Wind Turbines of Madison Cty, Kotkin, Foreign Policy video, & Black-throated Sparrow
Wind turbines of Madison County, Kotkin on nationalism, Foreign Policy video is available, Black-throated Sparrow in Utah
Zion National Park is a gem. I’ve seen a fair bit of the western United States and visited several of our national parks, but Zion ranks near the top in terms of the scale and beauty of its rock formations. Jacob and I visited the park this week and had fun hiking, birdwatching, and people watching. (It was pretty crowded). I was in Utah for a speaking engagement to the Utah Municipal Power Agency, which is a joint action agency that supplies electricity to six public utilities in the state. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big believer in public ownership of utilities. Whether it is electric cooperatives, gas utilities, or electric utilities like Austin Energy, (which supplies the juice for our home in Austin). These entities are living remnants of the New Deal. They represent the best of America. In addition to the UMPA event, I also did a virtual lecture to Steve Koonin’s class at NYU on Monday and participated in a virtual event with Foreign Policy magazine on Wednesday. There certainly is plenty to discuss. On to business. Four items today:
Joel Kotkin: America needs “a new nationalism”
Foreign Policy video is available
Black-throated Sparrow in Utah
The photo of the Black-throated Sparrow above was taken in Arizona by Patrick Coin in 2005.
This morning, I published an update in Forbes on the controversy that is raging in Madison County, Iowa over wind-energy development. As you may recall, I wrote about Madison County last year. Since then, I have had two of the county’s supervisors, Heather Stancil and Diane Fitch, on the podcast. I explained:
Last May, Heather Zichal, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association (formerly known as American Wind Energy Association) claimed in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that wind energy projects are “creating new opportunities in rural America in ways that improve real lives.” But Zichal and other wind-energy promoters rarely, if ever, mention the hardball legal tactics that Big Wind is using to force small communities to accept wind projects they don’t want. The latest example of those hardball tactics can be seen in Madison County, Iowa, which has been embroiled in a bitter fight with MidAmerican Energy (a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, which has a market capitalization of about $775 billion) over a proposed wind project in the county.
There’s a long backstory to the saga of the Wind Turbines of Madison County. But I’ll cut to the chase: by effectively intimidating an elected county official, Supervisor Diane Fitch, and convincing her to switch her position and settle the lawsuit the company filed against the county last year, MidAmerican Energy won the right to put 30 more wind turbines in Madison County. If it builds all of those turbines, the company stands to collect about $81 million in federal tax credits.
I concluded:
It's not clear what happens next. Several Madison County residents who signed wind-turbines leases with MidAmerican want to cancel their agreements. Furthermore, the company said it sued to protect its right to build more wind turbines, but it’s not clear if the company will follow through. If it does, it could face civil disobedience from locals, including, weird as it may sound, from Diane Fitch. In her email to me, Fitch said that if the company brings in bulldozers to build additional turbines, “my husband and I are prepared to chain ourselves to the Caterpillars. I have never been arrested; it might just be a new chapter in my life.”
Over the past decade, I’ve written about the backlash against large-scale renewable-energy projects in dozens of communities across the country and in several other countries. I’ve compiled the Renewable Rejection Database to document the backlash. But the Madison County story stands out because of the county’s fame, the bitterness of the fight, and because MidAmerican’s tactics are such a clear example of big business running roughshod over small-town America. That said, the company’s tactics make sense if you recall what Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, as well as the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said back in 2014: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them.”
By intimidating an elected official in one of America’s most-famous counties with costly litigation, and convincing her to change her position, one of Buffett’s companies now stands to collect about $80 million in tax credits. It will get those credits by putting 30 more giant wind turbines in a county that doesn’t want them. If this is how the corporate world is planning to treat rural America, the much-heralded “energy transition” is in for a long and bitter fight.
Please give it a read and share it.
Joel Kotkin on the need for "a new nationalism"
This week, I am pleased to welcome Joel Kotkin back on the podcast for the second time. In this episode, (#101) Kotkin, who is a demographer, journalist, author, and executive editor of NewGeography.com, talks about his recent article “The New Great Game,” for Quillette. Kotkin says China and Russia are now allying themselves against the West. Given that fact, he says the U.S. needs to change its strategy to counter this change in the geopolitical landscape. He said it’s time for the U.S. to understand that it, and other Western countries, are “putting themselves at a tremendous disadvantage. I think what we need -- and I wrote about this recently for Claremont -- is we need a kind of new nationalism. I mean, what would Teddy Roosevelt be doing right now? Right? Teddy Roosevelt is trying to shut down natural gas production and going on a bended knee to Maduro? I don’t think so...and I think that that’s what we’re missing.”
We also discussed a recent report that Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky did for Chapman University in which they found that incomes among African American and Latino Californians, when adjusted for cost of living, ranked between 48 and 50th among the states. They also found that African Americans in California earn roughly the same or slightly less than do their counterparts in Mississippi. We also discussed Michael Shellenberger’s gubernatorial bid, energy, housing, and why despite his many concerns, he remains bullish on the future of the United States.
Again, here’s a link to the audio. And as always, the video is available on YouTube.
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Video from the Foreign Policy magazine virtual event on decarbonizing the electric grid
As I mentioned in my note last week, I participated in a virtual event on Wednesday that was hosted by Foreign Policy magazine. The video for the event is available here. My segment starts at about the 6-minute mark.
During the discussion with the moderator, Reena Ninan, I made many of the same points I have been making in my articles and on the podcast. First among them: the global electricity sector is not decarbonizing, it is re-carbonizing. In the wake of Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the global economy is heating up and as the economic rebound continues, countries, companies, and individuals are scrambling to buy hydrocarbons of all kinds. That, of course, includes coal. As I explained to Reena, the Chinese government recently announced that it plans to increase domestic coal production by about 300 million tons per year. That’s roughly equal to half of current US annual coal production. Again, here’s a link.
Black-throated Sparrow at Snow Canyon State Park
Birding in the desert requires patience and optimism. Arid regions simply don’t have as many birds as places where water is abundant. Thus, over several hours of hiking, you might only see a handful of birds or you might see none at all. Jacob and I hiked in Zion National Park on Wednesday afternoon and saw a handful of Spotted Towhees, Western Scrub Jays, American Robins, and a pair of Black Phoebes along the banks for the Virgin River.
On our Thursday afternoon hike in Snow Canyon State Park, which is just a few miles outside of St. George, we saw the Black-throated Sparrow (Amphispiza bilineata). Unlike Zion NP, there's no water at Snow Canyon SP. Seeing the Black-throated Sparrow was particularly memorable because we had spent several hours hiking along several trails in the park and had only seen a pair of noisy Common Ravens and a single Scrub Jay. We didn’t expect to see any other birds. In fact, Jacob had largely given up and had stowed his binoculars in the backpack. And then, a few hundred meters from the car, we spotted a bird that was patrolling some low bushes a few yards to the right of the trail. It took maybe five or six minutes of watching before we both got a clear view of the Black-throated Sparrow. It’s a new bird for me. (Or at least I think it is. I don’t have a record of seeing it before.) Sparrows can be hard to identify due to their small size and flighty nature. But this one was easy to distinguish from other Sparrows due to its distinctive black throat and white eye stripe. (The photo above was taken in California in 2007 by Elaine R. Wilson.) Wikipedia says the Black-throated Sparrow is “a small New World sparrow primarily found in the southwestern United States and Mexico. It is the only member of the genus Amphispiza; the five-striped sparrow.”
Allaboutbirds.com says: “This resident of open, shrubby deserts is one of the sharpest-looking of all sparrows. Black-throated Sparrows have neat gray faces set off by two bold white stripes and a neat black triangular patch on the throat. The face pattern jumps out when the bird is perched in the open, but at other times the soft brown back and pale underparts help it blend in with its desert home... establishes and holds a large territory during nest construction and egg laying. Once incubation starts, the territory boundary shrinks, and the male becomes less responsive to intruders.”
Utahbirds.org has this short entry: “Nests in a shrub or in a cactus at a height of 0-2 feet, in a cup nest. This species is an uncommon cowbird host. During the breeding season, this species is an insectivore: lower-canopy gleaner; ground forager. During the non-breeding seasons this species is a granivore: ground gleaner.”
Have a great weekend.
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