[Editor note: The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo) has proposed to erect between six and nine industrial wind turbines just off the shore of Cleveland. The so-called INCUBATOR project is currently before the Ohio Power Siting Board.]

“We are thrilled to have the strong support of the environmental community in Ohio,” said LEEDCo President Lorry Wagner, citing letters from the Ohio Environmental Council, Nature Conservancy, Environment Ohio, Sierra Club, Mom’s Clean Air Force, Ohio Interfaith Power & Light, and Earth Day Coalition.

Barely were those words spoken, when a damning letter arrived (Part 2 tomorrow) from a much broader, bigger, and sophisticated group of environmentalists and consumerists.

The letter provided brutally clear information and frank talk about one of the wind industry’s leading carnival barkers, Dr. Paul Kerlinger and Associates, whose environmental testimony is universally controversial and corrupted by industry money.…

“Natural forces causing climate change such as solar sunspots, earth’s orbit changes, ocean currents, volcanoes, etc. are considered unimportant during this period of increased fossil-fuel-produced carbon dioxide (mid-20^th century to the present).  This is a serious distortion of the simple meaning of the term climate change.”

On March 31, the New York Times featured an article by Justin Gillis “Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk:  Worst is Yet to Come” that reported findings in the just released UN IPCC Working Group II report “Climate Change 2014:  Impacts, Adaption, and Vulnerability”.

The 44-page Summary For Policymakers defines climate change as follows:

Note that the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in its Article 1, defines climate change as: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”

“Policies that force use of more expensive, less reliable energy push costs throughout the economy and place the heaviest burden on the world’s poor and low-income citizens. We need all forms of energy to address global needs, and we must recognize the strengths and limitations of each choice.  Advanced coal is the sustainable fuel at scale that can meet these needs.”

– Gregory Boyce, CEO, Peabody Energy, April 3, 2014.

Peabody Energy–“the world’s largest private-sector coal company and a global leader in sustainable mining and clean coal solutions … in more than 25 countries on six continents”—has started a good conversation. Lifting countless millions out of energy poverty into energy modernism is worth our best thinking and debate.

Peabody’s call to reduce energy inequality between the haves and have nots challenges the “Let them eat cake” conceit of so many energy statists/elitists. …

“As citizens, we need to call on our leaders to make thoughtful choices about where to site industrial-scale development and renewable energy projects, and to create a legacy for our national parks and to public lands everywhere.” – Mark Butler, “Saving the Mojave from the Solar Threat,” Los Angeles Times , March 25, 2014. “‘Soft’ energy sources are horribly land intensive…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.” – Peter Huber, Hard Green; Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 107–108.

Hard-green energies (fossil fuels, uranium) have a major ecological advantage over politically-correct soft energy (wind, solar): less infrastructure requirement, including land. …