Monday, May 29, 2023
So much for sustainable non-polluting power
Greenies have always hated dams with a passion
WHEN you see the abandoned construction site, it isn’t hard to marvel at what could have been. We floated round a bend in the river on our raft and there it was: two colossal artificial banks beneath scarred hillsides, stranded diggers and cement hoppers.
These are the forlorn remains of the Kalivaç dam project on the Vjosa river in Albania, which has been dubbed “Europe’s last wild river”. If the developers had had their way, this would now be the site of a 43-metre-high hydroelectric dam with a vast reservoir behind it. Instead, in March, the Albanian government declared the entirety of the Vjosa and many of its tributaries a wild river national park, the first (and probably last) of its kind in Europe – saved in perpetuity from a fate that has befallen too many of the rivers in this part of the world.
The Vjosa is special because it is entirely free-flowing. Aside from the remains of the Kalivaç project, there are no dams, barriers or artificial banks. It will now stay that way. Mostly.
Dams generate hydroelectric power, but are disastrous for biodiversity and other crucial ecological gifts rivers bestow upon us. So the saving of the Vjosa is a big win for nature – including the critically endangered Balkan lynx and European eel – and an inspiration for other river conservation projects. It is also a rare bit of good news against the backdrop of the shocking state of many of the world’s rivers
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Supreme Court Acknowledges God Was Right: ‘Land’ Really Is Different From ‘Water’
Michael and Chantell Sackett have waited for well over a decade to learn whether the federal government would allow them to build a home on land they own. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
How is that possible in America? That’s easy. America might be “the land of the free” and “the home of the brave” in the national anthem, but it’s in the stranglehold of the administrative state everywhere else.
“Land” and “water” might be different to most people. Indeed, we have it on good, long-standing authority that they are and that their separate nature is “good.” Just read Genesis 1:9-10 (King James Version: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’ and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters He called the Seas, and God saw that it was good.”)
The Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mustn’t have read that. They claimed that the Sacketts’ land in Idaho is actually a “water of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, even though their land is not connected to an ocean, lake, river, or stream. Only a lawyer (or maybe a heathen) could make that argument.
The Sacketts wanted to build a home on land that was not on or touching water. The federal government claimed that the Sacketts needed a permit, however, because disrupting the land on their homesite might affect a “water of the United States.”
Fortunately, five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court found Genesis persuasive and ruled Thursday in favor of the Sacketts in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency.
In His response to today’s opinion for those in the Great Beyond, God likely wrote: “And it was good.”
In an opinion for five members of the court, Justice Samuel Alito—joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—concluded that the term “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act refers only to the following: (1) geographical features that “in ordinary parlance” would be described as oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, and (2) adjacent wetlands that are, practically speaking, “indistinguishable” from those bodies of water because of a continuous surface connection with them.
Relying heavily on the Clean Water Act’s text and the common understanding of the terms “waters” and “navigable,” the majority concluded that the term “waters” reached only relatively permanent, standing, or continuously flowing bodies of water forming what in ordinary parlance are oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams.
The majority rejected the government’s interpretation because it would have required every body of water, however small or isolated, to be evaluated whether it is a Clean Water Act-covered “water.”
The other four justices agreed with the majority that the Sacketts’ land was not a “water.” (Whew! Common sense unanimously prevails.) But they would have left room for wetlands in the vicinity of oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams to qualify as “waters” in other cases.
How did this happen? How could the Sacketts’ case have taken two trips to the Supreme Court and two sets of opinions to resolve what, on its face, should have been an easy issue?
The answer, ironically, is rather simple. Two factors came together to make the Sacketts endure the trials of Job to be able to avoid $40,000 per day fines for what was once thought of as the American dream; namely, building a home on land you own.
First, Congress did not define the terms “navigable waters” and “waters of the United States” with the specificity necessary to prevent lawyers from turning this case into an environmental Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” fame. (The latter has become a literary metaphor for seemingly interminable legal proceedings.)
Maybe Congress thought that those terms needed no further explication. That’s what Thomas, in a separate opinion joined by Gorsuch, thought.
Maybe the members of Congress decided to punt the interpretive problem to the courts to avoid having to negotiate and debate the issue. That’s a common problem with Congress today. Whatever the reason, agencies and their lawyers committed to environmentalism uber alles were able to muck up the Sacketts’ dream for 10-plus years.
Second, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers approached this issue with an environmental engineering mindset. They asked themselves, “How can we ensure that every actual and potential body of water, wetland, or even dry land that yearns to be wet can fall under the Clean Water Act?”
“That’s easy,” they concluded. “Just make any body of water or parcel of land that has any hydrological connection to a lake or river a ‘water of the United States.’”
The effect was to examine the issue not as a matter of deciding what water bodies can be navigated from one state to another, which was the approach that Thomas and Gorsuch found critical.
No, if H2O goes from Water Body A to Water Body/Land Parcel B, then the latter is a Clean Water Act-covered water. How can we know whether that transfer does or can occur? Again, the EPA and Army Corps concluded, “That’s easy. Just ask us, or hire your own expert hydrologists, botanists, biologists, or whatever-ists.”
Then, perhaps a decade later—and/or your wallet $50,000 to $100,000 lighter—you might know.
That’s nonsense, as the Alito majority rightly noted. The law is not always sane, but the Supreme Court surely was Thursday.
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Giant Wind Turbines Keep Mysteriously Falling Over. This Shouldn't Be Happening
Multiple turbines that are taller than 750 feet are collapsing across the world, with the tallest—784 feet in stature—falling in Germany in September 2021. To put it in perspective, those turbines are taller than both the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Even smaller turbines that recently took a tumble in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado were about the height of the Statue of Liberty.
Turbines are falling for the three largest players in the industry: General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa. Why? “It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products,” Larry Culp, GE CEO, said last October on an earning call, according to Bloomberg. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain.”
Without industrywide data chronicling the rise—and now fall—of turbines, we’re relying on industry experts to note the flaws in the wind farming. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the new turbines,” Fraser McLachlan, CEO of insurer GCube Underwriting, told Bloomberg, “and that’s quite concerning.”
The push to produce bigger wind-grabbing turbines has sped production of the growing apparatuses. Bloomberg reports that Siemens has endured quality control issues on a new design, Vestas has seen project delays and quality challenges, and GE has seen an uptick in warranty costs and repairs. And this all comes along with uncertain supply chain issues and fluctuating material pricing.
With heights stretching taller than 850 feet, blades 300 feet long, and energy generation abilities ratcheting up accordingly, the bigger the turbine, the more energy it can capture. But the bigger the turbine, the more that can go wrong—and the farther it falls.
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Bleaching the truth about the reef
For years, the Australian public has been subjected to an unremitting narrative that the Great Barrier Reef faced an existential threat from climate change. Last year a UN-backed mission concluded the world’s biggest coral reef system should be placed on a list of endangered world heritage sites saying, climate change presented a ‘serious challenge’.
Who knew that last year, to very little fanfare, the Australian Institute of Marine Science found, despite six serious bleaching events since 2016, coral cover was the highest it had been in its 36 years of monitoring? Certainly not the Australian public. An Australian Environment Foundation survey of 1,004 Australians found only three per cent were aware of this reality.
Following a relentless campaign of formal complaints by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, the Australian Communication and Media Authority obligingly censured a segment on Sky News’s Outsiders programme for failing to mention that the reef’s splendid recovery was still at risk.
Perpetuating the image of a threatened Barrier Reef is critical for those who see global warming as a vehicle for social change. They worry that the AIMS report could lead impressionable adults to question the claims of climate change ‘experts’, thereby undermining the credibility of emissions abatement policies.
Australia’s state broadcaster, the ABC, is a serial worrier. Despite its declining audiences, it remains a reliable and important megaphone and a go-to for like-minded political advocates like the Bureau of Meteorology. It dutifully carried the AIMS report along with an environmentalist’s warning, ‘that unless fossil-fuel emissions are drastically cut, the reef remains in danger from rising temperatures and more mass-bleaching events’. In other words, don’t be misled.
Fear is an important weapon in the centralist’s arsenal and the ABC, and the mainstream media generally, are willing accomplices in uncritically spreading it. That’s not a conspiracy theory but reality. In this echo chamber only one view is allowed. After all, weighty issues like global warming, healthcare, education and pronouns are beyond the ken of most ordinary people and should be left to experts.
Thomas Jefferson was right. ‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’. That vigilance is visibly absent. Indeed, bribed with their own money and falling prey to a divisive political agenda, the public has become ever more obedient and dependent upon government. Likewise business. With the media ideologically aligned, carrots and coercion are deployed to control it. Political careerists conflate their desire for power with the national interest and recruit like-minded bureaucrats to further regulate an already over-regulated society. It’s a self-perpetuating coalition which thrives on controls and complacency.
Australia may not yet be China where there is a facial recognition camera for every five people, but as government expands, Australia’s political class is demonstrating an insatiable taste for power and, with it, a growing contempt for the rule of law.
For example, during Covid-19, governments seized extraordinary powers when they employed apps and QR codes to collect personal data. It was on the basis that information gathered was for ‘public health purposes only’. It would be destroyed 28 days after collection.
We now know that the Victorian government lied about access and tried to suppress a secret Supreme Court ruling which confirmed personal data did not have ‘absolute protection’. Then acting premier, Jacinta Allan, reassured Victorians that the government’s repeated and deliberate attempts to hide the information were to avoid a ‘baseless scare campaign’– never wrong, never accountable.
Still, there was no public outrage. Nor in South Australia when it was revealed its government had secretly kept personal data beyond the mandated four weeks. Nor in Western Australia after its police had used this information as part of criminal investigations. Where is that data now?
Contempt for the law and disdain for civil liberties thrived under Covid. Doctors who put their professional judgement ahead of health bureaucrats’ advice were threatened with disciplinary action if they undermined the national vaccination programme. Contrary views, however well-credentialed, were characterised as sourced from anti-vaxxers’.
Now it has come to light that the regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, knew that vaccines carried greater risks than it disclosed. Rather than ‘undermine public confidence’, it withheld vital causality data from health professionals and the public. This included hiding the deaths of two children, aged seven and nine, who died after Pfizer vaccinations.
In such an environment, wherever political authority can be established or expanded, it will be. Like the new monetary policy board which will politicise the Reserve Bank and deprive it of its traditional independence. Just one more subtle level of control.
Not even the justice system escapes political influence. The trial of Cardinal George Pell and, the ACT’s Sofronoff inquiry into the conduct of criminal justice agencies, demonstrate how the political vibe can override the presumption of innocence and the rules of evidence.
With their parents and grandparents behaving like frogs in slowly boiling water, seemingly in denial of the unrelenting intrusion of government into every aspect of their lives, younger generations believe this is the way things are around here. Indoctrinated in the classroom about their evil colonial heritage and the prospect of an uninhabitable planet and, the need for a more ‘caring’, and a ‘fairer’ society, they accept big government is good whilst believing that capitalism leads to selfishness and environmental destruction.
Banking on continued public complacency, Australian governments have gone where, outside of emergencies, they have never gone before. The blurring of lines between the major parties along with a divide-and-rule political agenda have created a de facto one-party state where opposition to the continuing erosion of civil liberties is not tolerated.
But in the end, even boiling frogs start to jump. When that time will come is difficult to determine. However, whenever it will be, Covid emergencies and climate change directives may have so weakened the public’s resilience and determination it may be unable to escape the pot. In which case, investing in facial recognition camera makers may be a wise precaution.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/truth-bleaching/ ?
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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