guttenberg has compared the BUND directors to Judas and accused them of having sold out the environmental philosophy for a “dish of lentil”. Leading environmental activists today are now saying: “The color of sleaze is no longer black, rather it is green.”
The environmental movement has become so disunified, Spiegel writes, that once diehard nuclear energy opponents have now switched to protesting wind turbines, as many planning boards ignore concerns of the citizens and attempt to steamroll projects through against the public will.
Often the projects are politically explosive, involving a good old boys network. A typical pattern, Spiegel writes:
Town mayor, local pols, city directors, who at the same time happen to be the managing directors of wind parks and who profit from them. A dubious mesh of community and electricity interests.”
This is how it works at many communities, Spiegel describes. Often the nearby residents and citizens pay heftily through lost property values, health issues from infrasound, and high electricity prices. Invariably only very few benefit at all.
Planners often shoot back and claim nothing is illegal about the business deals. But the public is not having it. Spiegel adds:
Indeed in the meantime resistance is growing. ‘The mood has flipped because people are noticing that it is all about business,’ says anti-wind activist [Manfred] Knake”
At the end of the article Guttenberg, Spiegel writes, calls it the “capitialistic injustice of the Energiewende“.
The money of the little guy, who has to pay billions for renewables, is diverted into the pockets of some large property owners.”
“capitalistic injustice of the Energiewende”
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world this is free market.
———-
H/T Verbal Kint and Charles Baudelaire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN_sRhaehw4
“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!”
I don’t know whether Enoch is a victim of the public school system. Anyway he should sue whatever school he went to for mixing up socialism and capitalism in his education.
Yes, he should sue them for educational malpractice and failure to educate. We know the Progressives at the ACLU keep exploring that route. He could call the Chancellor and other coalition members as expert witnesses. I think they took enough Marxism classes to know the difference.
He could also go after the root of the evil and file a lawsuits against the Devil.
We could have a rerun of Enoch vs. Satan. I don’t think they ever settled their original quarrel, anyway.
The question is who would be the Devil’s advocate?
Maybe off-topic, maybe not, a good article in The Guardian about how low-carb diets are finally defeating the zero-evidence low-fat dogma, still being defended vigorously by “establishment” nutritionists:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
Thanks!
The “green” angle on this does not get a mention, greens have always hated meat and dairy products because of forest clearance to grow crops and provide grazing to feed cattle, and of course cattle farmers tend to have the wrong politics. And of course emissions from cattle are destroying the climate. Thus, the low-fat dogma will tend to get an easy ride from environmentalists, even if they know it to be baloney.
Very telling.
They don’t need evidence. Some of them have their entire lives invested in it.
“Der Spiegel reports how Germany’s green energy revolution has bitterly divided the country’s environmental movement.”
Are they suggesting that’s a bad thing?
I’m laughing every time I return to this thread and see this, yonason.
“Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.” – Guardian article referred to by Mikky
The best way I know of consuming corn sugar is to first detoxify it using yeast bio-remediation technology = turn it into beer.
It’s time to release the enslaved than can win this corrumption. #FreeTheCarbon
The greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since the sheriff of Nottingham
Tangential to this, but: 77 600-foot-tall monsters are going up around us right now, here in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. Ugly bastards. So are the turbines.
The rest of the world is realizing their folly, Kate and Justine will never notice, Ontario is ground zero for green scams, at the present time. Until politicians are seen swinging from lampposts, we will continue the idiocy.
“… lost property values, health issues from infrasound, and high electricity prices …”
It is funny no mention is made of the failure to provide efficient power or to lower Earth’s temperature, the two things for which it was proposed.
Another solar giant is deep du-du.
http://dailybail.com/home/green-energy-chronicles-sunedison-enters-death-spiral.html
I wonder where that $1.5 billion taxpayer subsidies etc went to ?
“Often the nearby residents and citizens pay heftily through lost property values, health issues from infrasound, and high electricity prices. Invariably only very few benefit at all.”
Same is true for a property developed for coal, oil or gas extraction.
The ONLY place I ever heard of that fits that bill is Silent Hill.
I have no idea where “Silent Hill” is, but I doubt you would like living downwind of a coal plant. In the US they cause acid rain and their mercury pollutes waters and fish.
But maybe in Germany it’s all candy and cakes.
German coal power plants are in fact very clean.
“German coal power plants are in fact very clean.”
Compared to what? Some provinces of China?
German coal plants are the biggest emitters of mercury in europe.
http://www.swr.de/landesschau-aktuell/bw/quecksilber-ausstoss-in-bw-deutsche-kohlekraftwerke-sind-europas-suender/-/id=1622/did=16742734/nid=1622/gopxo5/
The new limit shall be 4mg in 2019, while the USA already has 1.4mg today.
And that is totally ignoring CO2, which has 4 of the 5 biggest emitters (brown coal plants) in Germany.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/co-emission-europas-klimaschaedlichste-kraftwerke-stehen-in-deutschland-1.2420130
And coal land use is simply huge, about 2400km² up till 2013.
They are turning out to be much cleaner than wind power. Wind turbines litter the landscape, kill wildlife, make people ill, leak lots of oil, contribute to mass deforestation and industrialization of natural areas, etc.
sod 23. April 2016 at 8:05 AM | Permalink
“German coal plants are the biggest emitters of mercury in europe. ”
You forgot to add: Says a study payed for by The Greens. And: The text you linked to does not explain how the mercury emissions even compare to natural levels of mercury.
And: A text box even explains that the origin of the mercury is volcanic. So what are ye gonna do when the next volcano blows up? Tax it?
And: The text says, oh, Germany emits the most in Europe. Well we are also the biggest economy still standing in Europe so what? How much mercury is emitted PER TWh and how does this compare to the enormous pollution caused by processing rare earths for wind turbines PER TWh?
Again your irrationality will cause total havoc. The low energy density contraptions that you Greens desire will cause a manifold increase in total pollution as you Greens are mentally incapable and politically unwilling of computing RELATIONS.
This shows again how much the Green movement depends on lies, deception and disinformation.
If I didn’t know the quality of German state media – to which you linked – I would now be disappointed that these leeches that I am forced by the state to finance partake in the disinformation campaign of the Green party – the incapable apparatschiks at SWR were of course not mentally able to even understand the question of the RELATION of emissions to total produced power; and would doubtlessly get a blank stare in their eyes if asked the question.
And YOU GREENS claim you can run those future-forecasting numerical simulations called climate models and get meaningful results.
You can’t even do arithmetics.
On nowhere near the same scale though. It’s easier to site a gas plant than a windfarm taking up a huge expanse of land and in comparison a gas plant is much less visually intrusive
“On nowhere near the same scale though. It’s easier to site a gas plant than a windfarm taking up a huge expanse of land and in comparison a gas plant is much less visually intrusive”
A matter of opinion.
In the US, many landowners are making a pretty penny by leasing their land to wind turbines.
Nice that the rich landowners are the ones profiting from this scam.
In Scotland a very few people bought up the rights to all the wind sites … and then they ran the committees that created the legislation and decided how much money they pocketed.
The landowners got comparatively little.
“a gas plant is much less visually intrusive”
Appell: “A matter of opinion.”
So you have never seen a gas plant. Little wonder. They are tiny.
http://www.vw-kraftwerk.de/
Before you scream “SMOKESTACKS!”. They are 125 m high. Not higher than a wind propeller. And. They don’t mince birds of prey.
“That’s not tiny!” you say? Well tiny compared to the mighty ovens of a coal power plant. A nuclear reactor of course is much smaller again. It’s entirely a matter of energy density. Greens want the lowest energy density possible – and therefore, the lowest efficiency possible. They are weird people bent on wasting the most money possible and installing the biggest machines for the smallest gain. It’s caused by the fact that they don’t know anything.
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I used to be in the wind sector and the Scottish Green party – The wind businessmen were just using the greens not only to make money – but also to use the green propaganda machine to create a “moral imperative” to line the pockets of these evil businessmen.
People might like this via WUWT, from Scotland 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/22/friday-funny-subsidy-sam-in-the-news/
Follow through to the Facebook page, and read the whole story.
https://www.facebook.com/WindEnergysAbsurd/photos/pcb.1144669955577445/1144668062244301/?type=3&theater
And the full story.
https://www.wind-watch.org/documents/subsidy-sam-the-turbine/
NS-DIC caught out “adjusting” Arctic Sea Ice charts
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/04/nsidc-busted/