Editor Note: Part I yesterday examined the property-right and economics problems with Texas wind development.
“The government is using corporations as its arm. They’re not just destroying my land; they’re destroying my heritage. I was taught for as long as I can remember to be a good steward of the land. Now the government has given this company the right to take what they want and do whatever they want with it. Believe me, what they want will damage my land forever. It makes me feel helpless.”
– Mark Cadra, a Wheeler County rancher along CREZ route
As discussed yesterday, Texas landowners are fighting against eminent domain associated with a $4.9 billion (and counting) transmission line project to get the state’s wind generation from nowhere to somewhere. This project is hardly essential and is a case of throwing good money after bad.…
Continue ReadingEditor Note: Sam Pakan (full biography below) is a rancher and writer living in Wheeler County, Texas. Part II discusses the environmental controversy regarding Texas’s latest wind development push.
The eastern Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling sand hills, tree-lined creek beds and tall grass vistas, may seem a desolate place to outsiders. Still, it has its beauty, especially to the cattle ranchers and wheat farmers who work and live on it. But not for long.
Much of this land–the fragile habitat of the Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Whooping Crane–is scheduled to become industrialized if the Texas Public Utility Commission (Texas PUC), the Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have their way. Incongruously, the demolition of this mostly native grassland is being proposed in the name of green energy.…
Continue ReadingA new study from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard Medical School, Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal, estimates that the negative externalities of coal-fired electricity generation are two-to-three times as great as the actual price of the electricity itself. Wow–so much for the cheap price of electricity from coal itself being a social good. And forget that decades of ever more stringent air and water regulation has internalized the so-called social cost of coal-fired power plants. And forget that carbon dioxide (CO2) has positives, not only negatives, for the biosphere.
So forgetting all this, and taking the report’s analytics at face value, it is concluded that the FULL COST of coal makes “wind, solar, and other forms of nonfossil fuel power generation … economically competitive.”…
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