The Winds of War
Although first appearing in the 1620 novel Don Quixote by Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes, invariably the idiom “Look who’s calling the kettle black” or its cousin “the pot calling the kettle black”, will now be considered racist by some. The expression is an allegation of hypocrisy or when one person is accused of doing something the accuser is indeed doing.
In the linked story from Yale Climate Connections, an online activist communiqué associated with the highly-privileged university disseminates that a sect is actively engaged in protesting wind and solar farms in rural areas. Entitled, “It’s almost like a cult. Activists shout down rural renewable energy projects”, it talks about protests against wind and solar farms in Montcalm County, Michigan, although the article claims these objections are happening all over the Midwest of the United States. They state no examples or evidence - even with no proof conjecture, and cynicism apparently suffice.
At this point, I’m sure you can perceive the use of the idiom or phrase in the first paragraph. Any amount of demonstration against renewable energies would pale infinitely when compared to the protests, vitriol, violence, and often destruction relative to cultist campaigns on anthropogenic climate change.
A few farmers are being interviewed in the accompanying video and it’s easy to understand why some of them would be in support of wind. It is not that they would be opposed to fossil fuels because without natural gas, fertilizers become essentially unavailable and their tractors would not move, but rather the additional revenues they receive by allowing wind turbines placed on their farmland.
While some of the wind and solar demonstrators are likely to understand and support the advantages of fossil fuel energies, many of them would be protesting the obstruction and destruction of their scenery. Wind farms can affect the landscape of people living several miles away, especially if these turbines are located on elevated hillsides. The Goshen Wind Farm located on a hill east of Idaho Falls, Idaho can be seen from my location a distance of 15 miles.
As I wrote in January of 2023, in an article entitled, “A Case in Point”, I was asked to assist a friend in Canada, just north of Kingston, Ontario, who did not want a wind farm established near his home. I wrote, “Naturally, I went into the substantial detriments of electrical generation by renewables, their sporadic production, and intermittency, and thus significantly higher costs in comparison to traditional energies. I discovered as I articulated and detailed these for him, his struggle was not with solar and wind he believed in climate change”, and was simply a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard).
I fully expect that the Yale Climate Connection would not write about the need for offshore wind farms near the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Kennebunkport, or New Haven Harbor, just south of the university, but would certainly buttress efforts to purge any idea of such. The residences of the progressive political elite would certainly and easily market those opposing efforts and Yale would be a willing and enthusiastic ally.
This entire article is simply a vindictive piece and one to deflect attention away from the detrimental antics of climate change protestors and the deceptive language used by political proponents. However, I would further suggest that as renewable energies continue to fail, protests against governments that use them for political advantage will elevate significantly.
Generally, if we all want to discuss an effective compromise, nuclear energy, provided the plants are on solid ground, unlike the energy plant in Fukushima Japan, we need not be discussing carbon dioxide emissions or unsightly land transformations. I often mention thorium as the fuel of choice since it cannot be weaponized and has faster degradation than uranium. There will, of course, be the protests of unlearned detractors, but as a brother-in-law once said to me, no climate change advocate should be talking unless they are willing to discuss and debate nuclear.