The View From 1776

Senator Ted Kennedy has never encountered a socialist, micro-managing cause that could not command his support.  Pagan worship of the environment has always attracted him.

Perhaps that’s why he so notoriously joined local environmentalists to stop construction of a wind farm to generate sufficient electric power for most of Cape Cod.  It would, no doubt, be unfair to denounce him for hypocrisy just because the proposed site lay in the waters of Nantucket Sound, offshore from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port.

Thomas Segel, in the essay below, tells us that environmental paganism is not confined to the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts.

More Than Energy in the Wind
By Thomas D. Segel
Tom@thomasdsegel.com
http://www.thomasdsegel.com

Harlingen, Texas, May 3, 2008:

A renewable source of energy that requires no coal, gas or oil, has no waste product and creates no greenhouse gases would seem to be the magical solution everyone is seeking. As gasoline tops $4.00 a gallon in many regions, Americans are screaming for a solution to the national attack on family budgets. With almost uncountable restrictive federal regulations, most of our available resources remain untapped. These same politically oriented restrictions have even stopped the construction of new refineries. In fact, the only resource our left-leaning Political Kings and their Environmental Jesters have not managed to completely regulate is the wind.

This does not mean they are ignoring attacks on wind power energy. From lamenting the possible death of birds and bats, to threats of damage to the ecology, charges and counter charges related to wind energy unfold in our newspapers and across television screens. In many regions of the country, these naysayers have managed to influence political bodies and regulations relative to permits and locale have been adopted. One of the few barriers to even more regulatory moves has been the fact that wind farms are constructed on private property.

However, the NIMBY (not in my back yard) crowd and environmental activists are now on the attack in Texas, just as they have been with every other attempt to increase energy across the United States. The latest of these attacks is taking place along the Gulf Coast where PPM Energy of Portland, Oregon is attempting to erect 240 wind-powered turbines on the Kenedy Ranch. This is the first of two planned farms on the 400,000-acre South Texas ranch. It is the start of an $800 million project that will eventually provide electricity for more than 100,000 homes, and have no negative emissions. According to a company spokesman, even before construction started it had completed three years of comprehensive wildlife studies. The conclusion of these studies was the farm would be outside the main migratory flight path and no endangered species or birds would be harmed. This failed to satisfy those opposed to the construction.

The first to attack the project was neighboring King Ranch President Jack Hunt. He claims the turbines will create an eyesore, even though the nearest highway is more than twenty miles away and there is little population to view the operation. He also claims the wind farm will harm wildlife and kill migrating birds. A coalition of state and local environmental activist groups started filing complaints early in 2007 making claims that birds migrating to the south flew on a path that led directly into the planned 200 to 400 feet tall wind- turbines. They predicted massive kills.

State courts and agencies have dismissed all attempted actions saying the King Ranch and the Coastal Habitat Alliance have no standing for action in a case that requires no permits and is on private land. Still the group persists and in December 2007 filed state and federal lawsuits to halt construction. If they fail to stop the building of the wind farm, they at least want to gain input in the project.

According to those involved in the Kenedy Ranch project, the litigation is completely without merit and will only serve to delay construction. In the event these law suits fail, Hunt, with his King Ranch clout, is contacting Texas state lawmakers in an attempt to convince them to pass legislation regulating and licensing the construction of wind farms.

The State of Texas leads the nation in wind-generated energy. Wind farms provide almost 4% of the state’s electricity. A total of 4,356 megawatts of electricity are produced in the Lone Star State from 40 different projects. This is more than one third of the current 11,600 megawatts being produced in the United States. California holds national second place with wind farms that generate 2438 megawatts. Texas is well suited to developing wind energy due to its size, availability of open land and ample winds. Farmers and ranchers have found wind farms a good source of supplemental income. Some large landowners are considering the development of their own wind farms, while others are content to lease their land.

One of the very important benefits to having wind farms on any site are the use of land is very minimal. Only about 42 by 42 feet of actual space is used for any single wind turbine, allowing farmers to plant right up to the base of the construction. Because some of these turbines are very high, between 100 and 400 feet, there is little noise, allowing normal conversation right at the base of the unit. There is also wide separation of units, with each one situated on about a forty-acre plot of land.

To better understand just what a megawatt provides, think of it in these terms?a megawatt is a million watts. If you turn on a 100-watt light bulb, it will burn 100 watts of electricity in one hour. So, a megawatt would provide one hour of electricity for ten thousand 100- watt light bulbs.

Texas has a renewable energy objective of 5,000 new megawatts of electricity by 2015. The Kenedy Ranch projects will provide a major portion of the target megawatt goal. However, just as in the case of oil and gas exploration, hydro-electric and nuclear power plants, more electric generators or refineries for fossil fuel, the self serving few do everything in their power to impede progress that is all in the national interest.

Liberal-progressives are enthralled with imposing collectivist regulation to satisfy their religion’s “feel-good” agendas. 

But the cost of liberal-progressive worship of collectivist abstractions is great.  Diverting limited economic resources into less important or less effective uses, inherent in the straitjacket of government regulation, impoverishes the world with lower output.  It also results in the loss of innovation inherent in the liberty of millions of individuals to experiment and discover the most effective and least costly ways to solve problems.  Liberal-progressive-socialism’s claim that government bureaucrats are better at administering the economy than “greedy” individual workers and private businessmen is repeatedly belied by experience.

A front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal highlights the latest fiasco engendered by liberal-progressivism.  Under the headline Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders, the Journal reports:

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank—putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.

Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank agreed that the problem is severe. Among other targets, they singled out U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and other biofuels as deepening the woes.

“When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels,” said India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, in an interview. Turkey’s finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, said the use of food for biofuels is “appalling."

Let’s acknowledge that Congressional “feel good” environmental regulations mandating and subsidizing increased use of ethanol are not the sole cause of higher food prices around the world.  But those enactments are a major contributor.

Diverting agricultural production into growing corn for ethanol has reduced other food supplies, with the inevitability of higher prices for lesser amounts of foods grown on the reduced acreage not devoted to ethanol production.  In addition, every gallon of ethanol produced requires the use of almost two gallons of gasoline.  Rather than reducing our dependence upon oil, ethanol production sharply increases the use of petroleum, adding upward pressure on the price of the world’s major energy source, increasing food prices still more.

This counterproductive effect is typical of liberal-progressivism, which inherently is limited to a one-dimensional view of political and economic society.  Liberal-progressivism is prone to the quick, grand, symbolic gesture, without careful consideration of the manifold effects of imposed policies.  Liberal-progressivism is a religion that finds its trade-mark expression in mindlessness mob demonstrations in the streets, calculated to rush legislative bodies into quick-fix enactments. 

Above all, liberal-progressivism is a religion that abhors the idea of individual responsibility and the vastly greater wisdom inherent in the independent actions of tens of millions of individuals planning and reacting to events where the rubber meets the road. 

As former liberal-progressive Senator Bill Bradley said, liberals always prefer the bureaucrat whom they know to the individual whom they can’t control.

In the case of world food prices, ivory-tower liberal-progressive intellectuals and politicians have, in smug satisfaction, starved the world’s poor to gratify their own self-importance.  Worshipping their philosophically materialist goddess of Reason, they are delighted to behold in self-admiration their own images each day in the mirror, believing themselves to be the saviors of abstract intellectual conceits called “humanity” and “the planet.”