The hypocrisy abounds.
Environmentalists hate solar farms. And they hate wind farms. They only promote them if you are building a conventional power plant (and they are suing to stop you). But if you are building solar or wind, they’re going to sue you for that as well.
Thats because the membership are luddites and the leadership are shake-down artists.
But as you can see from the article, there is nothing green about wind and solar. They take up thousands of acres to produce the power a natgas plant could generate on 40 acres.
Still, its hard to imagine how a field of solar panels is going to harm a tortoise. Do they hate shade? I’m familiar with another solar farm where the issue was rats. As if rats can’t abide a little shade.
So you have dishonesty being used to refute dishonesty; we have to build the solar farm so the Bangladeshis don’t drown when the ice caps melt versus we can’t build it because the rats and tortoises can’t abide artificial shade as opposed to natural shade.
How about this: don’t subsidize solar. If they buy the land (which in this case they aren’t) but if they do buy the land, its theirs and they can do as they like. And lets recognize that the greenest form of energy is a natural-gas-driven turbine generator. They emit almost no emissions, and they take up almost no space at all. And, no subsidies required to make a profit.
“-—nothing green about wind——” is more true than most imagine. I’ve written about this beore but what I point out is this: If one thinks we are dependent on petroleum now one should wait until we have wind. At current production levels it takes one supertanker load of oil to make the composites we are using just to make the blades per year. It takes another supertanker load of oil’s worth of energy to process the first tanker load. And the composite blades only last about ten years depending on how many eagles try to take them out with their heads. It therefore takes at least three sets of blades to get to the service life of the generator head——that’s a huge amount of “energy independence”