Posted on 07/29/2022 6:58:05 AM PDT by libstripper
Mark Schein sings from the back row, aware that many of the people in the other pews view him as their enemy.
His wife, Toni, stands by his side, but the rows around them are all empty.
The hymn at this May service, backed by a pipe organ, is “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” about perseverance in the face of great challenges.
Mark is a retired farmer, a parent, a grandparent and part of a family that has attended this church, Williamsport United Methodist, since its construction in 1900. His offense in the eyes of many in this community is that he signed a lease with a developer that wants to build a solar array, one of five solar projects in the area that opponents say will drive down property values and turn a pastoral landscape into a toxic industrial site.
“I don’t have very many neighbors talk to me anymore,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Everywhere these monstrosities are placed they drive the local people wild. This article, although biased in favor of solar power, shows how absolutely destructive it is to communities. Wind power is just as bad because living next to windmills is pure hell. Also, the idea that we are going to suddenly become energy independent by going over to solar and wind ignores the fact that nearly all of the equipment for both boondoggles comes from Red China. So, we end up going from a situation where our energy supplies are partly controlled by not necessarily hostile powers, like Saudi Arabia, to a situation where the equipment needed for energy supplies is basically provided to us by our most dangerous enemy, Red China. In addition, the intermittency of both solar and wind means that backup power in the form of things like gas plants is absolutely essential.
Just compare either a gas plant or a nuclear power plant to solar and wind and you find there is vastly less adverse environmental impact from either. This whole green businesses is pure communist insanity designed to turn us into a communist country where most of us are poorer and many of us are starving. It's pure anti-American hell.
The conflict is one of many urban-rural divides, in which rural areas dominated by Republicans are being asked to transform their landscapes to make electricity that will mainly serve cities dominated by Democrats.
And the tone of the debate often reflects the way Trump has changed what’s acceptable public discourse, with attacks that are more personal.
Mark signed his lease three years ago, when the developer was putting together the land to propose the project. The lease payments would be five times what he earns from renting out the land to someone to farm it
For windmills, the contract says they will remove the concrete to a depth of 18 inches at the end of the lease. Does anyone believe there will be money for that?
Mark Schein sings from the back row, aware that many of the people in the other pews view him as their enemy.
His wife, Toni, stands by his side, but the rows around them are all empty.
The hymn at this May service, backed by a pipe organ, is “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” about perseverance in the face of great challenges.
Excellent, concise, and highly accurate post, LS. Very good.
You wrote “...backup power in the form of things like gas plants is absolutely essential”
Exactly right. The insane thing is you now have to build THREE separate power plants to replace ONE conventional plant:
Plant #1: the solar plant and/or wind plant
Plant #2: the energy storage system (batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air caverns, etc)
Plant #3: the conventional natural gas fired combustion turbines for backup when there is no sun or wind and the storage system is empty.
Basic common sense tells you that building THREE power plants to do the job of a SINGLE conventional plant makes zero economic sense. Plus the new system is vastly more complex than the conventional system, uses up many times the land area of the conventional system, uses many times the mass of materials of the conventional system, and produces highly toxic, non-recyclable waste at the end of its life.
To open a new surface mine, you must post a reclamation bond at the beginning of the project to restore the site when operations are completed. No such bonds are required for wind or solar, so the economic playing field is highly tilted toward them. Just imagine those thousands of acres of solar panels at the end of their life 20 years from now and the company has gone out of business. Who cleans up the mess?
It is easy to see a ten billion dollar Superfund II coming to fleece the taxpayer to remove the obsolete and worn-out monstrosities.
Once you reach age 70 like me, you realize that 20 years goes by in the blink of an eye. People in their 20s see the next 20 years as an eternity.
The irony is that people are wanting to “go green” to prevent a one degree rise in global temperatures 100 years from now. But the toxic waste and abandoned plant messes from “green” equipment will be upon us in only 20 years.
I was looking at the impact of electric vehicles on the utility secondary distribution system. A secondary transformer serves ten houses on average. The secondary distribution system design standards were created in the 1960s, long before EVs. If you have two or three families charging EVs, you need to roughly DOUBLE the distribution transformer size AND DOUBLE the size of the wires in the neighborhood.
So, to electrify the economy, you meed to massively overbuild the power distribution infrastructure and build three times as many power plants.
Absolutely NOTHING about “green” power makes sense.
More likely, if the do anything at all, they will just pile 18 inches of fill dirt (not even top soil) on top of the concrete and leave an infertile dead spot on the land.
Sounds like you need more of our food supply in your gas tank.
“Once you reach age 70 like me, you realize that 20 years goes by in the blink of an eye. People in their 20s see the next 20 years as an eternity.”
Oh, so true. I am 79 and have had exactly the same experience. Having had an aortic valve replaced about six months ago, I have a definite sense of my own mortality.
“Up until December, Mark and Toni were joined at church by their son, George, a lawyer and the 2000 valedictorian of the local high school. George had left Williamsport for college and his career and then moved back, with his husband and their daughter....”
Gee, who would guess they were liberals?
Red state. No excuses. Just like Texas.
“Basic common sense tells you that building THREE power plants to do the job of a SINGLE conventional plant makes zero economic sense. Plus the new system is vastly more complex than the conventional system, uses up many times the land area of the conventional system, uses many times the mass of materials of the conventional system, and produces highly toxic, non-recyclable waste at the end of its life.”
Exactly correct.
The key point is “common sense”. Liberals don’t have any. That’s why “man made global warming/climate change” makes sense to them. Never mind that “man made global warming/climate change” is IMPOSSIBLE.
The erf is YUGE. The oceans are VAST. Puny humans CAN NOT affect the world climate if they tried to.
DO THE MATH.
Anything puny humans do to try and reduce emissions is quickly undone by one volcanic eruption, whether above ground where we can see it or under the oceans where we can’t.
“the greatest number of the Earth’s volcanoes are hidden from view, occurring on the ocean floor along spreading ridges.”
ANYONE who has flown over this great country on a clear day can testify to the VAST vegetation (trees) covering the landscape from coast to coast (except deserts). (They have even MORE trees in Canada).
Nuclear power has the smallest environmental footprint of ANY kind of power. It is the cleanest/cheapest type of energy other than hydro.
“man made global warming/climate change” is a HOAX and is IMPOSSIBLE for puny humans to fix, even if it were possible, which it isn’t.
True, but it makes great finanacial sense for the companies being paid tax dollars to contsruct them.
Exactly right. The "Climate Government-Industrial-University Complex" is HUGE and lots of people are getting rich off the scam. University profs deliver the results their government benefactors want. They graduate lots of PhDs in "climate catastrophe" who get hired by corporations to make new technologies. There are millions of undergraduates getting degrees in "environmental science" whose sole objective in life is to stop conventional projects of all kinds. The climate "scientists" get to fly to exotic locations for two-week "Climate Catastrophe" conferences and UN meetings. Government subsidizes all sorts of new companies (e.g., Solyndra). Giant prototype projects are built. Tax laws are tilted to favor the green boondoggle (think EVs, solar, wind) so all taxpayers are on the hook to pay for this crap. People like Al Gore get fabulously wealthy off the scam.
I could go on and on about the millions of people worldwide milking this scam for all it is worth. And NONE of it produces anything of true economic value to any of us.
Sum it all up and it is probably an annual $100 billion "industry" built on nothing but fear and greed.
Insanity is the shorthand version of the laundry list of holes you can poke in the whole “renewable” idea.
It is closer to alchemy than reality.
Good parishioners. They just aren’t friendly to the one destroying their community.
He on the otherhand sold the community out for a big check. Who’s loving thy neighbor? The hurt parishioners turning their cheek peaceably.
The company will go bankrupt and bankrupt companies do not pay their contracted debts.
The lease will end and his land will be forever ruined.
So why is that in the article? what is the agenda?
To smear the other parishioners as “Christian Nationalist” or some kind of bigots.
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