How many times have we seen this: the enviroweenies/Warmists demand more and more “green” energy, but, the minute either the government or private sector tries to do it they try to stop it. Remember the Cape Wind Project, and how long they tried to stop it, along with grand high poobahs in the climate cult like John Kerry? How about when they tried to stop the transmission line from the desert into Los Angeles? Or how Dianne Feinstein worked to block a solar project in the Mojave Desert, along with the extreme-enviros? There are lots of examples. If they cannot stop the project, and there’s always some Reason, they’ll attempt to block the transmission lines. And now we have (via Hot Air)
Environmentalists sue Puerto Rican government over location of renewable energy projects
Activists and environmental groups including the Sierra Club sued Puerto Rico’s government Monday over the planned location of dozens of renewable energy projects meant to ease the U.S. territory’s power woes.
The lawsuit claims the projects would be built on lands that are ecologically sensitive and of high agricultural value, a violation of local laws.
The groups requested that a judge prohibit various local government agencies from approving projects on such lands, noting that they should instead be built on roofs, parking lots, landfills in disuse and previously contaminated grounds.
“The loss of prime agricultural land to install solar projects of an industrial magnitude is a serious attack on the food security of Puerto Rico, which is already in precarious condition,” said David Sotomayor, a soils professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau has so far approved 18 projects on more than 2,000 hectares that the lawsuit states are classified as special agricultural reserve and specially protected rustic land.
Like I said, it’s always some Reason. And if they did try and do this on the mentioned areas, they would complain about that. Surely, building on some roofs would be great, but, what happens when another hurricane, and there’s bound to be one, destroys homes? A company can respond a lot quicker to repair a solar farm, and could have worked to protect it from a coming storm.
As far as agricultural lands, do these activists and environmental groups own those lands? No? Then it’s none of their business. They can all piss off.
One of the common habits of the wealthy and politically connected is to lock up land use to encumber future generations from using it as they see fit, after the current generations already used it as they saw fit. In many cases, the current owners do this to escape some sort of taxes or to preserve an estate from being broken up and bought by “people who don’t deserve it”. Of course this is cheap virtue signaling when the government does it to places that are miserable wastelands (Death Valley) and unreachable parts of the ocean (Marianas Trench Marine National Monument and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument), or declaring inaccessible ice and tundra a “wildlife refuge”. It is of course more self-serving when the wealthy donate their land and put it into trusts “for the future”. I often wonder at what point the people of the future get tired of driving by all the places in the country that they can’t own, use, live on or go into because some previous generation made it into a park, monument, or trust. Will those future people instead decide to claim their inheritance for themselves despite the wishes of their ancestors? It should not be lost on all those communists in our universities that the only real “land reform” possible in the USA is the redistribution of government owned land. It is the only real estate that they are indeed making more of every year.
Cape Wind is already installing its first blades. First power will come on this year
Erecting the towers in a channel only 6 miles wide in between Cape Cod and the Vineyard was not the best location
They are now being placed 14 miles offshore.
But the good news for Teach’s feathered friends is that the new placement will have much less affect on the migrating birds who fly over water but close to shore to avoid predation by raptors
That still doesn’t change the fact that windmills are a stupid idea in the first place. It takes over 300 windmills to take on the load of a single power plant. And that is under ideal wind.
Would enviroweenie Mr Teach welcome replacing his nearby park with a nuclear power plant or coal-fired power plant? Why not? NIMBY.
No zoning laws would allow either…. but I wouldn’t object to some shuttered auto factory around here being replaced by a nuke…
Well-funded, well organized Environmental groups are opposed to every form of electricity production unless it’s subsidized and has a negative ROI. Kinda makes ya wonder who’s funding them, don’t it?