Pirate's Cove

I think all these Warmists should have the “green” energy projects built near where they live and work

To fight climate change, environmentalists may have to give up a core belief

For decades, environmentalists have made their mark by stopping things. Petroleum facilities that spew toxic air pollution. Pipelines that cut across Indigenous lands. Drilling for oil and gas.

But climate change is about to change everything. To cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to zero, experts say, the country is going to have to do something environmentalists have traditionally opposed: It’s going to have to build a lot of energy infrastructure. And fast.

Right now, many roadblocks stand in the way of building wind, solar, and the transmission lines that can carry their power to city centers. And while Democrats have a bill in the works to speed that sort of permitting, most environmentalists oppose it — because it could also promote oil and gas development.

“We’re going to have to build a lot more of everything clean,” said Josh Freed, the director of climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “The United States has an infrastructure building crisis. We can no longer build anything big — let alone big and ambitious — in a reasonable time frame.”

Well, good luck with this. Even if Warmists agree, the extreme-enviros won’t. They’ll sue to stop projects, even “green” ones, just like they’ve done and attempted to do. For instance, trying to build a solar farm in the Mojave Desert. As the subhead says “Mojave Desert residents say they support clean energy, but not giant projects, citing threat to tortoises and views.” Huh. Or, hey, how about Cape Wind, which Democrats tried to block for over a decade?

To reach net-zero carbon emissions, according to a study by Princeton University, wind farms will have to spread across the Great Plains and the Midwest, covering an area equal to at least the states of Illinois and Indiana. Solar panels will sparkle across an area at least as large as Connecticut. And thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines will need to be built to carry all that power from where it’s generated — mostly in rural parts of the country — to urban centers far away.

Hmm, they want to build these in rural areas so that the climate cultists in urban areas can have power? And don’t have to look at the projects? Huh.

And these projects need to be up and running soon. According to an analysis by the DecarbAmerica Project, solar and wind power in the U.S. will have to double in just the next eight years.

I’d support this if the projects were viable, but, they really just do not generate the power necessary. We would have been better served, as I’ve said before, if the money from Obama’s stimulus went into research and development, rather than projects.

One thing that could help, Reed argues, is giving the federal government authority to approve the construction of big, high-voltage transmission lines. At the moment, power lines have to get approval from every state that they cross, including states that may not benefit much from having gigantic power lines weaving over their homes and buildings. Federal authority would allow the government to rubber-stamp transmission lines without getting into the local and state regulatory morass. (Similar authority already exists for natural gas pipelines.)

In other words, the federal government would be taking more power, blowing off it’s Constitutional limitations.

Green groups, however, still have reservations.

“Whatever the proposed project is — whether it’s a pipeline or a highway or a solar farm — it should be subject to the same commonsense review process,” Mahyar Sorour, a deputy legislative director for the Sierra Club, said in an email. “If we want these projects to move forward faster, we shouldn’t be weakening environmental laws, but investing more resources into the agencies and staff.”

Double in other words, they’re going to block projects.