Category Archives: environment

Why Black Lives Matter & Antifa are Pointless Causes

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Even in a feasible anarcho-communist society, criminals would still exist as part of human nature. Some of them would unavoidably die while resisting arrest, so you’re back at square one. Only a far more evolved species could manage perfect peace and altruism.

Graceland’s stone walls were vandalized with graffiti in Sep. 2020. Was this “justice” for specific black singers Elvis overshadowed? Notice who’s cleaning it up.

The net impact on America of the BLM/Antifa gestalt organism has been this:

  1. Heightened defensiveness and fear among the general public over cherry-picked exaggerations of every possible racist remark or transgression. It defines the word divisive because that’s its intent.
  2. Jobs are lost to virtue-signaling as fear spreads through corporations and makes their images a target. You can’t say anything even slightly off-color about anyone of color, or female.
  3. Whiny, masked cowards run around breaking other people’s property, claiming it “can be replaced,” whereas the lives of robbers, rapists and murderers are sacred if they brawl with police and lose. Antifa types are so deluded that if a black guy shoots them, they’ll blame The System. It couldn’t just be the thug’s violent temper.
  4. More general crime in woke-addled cities, typically affecting poor black people the most (irony lost). This is directly tied to police demoralization and early retirements. SJWs feign “compassion for all people” but won’t walk in a cop’s shoes or learn why arrest tactics usually save lives. Since Antifa knows street fighting dynamics, they should grasp why cops are forced to use knees, etc.

Thanks, BLM & Antifa (pragmatically Blacktifa), for spoiling America on top of Trump’s greed stain you sought to clean up. Your critical thinking skills are weak and, like broken windows, you’ve accomplished nothing of lasting value. Identity politics and victimhood end up empowering the lazy. Look at the setbacks you’ve dealt to true civil rights.

With roughly 100 million deaths, crime and famine aren’t bugs of your Marxist ideology, they’re features. Critical Race Theory has made melanin content more important than MLK’s content of character theme. “Police violence” (which you pretend happens in a vacuum) has become more newsworthy than brutal criminal violence. A number of you have relatives killed by G. Floyd types, but you still don’t get it. See this woke-prefaced 2021 Lancet study that claimed to find a conspiracy of hidden police killings by reinterpreting old data.

For any hope of a stable America, BLAMtifa needs to fade away by the time Biden leaves office. In his zeal to finally get elected, he went along with something he really doesn’t believe in.

Recommended black authors and speakers on this topic, since whites have lost the right to practice parrhesia.

Advice for people who hate the police:

If you don’t want to deal with cops, don’t be a slouchy, sullen, rude criminal, and don’t hang out with those types (people who claim to respect them often just fear them). Try to work with society, even though it’s got unsolvable problems. You’ll find that your skin color is less important than your behaviors and associations, though racism and conflict will never really end. All races are racist to some degree; mistrust of human differences is probably genetic. Just be the best representative of whatever ethnic group you’re in.

If you’re white, quit trying to fight other people’s battles, lay off the drugs (impractical visions), and don’t gripe about “the system” unless you have a workable alternative. Anarchy is lazy and useless. Also, anti-authority types on the trashy Right want to weaken environmental protections. The Left claims to be pro-environment but it supports litterers and vandals if they’re homeless or rioters. Those people just waste resources needed for cleanups and repairs. Stop and study what you’re actually doing, not just how righteous you feel.

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YouTube/Google Promotes Gratuitous Violence, Disrespect for Wildlife and Resource Waste

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Google’s Don’t Be Evil motto has become a long-running joke. They’ll grab view-counts and revenue from the lowest sources.

For all its useful how-to topics, reviews, interviews, music, movies and science documentaries, YouTube fails to enforce its own community guidelines on vile acts and gratuitous death. Nowhere is this more true than “hunting” videos or clips of pet dogs killing various species. Under the vague banner of survival skills or cultural education, YouTube has become an outlet for rural depravity and wildlife serial killers. Positive comments on these videos, like “nice shot!” or “the dogs got him!” reflect the crassness of the material. A typical I.Q.-85 response to negative comments is “if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.” The number of animals succumbing to gunfire far exceeds human-on-human mass shootings, including all wars combined.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kill+shot+compilation or https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dog+fights+raccoon

It’s clear that some animals are shot to death solely for making videos, and there’s an apparent rise in voyeuristic hunting licenses just for this purpose. They see other trashy trophy hunters killing for ego and want to add their own corpse piles. Some of these neo-hunters do emphasize ethics, but spread the false impression that wildlife could sustain large populations the “natural” way. They can’t see that urban residents would starve without dense livestock (and planted fields vs. gathering).

This directly describes many loosely-defined “hunting” videos and dog-sick-’em porn. When called on this, YT goes into lawyer-mode or says nothing.

There should be a separate site called SnuffTube for this so-called “recreational” or “educational” content. Trophy and “sport” hunting videos are often filled with slow-motion replays of bullet-strikes, mountain folk testing rifles at cruelly inaccurate distances, or pit bulls shaking rodents to death. Reckless gun-play videos merge into this category, showing yahoos out in the woods or desert “shootin’ stuff and blowin’ stuff up.” They tend to be the very people who ought not own firearms!

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gun+bullet+test or https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=50+caliber+vs

Most gun-play involves wasted target objects, like seeing how many pieces of X caliber Y can penetrate. There’s also a Pranks genre that wastes large volumes of resources, like covering mansions in toilet paper, filling swimming pools with bath bombs, or wasting oil with car stunts and emissions modifications. Vlogging families that record vapid daily routines merge with the prank category, since they tend to gin-up the action. Those videos could be moved to a site called GluttonTube. Many video-creators seem to be fairly wealthy from YouTube revenues and magnify environmental problems caused by disposable income. The whole scene feeds on itself.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pool+prank+gallons or https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pranks+gone+wrong

Borderline pornographic content is another common subject, though less technically offensive than weapons-related videos. Countless “yoga” sessions, best named as “hot yoga,” fall into the near-porn category. Women preen and show off under the ruse that it’s not entirely about sex. On or off YouTube, the “fitness model” craze rides on titillation and there’s no end to glossy asses and bathroom selfies. Too much easy exposure to sexual signals must be warping kids. Gone are the days of finding dad’s magazine stash.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hot+yoga+ass (it’s all about heath, eh?)

Despite all that, YouTube censors often find free speech more offensive than visually mature or evil content. For example, if you note that POC have a big crime problem but groups like Black Lives Matter try to blame their moral failings on police, the woke brigade may ban you for simply observing the world. This is a systemic problem on other social media sites, of course.

In a best case scenario, YouTube may slyly be allowing trashy videos to showcase the depravity of human nature in the hope that activists will control it, but that seems unlikely. It’s gone on far too long.

One solution could be YouTube eventually running out of server space (typically denied, like most limits on this planet) and being forced to delete millions of hours of junk footage. They could start today with anything that showcases death as entertainment.

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Wind Turbines Planned for Tsau Khaeb National Park in Africa

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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.

Remote places like the Tsaus mountains and local shores make easy targets for wind energy sprawl. These escarpments bear similarities to Oregon’s wind-targeted Steens Mountain.

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!

California’s Manzana project and Bangui Bay, Philippines, reflect potential wind power development inside Tsau Khaeb National Park. 5 gigawatts is a target they mention.

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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Woke Wind Energy: No Justice or Peace for Natural Scenery, Wildlife and Rural People

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“There are few people in this world I could dislike more than farmers and other country types who see the continuation of their quiet way of life as more important than the loud improvement, advancement, development of their society.” – Charles Mudede

Wind power zealotry is an ugly trend, and there’s more than one ideology behind its destructive path. If the above quote isn’t smug enough, the following paraphrased sentences aren’t exaggerated, either.

“F-CK THE POLICE! PROPERTY CAN BE REPLACED. RACIST CAPITALISM IS THE ONLY SOCIETAL PROBLEM. EQUITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE ALL THAT MATTERS NOW.”

“F-CK OIL, GAS & COAL! SCENERY CAN BE REPLACED. FOSSIL FUELS ARE THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT. CO2 AND CLIMATE CHANGE ARE ALL THAT MATTERS NOW.”

As revealed in articles and forums, many wind power advocates favor “climate justice” that flips the bird at honest environmentalism and sanctions the killing of real birds & bats. This attitude replaces longstanding conservation principles and uses carbon-obsession as an anti-oppression wedge. Starting in the late 1990s and accelerating in the mid 2000s, the environmental land ethic was buried by carbon monomania, with new emotional blackmail added during the race-obsessed 2010s. Environmentalism has fully absorbed the toxic leftism that repelled conservatives, starting with the 1960s hippie movement.

Just as Antifa & Black Lives Matter damage historical city buildings & statues to annoy mainstream society, wind energy zealots deface the land & sea to gesture “against” the fossil fuel legacy while merely abetting it. Their willingness to ignore these new, bleak landscapes shows the power of mob psychology. Activists may not build the actual wind turbines but they see them as different from old industrial icons like coal mines. Some will applaud mountains and coastlines blighted by giant white spikes, yet claim to despise small sins like Casey Nocket’s rock paintings, nearly invisible outside of social media. Perceived greenness is the color they consider oppressed, not caring about insincere branding. Like their SJW counterparts, WJWs (wind justice warriors) get angry when challenged on assumptions. “YOU MUST BE A RACIST AND A CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER.” Even if you explain that you fully understand AGW, they’ll cancel your opinion.

Leftists see police as an unnecessary evil, and the wind-woke think fossil fuels can also be pragmatically abolished. This agenda is most common among younger people who haven’t formed a balanced worldview, growing up when global warming news framed people as bigger victims than nature. This occurred while PC overpopulation denial became a trend. As with growing human numbers, neo-environmentalists don’t grasp the physical sprawl of “clean” energy relative to the “dirty” energy that builds it. Since dirty builds clean, how is clean not at least soiled? Extraction of all energy resources adds cumulative harm to nature. There’s no easy substitute based on evidence, so they pick the “greenest” angle for their slogans.

There's no free energy lunch and wind power sprawls further due to lower density.
“Renewables” zealots are too drunk on slogans to understand the scale of energy production. You can’t just reuse existing industrial lands.

These people need to be shown that sprawling wind projects can’t exist without portable, sufficiently dense energy to build them. Fossil fuels and wind are allies, not alternatives to each other. Short of a miracle battery that withstands rapid charging and high heat, portable, strong energy can only be had from oil, gas & coal. If you keep trying to build & maintain weak energy machines from only weak energy sources, the laws of ERoI & entropy quickly head toward a net energy cliff. With fossil fuels, the world could shake off ERoI losses because those inputs yielded much denser outputs. “Renewables” speculators refuse to apply that math to their gadgets.

Just look at the enormous size wind turbines require to spin relatively small generators. Their whole structure and array-spacing is inefficient because wind lacks density (vs. water dams). That inefficiency is what makes them so intrusive on nature. No large wind turbine has been built solely with wind or solar power, including materials-mining, fabrication, transport, installation, maintenance and backup power (typically from natural gas). If you’re against fracking yet for wind power, you don’t understand interdependence or scaling math. Wind wokeness also tends to shun hydro power, the ground-level version of aerial turbines.

Other intractable problems with wind energy have been covered on this blog. It’s just important to understand the latest emotional roots of wokeist climate-obsession, labeling those who still respect scenery & wildlife as “deniers.” Resistance to Big Wind doesn’t mean there’s no climate emergency. The eco-woke create a false dilemma with wind as a must-do option, rather than accepting its deep flaws.

A true climate solution is unlikely without degrowth and acceptance of scarcity. But, given Man’s track record, nothing is assured to work in any future scenario. Over the next few decades, small-footprint nuclear power may be the only way to preserve nature’s physical grandeur and the animals that fly through it. If you’re woke for Big Wind, learn more about environmentalism’s roots.

Overall, environmental progress is tainted by identity politics. It puts poor people in the automatic victim category, yet they inflict damage like deforestation through sheer numbers, minus tech-amplification. Personal character always matters, since ruthless takers exist in all groups. A home invasion robber like George Floyd could have become an African rhino poacher, given his failure to respect other laws. Be careful when you pick martyrs for any cause.

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Fools on the Left. Fools on the Right. No End in Sight.

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A list of three significant flaws at both fringes. Just another entry in the ongoing theme of this blog.*

Newton's Cradle, showing Left & Right extremes with an apathetic Center.

Foolishness on the political LEFT:

Soft on crime is no stereotype and Democrats keep proving it, as we’ve seen in the 2020/2021 riots. Law enforcement is essential but it’s always messy business, especially when criminals fight back. Those thugs come in different colors and oppress or kill their good neighbors on a daily basis. Slogan-based, quasi-moral gangs like Antifa and Black Lives Matter never riot over those casualties. Using a related professional metaphor, they’d rather attack firemen than sources of ignition.

Socialism in its purest forms can’t work because human nature won’t allow it to. People operate on greed, self-interest and lies as a survival strategy. Power structures will always re-form over time if you destroy them, so why waste energy and resources to return to the same realization? “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is another way of stating the obvious. College students, fresh on history from the classroom, often understand it less than alumni who’ve forgotten minutia. Elected leaders should ideally not be under 30 because they’re naive about social processes.

Identity politics and woke historical shaming can’t force life to be fair on this unforgiving planet. All that does is irritate people trying to live their lives. Adults should understand that striving for equality of outcomes has been tried before. Future attempts will fail for the same reasons earlier ones did. Any idealistic youth who’s been on a disappointing date or lost a football game should know you can’t always be welcome or successful. It would take a species without human traits to manage full equity among races, classes and genders.

Foolishness on the political RIGHT:

Global warming is a “hoax” is the default Republican attitude on environmental topics, even if not put that bluntly. They keep assuming CO2 molecules must respect their narrow definitions of freedom and patriotism. They had the same canned skepticism about acid rain, the ozone hole and other forms of man-made pollution, all because avarice and industrial hegemony was questioned. They tend to see nature as beneath them, the height of arrogance, tying into religion (below). Being willfully ignorant of evidence essentially makes people stupid. The Right often operates with reason but builds logic walls around specific topics.

Gun worship is generally a juvenile phase but some people never outgrow it. They get bored with just looking at guns, so they take up crass hobbies like “sport” hunting and rationalize owning far more firepower than needed, which inevitably gets into the hands of criminals. Sometimes, they become those criminals, freaking out and shooting up public places after years of drooling over weaponry. They miss the hypocrisy of gun-fetishism when they complain about crime, gangs crossing the border with stolen firearms, and so on. You can tell they’d rather keep the world violent just to have an enemy to shoot at.

Founded on supernatural beliefs, churches have formed societal structures and inspired morality, but they’re also a venue for ignorance, dwelling on an ancient book that needs major revisions. Many new things have been learned over the centuries in medicine and science, improving life, along with some trade-offs. But knowledge gets selectively interpreted by people of faith who wall themselves off from evidence. As the world gets more crowded and interdependent there’s less room for rigid, dogmatic beliefs. The most dangerous faith-based views involve resource-scarcity denial, like “God will decide when oil peaks” rather than geology.

Summary:

Humans are too innately tribal to solve chronic social and environmental problems. Many of them enjoy having enemies more than cooperating with each other and nature. Members of each tribe claim that “only those people” have flawed logic. This could be seen as a lack of education or critical thinking deficiencies, but schooling hasn’t worked. Some of the worst offenders are well educated and presume they can’t have biases.

The publicity-shy Center must speak up to prevent the fringes from controlling narratives. Still, not all the best ideas come from the Center; they’re often too bland or stoic. A wise society would choose the smartest concepts from each side and vote on them. It’s doubtful this will happen until an intractable resource-crisis forces it (see other posts on this blog).

This page may be updated and reworded at random with new information. If you cite it, please post the link instead of a pasted snapshot. *I’m not sure how others stay motivated to write when nihilism seems inevitable!

Rush Limbaugh: Social Sage, Environmental Lout

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The February 17, 2021 death of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh shouldn’t be made light of, as predicted when he first announced his terminal cancer. Despite his legendary crassness, he was a significant figure in America and deserves a mixed eulogy, if not a Medal of Freedom.

Wisdom:

Limbaugh exposed a lot of hypocrisy among the irrational Left, which played out in the worst way when nasty reactions to George Floyd’s arrest ignored the full context of his behavior and medical conditions. Limbaugh had been one of loudest voices to hit back at a culture of naive “fairness” at odds with the facts of crime and human nature. People say Republicans are mean-spirited but Man is often a mean animal under a veneer of politeness. Criminals who fight police are a brutal lot, yet Leftists only want to talk about their “unfair” treatment as if nothing precedes it. Goons like Antifa magnified this beyond all reason after Trump’s election.

Limbaugh spoke a lot about crime and the welfare state, and conservative blacks mostly agree. The Left’s treatment of minority races (soon to become majority) as “victims” of everyone else has always been a guilt-laden fable. A look at black & Latino crime rates in America and their native lands proves it. They’re constantly trying to emigrate from tyranny, crime and poverty endemic to their own cultures (typically loud and unstable). Aside from the evils of slavery, America has been foreigners’ top destination for good reason: We are consistently fairer than their homelands! Dwelling only on America’s past sins ignores global history. No race has earned sainthood.

Irrational people believe extreme socialism is workable, based on denial of pride-of-ownership and people’s innate desire to be autonomous. They also try to force genetic flukes and weird lifestyles into the realm of normalcy, which would only work sans legislation if it felt natural. Only a small segment of the populace – unusually kind and forgiving – could manage full tolerance, cooperation and sharing with others, yet they insist entire societies could do it “if only” their perfect social order was enforced. They can’t see that very need to enforce such a plan renders it hypocritical and unworkable. Human nature requires laws and regulations to control self-interest, which leads to Limbaugh’s dark side….

Arrogance:

Throughout his radio, TV and writing career, Limbaugh never grasped nature’s importance to life itself, or people’s utter dependence on finite resources that growth-economies keep depleting. He wasn’t overtly religious and seemed mostly motivated by greed and hubris. His famous “undeniable truths” were a laundry list of human arrogance, carried out by Presidents like Reagan, G.W. Bush and of course Trump.

It’s unfortunate that Limbaugh didn’t live long enough to see his Florida mansion flooded by global warming but it may not have mattered to him. He was stuck on the worst aspect of the GOP with his staunch indifference to the laws & limits of nature. Conservatives should be on the forefront of conservation, not pushing foolish gluttony. Nature doesn’t care about ideology, just physics and time.

Limbaugh’s disrespectful “Born Free” segment mocking endangered species was one of his low points. Here’s a full post on right-wingers versus nature to avoid redundancy in this section. On the closely related topic of fossil fuels, Limbaugh and the GOP have told many lies over the years, covered here. To be fair, many Democrats have also sold out to industrial sprawl they spin as clean and green.

Improving the GOP:

What used to be a values-centered party, tainted by greed, has morphed into mostly greed and willful ignorance of science. Tucker Carlson of Fox News is similarly thickheaded on environmental topics, but comes across as more decent than Limbaugh. A new sense of fairness and (true) balance is badly needed in the Republican party. They need to stop seeking profit over morality and supporting crass populists like Donald Trump. QAnon fools like Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t help their image, either. Tolerating such people in your ranks is like “peaceful protestors” mingling with Antifa. Republicans could get more votes from centrists if they stuck with solid views on human nature but stopped disrespecting nature itself.

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Hey, Joe Biden.* Where You Gonna Put 60,000 More Wind Turbines?

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USGS wind turbine database as of 11-12-20 (green replaced with blue).
If Biden is successful with a version of the Green New Deal, what you see above could be doubled with bleak urgency (source).

With Donald Trump grudgingly leaving office, we’ve lost one of the few major politicians willing to criticize the crass blight of industrial wind turbines. Though he was crass himself and fabricated certain details, he was morally right on this issue. Wind turbines may not directly cause cancer, but they’re like a cancerous growth on nature, taking over too much horizontal and vertical space in areas untouched by older energy projects. Even 22 years ago, their sprawl could no longer be described as novel and welcome. Nothing so blatantly ugly, noisy, lethal and futile has been marketed as “green” with such blind ambition. Relatively few environmentalists bother to ask if wind power meaningfully reduces carbon, or whether other footprints still matter. They assume anything beats smokestacks, even if it resembles hordes of them, minus blades.

A greenly zealous President Biden plans to carry on with Obama’s PTC wind power legacy after a notable construction lapse during Trump’s term. In his 2020 campaign, Biden spoke of building 60,000 more wind turbines on top of the 65,548 already spiking America (as of this posting-date). If funding is secured, this politically-correct and bipartisan destruction of nature will resume unless rural landowners and honest environmentalists put up roadblocks. But where would all these new eyesores be built? Offshore ocean sites promise more consistent wind and less visibility, but theory & reality have clashed and permitting is slow. It’s been unrealistic to put turbines far enough offshore and keep them affordable, including maintenance at sea.

Row of wind turbines spoils another mountain ridge (in BC).
One’s reaction to a scene like this determines whether nature matters versus coddling people’s endless needs. You’re reading the wrong blog if you find this beautiful!

This means Biden’s Departments of Interior & Energy are likely to target pragmatic onshore locations, including besieged mountaintops where wind can be most effectively “harvested” (a term also applied to anthropocentric hunting). Since wind “farms” unavoidably destroy scenery and bird & bat habitat, big environmental groups have responded to the encroachment with denial, covered at length here and here. They downplay the visceral impact of giant machines and replace it with shill-terms like “installed capacity.” To be green now, you must itemize nature as a product and wrap it around metrics.

There’s been a misleading controversy over Biden’s plan to “replace” fossil fuels with quasi-renewables, upsetting the livelihoods of traditional energy workers. It’s based on a widespread misunderstanding of energy scale and the dependency of most infrastructure on fossil fuels for construction and maintenance. The laws of physics will not allow wind or solar to actually replace oil, gas and coal. Once one understands the scale problem, nuclear power becomes our best hope in the electricity sector, though it can’t replace what fossil fuels do best. Recent urgency in approving molten salt SMRs, and fast-tracking fusion, shows that scientists understand the limits of wind & solar. Both Democrats and Republicans are too vague about our energy predicament, compounded by general denial of scarcity.

Cutesy can't hide ugly.
Quaint clip art can’t really soften what these machines do to landscapes. The world has over 360,000 wind turbines as of 2020.

We can hope that Biden’s “500 million” new solar panels are only built on roofs and parking lots, but wind turbines can’t be “carefully sited” much longer, if it was ever true. We’re stuck with the same dilemma of sacrificing open space for the growing demands of people. With Trump, this took the form of shrinking national monuments and more oil & gas drilling, which at least didn’t pretend to be green. Biden will be compelled to spoil nature in “smarter” ways, rationalizing huge structures that wreck the facade of wilderness faster than anything else.

And, just as Trump weakened hunting regulations to appease right-wingers, Biden will be forced to weaken protections for anything that flies in the path of wind turbine gauntlets, e.g. more eagle-take permits. When America’s national bird and scenic heritage are threatened by “clean energy,” you wonder what qualifies as dirty these days. If Joe Biden really thinks Big Wind is green, one needs to say “Come on, man!”

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Republicans Disrespect Nature’s Laws and Democrats Disrespect Law Enforcement

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America is stuck with rigid ideologies that follow logic in some areas and denial in others. This post covers two big examples from the first Trump versus Biden Presidential debate on September 29, 2020.

Biden lies about Leftist and black crime, Trump lies about climate change and fires.
Biden lies about black & leftist crime while Trump lies about climate change and increasingly bad wildfires.

Trump spent most of the debate flouting the question & answer format, talking over both Biden and moderator Chris Wallace (one of Fox News’ most reasonable anchors). Of course, this wasn’t surprising and probably didn’t hurt Trump’s reputation. Biden went in with more to lose, given his earned reputation for talking incoherently.

Thankfully, Biden didn’t make any major gaffes, but he lied about this summer’s violence not being Left-wing, and dodged questions about police support for his candidacy. This was done to appease his BIPOC supporters who see themselves as permanent victims. He gave murky answers about how to balance calls for defunding police and keeping crime down, but told the truth about a rioting trend driven by Trump as agitator-in-chief. If he’s re-elected, America faces a dilemma of even worse riots, and the same difficulties in controlling them.

When Wallace persisted on the topic of climate, Trump refused to indict CO2 as a problem, changing the subject to the “crystal clear” water & air he’s fought against by defunding the EPA. He also repeated tiresome lies about “forest management” being enough to prevent fires from spreading in states like California and Oregon. Trump doesn’t consider the size of affected lands (workers could never reach it all) and many fires burn in grass and brush, not mature or dead trees. Also, was there ever such management in previous decades of lesser fires? He cited Europe as an example of managed forests, failing to note that they’ve cleared more of theirs relative to America, as an older civilization. Also, much of Europe is at higher latitudes than the U.S. with fewer long hot spells. Context like that is wasted on Trump and his low-information followers.

In summary, the Left’s refusal to address obvious links between black crime and numbers of police encounters (or even Antifa’s existence as a group) is no less dishonest than the Right’s refusal to accept evidence for man-made global warming and other environmental hazards. There are no real sages in mainstream politics, just appeasers of mob thinking. Society’s in an endless bickering rut, fueled by shallow social media normalization. Wise legislators would block future Presidents from tweeting to maintain dignity of the office by keeping all statements official. The Constitution never saw Presidents as bartenders!

As for which pack of lies is more dangerous, this author thinks environmental denials are much worse in the long run, but the Left is also wrong about how to save the planet, so most agendas are troublesome unless nuclear power takes off (see new hope for that). This blog is far more concerned about nature staying intact than solving intractable social issues. Both political parties are missing the point that survival is our biggest concern in this overcrowded world. It’s dumb to make racial excuses for crimes against people and even dumber to profit from crimes against nature.

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“Planet of the Humans” Rightfully Shames Green-Growthers and Technophiles

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The film’s poster shows the Lowell Mountain, Vermont wind project at an early stage. It ended up covering over three miles of ridge-line; a tiny fraction of what exists elsewhere.

On Earth Day 2020, Jeff Gibbs, Ozzie Zehner and Michael Moore released a strong attempt to save environmentalism from the pipe dreams and lies of “green growth” addicts. Other activists and blogs have been sending the same message to limited audiences but this film got wide attention, helped by its free YouTube presence. It was welcomed by deep ecologists who can’t support Man’s latest and largest assault on open space, built with fossil fuels at every step. But big environmental groups are trapped in funding cycles with mega-sprawl developers, compelling them to pan the film.

Given their addiction to technological growth, critics of the film ganged up to call it “outdated” and “dangerously” misinformed. Some even claimed that Gibbs is a fossil fuel shill and barely watched it. There’s bad press from prominent scientists like Micheal Mann but others have yet to weigh in (James Hansen’s opinion would be interesting since he’s scoffed at “100% renewable energy”). Critics cite relatively minor technology improvements that happened during the film’s pre-production years, and they assume wind & solar can do far more than physically plausible. They list incremental solar efficiency gains and somewhat cheaper wind turbine materials, missing the point of how they’re built and the vast acreage they occupy. Today’s energy sprawl will look quaint if a full Green New Deal (Mark Jacobson style) ensues.

Ivanpah and other solar projects litter the Mojave desert. Scenic ecosystems are being converted to “clean” industrial parks, rationalized by “wasted, empty space” attitudes.

In 1973, Oregon Governor Tom McCall warned that “…the future must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land…” but today’s clean-techies are embracing that same disregard for nature on an unprecedented scale. They say it’s being done for “the planet” but it’s really an effort to reduce CO2 for civilization’s sake (more on that). Since the year 2000, the scale of landscape and seascape industrialization has grown by millions of acres due to wind & solar sprawl, including all the areas these projects can be seen from. The visibility of wind turbines can’t be compared to other structures not nearly as tall, bright or numerous. Solar has a lower profile at ground level, but even when photovoltaic panels could technically be built on roofs and parking lots, open space gets developed for expediency, like the upcoming 7,100 acre Gemini Solar Project near Las Vegas. It will supply a city that should only be a fraction of its size, given local resources. To stay viable, Las Vegas is also grabbing water from distant valleys and represents everything wrong with urban sprawl.

Obsession with Man’s carbon (vs. landscape) footprint has distracted many younger people born into the mantra of climate change as Public Enemy No. 1. They’re willing to dump former environmental concerns and develop the hell out of nature if they can brand it “clean energy.” In a YouTube review supposedly debunking the film, someone says it’s “disturbing” when people compare mountaintop wind projects with coal mining damage, as if wind power is more sacred than any mountain. Climate concerns have drowned out land ethics and open space is for sale more than ever. If people really want to save the planet, they should realize that CO2 isn’t the fundamental problem, and helping modern economies doesn’t mean expanding them.

Other films like The 11th Hour (2007) also have anti-growth themes but fall back into “clean energy” rhetoric without examining its hypocrisy. They walk right to the edge of full disclosure then decide to not offend gluttonous people too much. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) was full of green-growth doublespeak and Planet of the Humans showed that Gore himself represents prevailing power. Filmmakers tend to close with hopium after showing grim montages, which robs their story of integrity and leads to environmental complacency. Gibbs’ film was notably lacking in that tactic and many are grateful for it.

Strong and weak points of Planet of the Humans (2020):

What it did well:

  • Questioned our addiction to economic growth and technological fixes.
  • Explained why “100% renewable energy” is a deception on many levels. It’s a present and future lie based on carbon credit manipulations.
  • Strong critique of desert solar projects, showing old how ones are abandoned and new ones physically deteriorate.
  • Revealed that “biomass” often means cutting more trees and comprises the bulk of “renewable energy” now. Old forest industry propaganda plays into that.
  • Successfully rattled arrogant clean-techies, and reached a bigger audience than Doomers have managed to. Let’s hope it’s not a temporary boost.

What it left out:

  • It should have shown the full scale of wind energy sprawl plus more coverage of wildlife impacts, noise and shadow flicker.
  • More time could have been spent discussing human overpopulation, though they probably knew the Social Justice crowd wouldn’t like it.
  • Nuclear energy, namely SMR, wasn’t presented as a low-sprawl alternative to wind & solar invasions. Safe(r) nuclear may be the only reliable way to offset electrical-generation from fossil fuels, but not their other uses.
  • The somber orangutan scene was powerful, but could have been shortened as part of the larger context. That sort of thing was happening long before “renewables” started plundering nature.

Given the time limits of a feature film, they did well enough with their focus on energy issues, so those aren’t big criticisms. Author’s overall rating: 8/10

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COVID-19 is a Symptom of the Primary OVERPOPULATION Pandemic

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“Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich nations, economic growth is the disease, not the cure.” – Paul Ehrlich

The widely-viewed JHU COVID-19 curve looks like a graph of world population growth. Why has the latter been normalized by society?

A wise species would spend far more time and energy trying to stop human overpopulation than cleaning up its endless symptoms with planning commissions, biologists, catalytic converters and medical disinfectants. We’d be in much better shape if the main driver of wilderness destruction, pollution and new contagions was itself contained. This has been discussed for decades and seems like a lost cause but it’s worth repeating amid extreme measures to stop a virus that barely registers on the scale of species annihilation, including human wars & famines. It also applies to climate warnings that treat CO2 as a tangential byproduct we must vanquish to maintain economic growth while pretending the scale of fossil fuels can be replaced. It’s a mental illness when people flail around reacting to side-effects while treating root causes as inevitable and desirable. “We need more economic growth!” say the politicians & business leaders, but we really need frugality, self-control, and more thinking, not tinkering in this over-engineered world.

The acronym COVID could also stand for Chinese Overpopulation Virus Disease. Around 1978 the Chinese government allowed wildlife to be farmed as a means to curb hunger among its 950+ million people, and in 1989 they further loosened restrictions on endangered species protections, calling it the Wildlife Protection Law (typical growthist apologia). Today, China has over 1.4 billion people and constantly boasts of economic growth, meaning more people, more consumption, more pollution and more heinous food sources. It’s considered racist to call SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” or “Chinese coronavirus” but it’s a highly accurate description of the origin. People should not be eating pangolins, bats, or shark fin soup. It’s disgusting and unnatural, just like the mindless overpopulation that spawned such desperation.

Attention China: When you reach a point where you’re eating pangolins, bats and other sick protein sources, you might want to retry stricter birth control.

The Internet also has physical limits to growth and its infrastructure can’t be endlessly expanded or supplied with adequate power. Data centers use a lot of electricity and water, and companies have been throttling bandwidth to accommodate more users working or video-conferencing from home. A lot of bandwidth is also used for arguably frivolous social media sites, plus spam. The impact of COVID-19 sheltering could be a preview of future overload as more people are connected, including a big increase in space junk if low-orbit Internet satellites get fully deployed. People need to know that the world is a physical place, not a spreadsheet with endless rows to add.

Reactions to any mention of population overshoot range from “How dare you say that about our Godly species?” to “It’s just a matter of inequitable food distribution” (treating hunger as the sole issue) to “Go kill yourself and lighten the load!” Few of those people bother to give counter-evidence, and are stuck on religious dogma, naive leftism or business greed. Another aspect of overpopulation-denial is ignorance of land-use and the scale of food production, physical infrastructure and energy sprawl. Those people claim there’s still “plenty of land” to fill up with farms, homes, roads, factories and wind turbines. They either won’t do the math or show little concern for what Man has already smothered. Acolytes of the late Julian Simon claim that human ingenuity can overcome physical limits, and see the Earth as not truly finite. They never prove it but they don’t care to because they view it as “optimism.” All that matters is attitude when you’re selling growth bubbles.

A big topic in mid-April 2020 was reopening economies after oppressive shelter-in-place restrictions and social-distancing. It’s understandable to want our freedoms back but the very economies we “need” to restart have been destroying nature for too long already. Scientists and laymen noticed less air & water pollution, roadkill, noise and other environmental impacts during coronavirus lock-downs. It gave a temporary glimpse of what the world might look like if we got serious about saving the planet vs. maintaining stock prices and compound interest. That wouldn’t mean building more “clean energy” sprawl, rather, scaling down human activity and limiting future births with government incentives and personal accountability. Nobody has an individual right to crowd the world to death, and all behaviors add up.

Old industrial scars and new sprawl branded as “clean energy” are compounding damage to nature. Viral machine overpopulation is no way to replace dense energy sources.

Stalling the global economy for COVID-19 has also revealed the truth of non-essential jobs and general economic bloat. Restaurants are a luxury unless your only food source is a cafe in the desert. For better or worse, film and music industries replaced people making their own entertainment. Energy-intensive sporting events are essentially showboating, with millionaires mimicking old hunting and war tactics. Other species put their energy into direct survival with little impact on their surroundings. Bears, moose, eagles and whales don’t need job-creation schemes, money or debt. People should question the true value of “passion jobs” enabled by fossil fuels, and interdependent (skilled and unskilled) professions that fall like dominoes in survival mode. Many of the highest paying jobs are non-vital, which says a lot about money itself. People seem to understand this when viewing apocalyptic dramas, but they lapse back into modern normalcy. When shale oil & gas production peaks (likely this decade) COVID-19 may be recalled as a mild economic preview.

This isn’t a call for returning to crude ancestral living, but we clearly ought to reduce wasteful labor-redundancy and ditch growthist ideology that seeks “More, more, MORE!” as it wrecks nature 24/7. People have been the main invasive species for centuries and should permanently back off to let the planet recover, just as we’re trying to recover from this virus.

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