From CFACT
By Craig Rucker
For decades environmentalists raised questionable, but often successful, objections to block mines, pipelines, nuclear power, and oil and gas operations.
Now, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet might say, they are “hoisted by their own petards,” referring to a small explosive device used in siege warfare.
In a bit of irony, the very legal and regulatory obstacles the Greens erected and deployed against fossil fuel companies they were opposed to are now coming back full circle to explode in their faces, blocking and hindering their beloved solar and wind projects. Even more poetically just, it has often been the “little guys” environmentalists have insisted they care so deeply about who are the ones wielding the weapons.
Energy expert and journalist Robert Bryce notes that farming families, small rural communities and Native American Tribes have rejected or restricted 35 wind and 58 solar projects this year, through September. Since 2015, these “little guys” have stymied a whopping 735 “renewable energy” projects across the USA.
Rural and coastal communities know those installations will be in their backyards. They apparently don’t want them impacting croplands and habitats, ruining scenic vistas, pummeling property values, killing birds and other wildlife – and creating major fire and toxic gas risks from lithium-ion electricity storage batteries.
Who could blame them? The bad news for the Greens is these locals are challenging their beloved “climate-friendly” projects, using the environmentalists’ own legal roadmaps … and winning.
In Idaho, local preservationists opposed the Lava Ridge Wind Project, which would install hundreds of 700-foot-tall turbines within eyeshot of the Minidoka National Historic Site, where a World War II Japanese internment camp was located. They have been joined by local officials, the Idaho legislature, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and both US senators in demanding that the US Bureau of Land Management scrap the project.
The unprecedented defiance convinced a nearby county to implement a moratorium on wind and solar farms the Biden-Harris Administration wanted as part of its climate agenda.
In next-door Oregon, Native Americans filed lawsuits to challenge a deepwater offshore wind project – which arguably makes no energy, economic, engineering or environmental sense. Even liberal Governor Tina Kotek has now changed her position on offshore wind, and an October auction was postponed because no company was interested in bidding.
In California, local officials and landowners oppose the proposed 320-MW Seguro battery energy storage facility, after a series of battery fires in EVs and at battery factories and energy storage facilities.
Heading east, after a decade-long legal battle, Oklahoma’s Osage Nation forced wind energy developers to tear down and remove dozens of turbines, because they had not obtained leases or permits to install the turbines and power lines on Native lands beforehand.
In Wisconsin, the Engelstad family and other locals are battling the Koshkonong solar project near Christiana, Wisconsin. It would blanket 6,400 acres (10 sq mi) of prime agricultural land and put a 667-MWh battery storage system hundreds of feet from an elementary school.
Along the Atlantic coast, multiple groups have helped to cancel the Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects (NJ), put Atlantic Shores North and South (NJ) under pressure, make Skipjack Wind (MD) less promising, and subjected Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and other offshore wind projects to litigation over harm to endangered whales.
Multi-hundred-mile transmission lines – including the Grain Belt Express (Kansas-Missouri-Illinois-Indiana) and Piedmont Reliability (Pennsylvania-Maryland-Virginia) – also face intense pushback.
The list of delayed, cancelled or stymied projects goes on and on.
Local residents, developers, regulators, permitting agencies and insurers are rightly concerned about the impacts of so-called “green” energy. It is they who must consider its major issues that have received scant scrutiny in the past. They must address questions such as what to do with the thousands of solar panels or hundreds of wind turbines get worn out after 20 years … or maybe destroyed by hail, tornados or hurricanes. It is they who must figure out who pays for dismantling, removing and disposing the trash, and in whose backyard do those billions of pounds of trash go.
Case in point, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird recently sued a waste disposal company for failing to cut up, transport, recycle and otherwise properly dispose of 1,300 broken and decommissioned wind turbine blades, which the company simply left piled up at multiple locations across the state.
As green ventures collapse, there’s a reckoning environmentalists must come to grips with – they no longer have the public trust. They will have to make their case to state and local officials who, to quote Shakespeare, will determine whether green energy projects are “to be, or not to be.” This may become much more difficult to do.
This article originally appeared at NewsMax
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