200k downloads, Alhajji on podcast, wind & solar rejections, Black Phoebes
Power Hungry Podcast passes 200,000 downloads, more wind/solar rejections, Alhajji on energy markets, Black Phoebes at Zion NP
More presentations this week. On Wednesday, I was delighted to participate in the Global Energy Symposium at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Today, I’m participating in a salon sponsored by the Urban Reform Institute, a Houston-based think tank led by my friend, Joel Kotkin and Charles Blain. (Joel has been on the Power Hungry Podcast twice, including last week and in August 2020). The caption for the meeting was “Restoring the Middle Class” and it included some great presenters, including Karla López Del Río, Houston Councilmember Tiffany Thomas, Jennifer Hernandez, Judge Glock and Wendell Cox.
Cox kicked off the event by observing that the middle class is declining because of soaring cost of living, and in particular, the soaring cost of housing. As Cox put it, the US is facing a “housing affordability crisis.” It has been a good day with tight focus on the need for home ownership, race, class, and energy. I am proud to participate in these kinds of events because we are living in a critical time in America. Particularly now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we need energy realism and energy humanism in America and we need it right damn now. I am still at the Urban Reform Institute event in Houston, so I’ll cut to the chase. Four items this week.
Power Hungry Podcast: 200,000 downloads!
Alhajji: “markets always overrun politics”
Black Phoebes in Zion NP
The Black Phoebe photo above was taken in California in 2021 by Pranav Tadepalli.
The Power Hungry Podcast continues to grow. This week, we passed 200,000 downloads. Tyson Culver and I launched the podcast in June 2020 without a business plan or definitive goals about how many listeners we wanted to reach. Since then, our focus has been simple: Talk to interesting people who are doing interesting things. It’s a simple plan and it seems to be working. If you want to help out, subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. And if you like, subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Anas Alhajji: "markets make people sin"
The latest episode of the podcast features my friend, Anas Alhajji, the editorial advisor to Attaqa, the world’s only Arabic-language energy-focused media outlet. Anas talks at length about why, despite sanctions, Russia’s energy resources will continue to find buyers. He said, “There is no replacement for Russian oil. If we lose all of it, there is no replacement for Russian gas. If we lose all of it. All we can do is replace some of it, but not all of it. And at the same time, the idea that we are going to lose all of it, even under the worst scenarios or under the most severe sanctions is not correct.” Anas also explained how Iranian gas could eventually replace Russian gas in Europe, saying “The biggest threat to Russia in the future is not the US. And it’s not Europe. It’s not China, the biggest threat is Iran.” He concluded with another comment that I liked: “markets will always overrun politics in the long run...Markets make people sin.”
Again, here’s a link to the audio. The video is available on YouTube.
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When I started in journalism back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I believed that claims about liberal bias in the media were exaggerated. No longer.
It is now obvious that many of America’s biggest media outlets are hopelessly biased toward liberal politics. This is particularly true when it comes to coverage of energy, electric power, and climate issues. Indeed, some of the latest coverage of these issues in the Washington Post and National Public Radio is some of the worst journalism I've ever seen. As I pointed out in my March 7 piece in Quillette, when it comes to renewables and land-use conflicts in rural America, NPR is publishing propaganda masquerading as news. Indeed, NPR published another execrable piece this week that reads like it was written by wind industry lobbyists. This blatant propaganda campaign must be called out. Toward that end, on Thursday, in Real Clear Energy, I published another article that shows how wind and solar projects continue to be rejected all across the country. I began:
You won’t read about this in the New York Times or the Washington Post. And you surely won’t see it reported by National Public Radio. But the rejections of big renewable projects are continuing all across the country and it appears that rejections of Big Solar projects are exceeding the Big Wind rejections. More on that in a moment.
First, the wind rejections. Last month, the Bureau of Land Management rejected an application for a 144-megawatt wind project that was proposed to be built in Lake and Colusa counties, which are located northwest of Sacramento. According to an article written by Elizabeth Larson of Lake County News, the BLM’s “denial was based on potential resource conflicts and the inadequacy of the information provided to the BLM to address these conflicts and to move forward with the environmental review.”
Larson also quoted Bob Schneider, a member of the Protect Walker Ridge Alliance, who said, “Molok Luyuk or Condor Ridge, also known as Walker Ridge is a special and spiritual place that tells a story of plate tectonics, diversity of plants and animals, Native American habitation over thousands of years.” Larson also reported that the same area had been targeted for a 60-megawatt wind project in 2010 by a Canadian company, AltaGas Income Trust. But that project was canceled in 2013.
The rejection is only the latest in a long string of rejections of Big Wind in California, including the unanimous vote last June by the Shasta County Planning Commission to reject the proposed 216-megawatt Fountain Wind project, which aimed to put up to 71 turbines standing 679 feet high near the town of Burney...The rejections in California and Ohio are the latest examples of the years-long battle over wind energy siting. Adding these examples to the Renewable Rejection Database shows that at least 325 government entities from Maine to Hawaii have rejected or restricted wind projects since 2015.
I concluded:
Furthermore, if Ingram’s numbers are correct, solar rejections and restrictions may be happening more frequently than wind rejections. As I reported in January, at least 31 wind projects were rejected in 2021. If 40 Big Solar projects have been rejected since the beginning of 2021, that means that solar projects are meeting even more friction than wind projects.
The bottom line here is that the rejections of wind and solar are continuing apace and they provide yet further proof that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the expansion of large-scale renewables. Of course, that fact is seldom, if ever, mentioned by the academics and NGOs who are promoting the all-renewable mirage. As Ingram points out, a recent report by the research firm Wood Mackenzie and by the Solar Energy Industries Association listed “siting restrictions” as a key limiting factor on growth.
Thus, it is clearer than ever before that the expansion of the renewable industry in the U.S. depends on its ability to capture ever-increasing amounts of land in rural communities. And those communities are fighting back.
Again, here’s a link. Please share it.
Black Phoebes, a tyrant flycatcher, in Zion National Park
Last week, in this “news” letter, I wrote about my trip to Utah last week and how much fun Jacob and I had hiking and birding. While hiking at Snow Canyon State Park, we saw the Black-throated Sparrow, which was a new bird for both of us. While hiking along the Virgin River in Zion National Park, we spotted another bird that was also new to both of us: the Black Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans). We saw a pair of them. (The photo above is from the National Park Service.)
The birds were on the other side of the river from us, maybe 40 meters away, so we didn’t get to see them up close. And it took us a while to identify them. Eastern Phoebes are pretty common in Texas. Last year, at Big Bend Ranch State Park, Lorin and I spotted our first Say’s Phoebe. Thus, the Black Phoebe was familiar in shape and behavior, but I had to scan through my iBird app for a few minutes to figure out it was that we were watching. That task done, Jacob and I spent ten minutes or more watching them. The two birds flitted back and forth between their mud nest, which was located under a nearby rock ledge nest, and one spot on a tree branch that overlooked the river. It was a memorable siting for many reasons: a new bird, plenty of time to watch it, stunning surroundings, beautiful weather, and the pleasant sound of the river in front of us.
Wikipedia says this about the Black Phoebe:
a passerine bird in the tyrant-flycatcher family. It breeds from southwest Oregon and California south through Central and South America. It occurs year-round throughout most of its range and migrates less than the other birds in its genus, though its northern populations are partially migratory. Six subspecies are commonly recognized, although two are occasionally combined as a separate species, the white-winged phoebe.
The Black Phoebe has predominantly black plumage, with a white belly and undertail coverts. The sexes are identical in color, and juveniles have brown feather tips and brown wing-bars. Its song is a repeated tee-hee, tee ho. It lives in a variety of habitats but is always near water. It is mainly insectivorous and waits on a perch before sallying out and catching its prey in the air. It makes an open cup nest which is placed under a cliff or a bridge and cemented in its place with mud.
The phoebes are a genus, Sayornis, of birds in the tyrant flycatcher family. The flycatchers are the largest family of birds on earth, with over 400 known species. The genus name was given by George Robert Gray of the British Museum, and is named after Thomas Say, an American naturalist. The species name, nigricans, is Latin for "blackish" and was given by William John Swainson in 1827.
The Black Phoebe has six subspecies, but these can be divided into two groups which are sometimes considered to be separate species: the nigricans group (Black Phoebe) and the latirostris group...breeds in the west and southwest United States, Mexico and Central America, and parts of South America. In Oregon it is found in river valleys on the Pacific coast, and in California on the western side of Coast Ranges. It breeds throughout the Colorado River valley and occasionally is found to the north in southern Nevada and southwestern Utah, as well as Arizona and central New Mexico. In Central America it breeds on Baja California, except for the central part of the peninsula, and on interior mainland Mexico southwest to Panama, excluding El Salvador. In South America it is found in the coastal mountains of Venezuela, through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, to western Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. It lives year-round in most of its range and is more sedentary (non-migratory) than either of the other phoebes in its genus (Eastern or Say's), although northern populations may be partially migratory. It is always found near water and is often found at coastal cliffs, river/lake banks, or even park fountains. Habitats must also include a supply of mud for nest building, and the birds' specialized nesting requirements probably cause their somewhat irregular range.
I hope y'all have a wonderful weekend.
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