Given adequate wind, would Americans accept huge bird-dicers on Half Dome, Hurricane Ridge, the Great Smoky Mountains, or the Grand Canyon rim?

In this latest bleak development, Big Wind will produce Big Hydrogen (plus ammonia) in remote Namibia and pretend it’s somehow sustainable. Invading a protected park is wrong on too many levels to lament at once. Energy visionaries, including Elon Musk, have explained that hydrogen is mostly a showy middleman for fossil fuels, especially when machines extracting it are fossil fuel based. It’s the same ruse as desalination “solving” water shortages by shifting energy from one place to another. Nothing is free when large industrial projects generate it.

This sort of project was inevitable, given the frivolous use of words like clean & green, and the growth agenda of the world’s biggest visual polluters. General ocean wind development is already morally shaky. When even national parks aren’t worthy of protecting from this machine army, what ecological values remain? Any other form of industrial blight on preserved lands would push today’s eco-posers to the boiling point. Think of ANWR oil drilling and other footprints they selectively complain about.

The location under attack is Namibia’s Tsau Khaeb (Sperrgebiet) National Park, and though it’s a place few will visit, its mere existence was a bonus for nature. This won’t be too different from putting wind turbines on the rim of the Grand Canyon, which soulless American Green$ would approve of. You’ll hear the usual talk of “careful siting,” and the excuse that diamond mines (e.g. Kolmanskop) have marred the Sperrgebiet, but the aesthetics of giant wind turbines create a much bigger contrast with desert lands. Park scenery will clearly be lost to widely visible, spinning towers, topped with red lights. It’s about scale and what sticks out the most. Lack of tree canopies to mask distant views will make it even more obvious.

With this park’s coastal boundary, the look of the Philippines Bangui Bay wind project comes to mind. Blatant beach placement is an affront to everything conservationist once stood for. People can’t seem to fathom how many of these damned eyesores would actually be needed to (not) do much about global warming. They eagerly want to be on board with something “anti” fossil fuels, though it’s built entirely with that energy. Even if it wasn’t, it’s simply too invasive. Eco sellouts, raise your hands if you support exponentially more wind power growth. What did you ever stand for in terms of a scenery ethic? And don’t try to hide the birds, bats & insects killed by these blades!

The cold truth is that few natural places are sacred anymore. It only took the prospect of Man losing modern comforts to expose today’s tech-obsessed environmentalism. The big concern isn’t the planet aka nature, rather surviving AGW without too much pain. But you can’t grow your way out of something you willfully grew into.

Read more details on the oft-denied grimness of industrial wind energy: Windschmerz: The Wind Energy Landscape Holocaust and Industrial Wind Turbines and the Rationalized Desecration of Nature

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