Newsweek: Biden’s gift to China, Kuntz on the podcast, & Brown Thrashers

Jun 10, 2022

Solar-tariff holiday is a gift to China, Julie Kuntz on the podcast, Brown Thrashers in Florida

Lorin and I have been traveling this week. A lot of airports and rental cars (aiming for three cities in five days) so it’s been rather hectic. But we also celebrated our 36th anniversary on Tuesday, which has been great fun. We have much to celebrate. We have been blessed with good health, rewarding work, and three above-average children. It has been great to be together for my presentations in Reading and Orlando. Speaking of speeches, I am always working to keep the content in my presentation as fresh as possible. That’s a challenge these days as so much is happening in the energy and power sectors. Case in point: Monday’s move by the Biden administration to suspend tariffs on solar panels, which I wrote about in Newsweek. On the media front, a couple of quick things of note: I got a nice shout out this week in The Athletic which includes a mention of my first book Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, which came out 20! years ago. The legacy of Enron is still very relevant today. Also, my March presentation to the Steamboat Institute is now on C-SPAN.

Given our travel schedule, a short epistle with three items today:

Newsweek: Biden’s suspension of solar tariffs is a gift to China
Julie Kuntz: “an informed citizen is the wind industry’s worst nightmare”
Brown Thrashers are “inconspicuous but territorial”

The photo of the Brown Thrasher above was taken in New York City in 2021.

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Yesterday, Newsweek published my piece on the Biden administration’s move to give a tariff holiday on imported solar panels. I began:

Last June, the Biden administration was so concerned about China's use of Uyghur Muslim slave labor to produce the polysilicon needed for solar panels that it imposed bans on imports of that product from some Chinese manufacturers.
But that was last year, before the domestic solar industry went into free fall due to a Commerce Department investigation into allegations of dumping that effectively halted the import of solar panels from four southeast Asia countries that were accused of circumventing tariffs on goods made in China.
On Monday, President Joe Biden reversed course and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. In doing so, Biden effectively neutered the restrictions that were imposed just 12 months ago. Biden's move is a gift to China. It's also a signal that his administration is more interested in pandering to the renewable-energy lobby group than it is in taking a courageous stand on human rights or defending existing nuclear plants.

I concluded:

While Biden, his top climate advisors, and numerous activists continue to warn us about the dangers of climate change, they did nothing to stop the closure of a critically important source of zero-carbon electricity in the heart of a region that is desperately short of electricity today. In short, the Biden administration is doing nothing to save our nuclear plants while trying to make our grid more reliant on weather-dependent solar panels. In doing so, it is giving a leg up to China's genocidal regime. It doesn't get much more cynical than that.

Again, here’s a link. Please share it.

Julie Kuntz on Invenergy's "nefarious tactics"

I met Julie Kuntz last August in Albert Lea, Minnesota, while I was speaking there about the “Not In Our Backyard” report I did for the Center of the American Experiment. I was in Albert Lea with my pal, Isaac Orr, and John Hinderaker, the president of the Center. I was flattered that Julie drove up from her home in Grafton, Iowa to hear our presentations. She made an impression on me because she is so similar to the dozens of other rural Americans I’ve met, or spoken to, over the past decade who are fighting to keep Big Wind and Big Solar out of their neighborhoods. Kuntz describes herself as a “fifth-generation Iowa farm girl.” Her fight to defend her home, her county, and the property rights of other rural Iowans has raised her profile. She has become one of the most vocal, and highest-profile opponents of large-scale renewable-energy development in her home state. In this episode, Kuntz, a member of Concerned Residents of Worth and Winnebago Counties, Iowa, talks about the lawsuit that Chicago-based Invenergy filed last month against Worth County, the company’s “nefarious tactics,” the media’s “horrid” coverage of the land-use conflicts around renewables, and why “an informed citizen is the wind industry’s worst nightmare.”

I’ve used the word “indomitable” to describe Julie. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll find that it's an apt adjective. Here’s a link to the audio. As usual, the interview is also on YouTube.

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Brown Thrashers have over 1,000 song types

As I said at the top of this email, we have been on the move this week, but we made time for birding. On Monday, We visited the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tincum, which is very close to the Philadelphia airport. It bills itself as the country's first urban wildlife refuge. We saw Osprey and Yellow Warblers, among other birds. On Tuesday, we visited the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. It was my second visit and Lorin’s first. It’s a wonderful place. When we started, the weather was cloudy with a few light sprinkles. By the time we got to the top of the trail, we were in the midst of a driving rainstorm. Of course, we didn’t have any rain gear and thus got soaked, but it was a delightful (and memorable) visit nevertheless. In Florida, we walked around the hotel grounds and watched the birds that were near the lagoons. We saw White Ibis, a variety of Egrets, and a Common Gallinule. But the memorable bird was the Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum), a species I haven’t seen in a while. (The photo above was taken in Illinois in 2017.) In addition to having one of the coolest names in the bird world, the Brown Thrasher is a striking bird. About the size of a Blue Jay, the Thrasher is active, curious, and spends a lot of time prowling around on the ground, which makes it easy to observe. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

a bird in the family Mimidae, which also includes the New World catbirds and mockingbirds. The brown thrasher is abundant throughout the eastern and central United States and southern and central Canada, and it is the only thrasher to live primarily east of the Rockies and central Texas. It is the state bird of Georgia. As a member of the genus Toxostoma, the bird is relatively large-sized among the other thrashers. It has brown upper parts with a white under part with dark streaks. Because of this, it is often confused with the smaller wood thrush(Hylocichla mustelina), among other species. The Brown Thrasher is noted for having over 1,000 song types, and the largest song repertoire of birds. However, each note is usually repeated in two or three phrases.
The brown thrasher is an omnivore, with its diet ranging from insects to fruits and nuts. The usual nesting areas are shrubs, small trees, or at times on ground level. Brown thrashers are generally inconspicuous but territorial birds, especially when defending their nests, and will attack species as large as humans.
When it feels bothered, it usually hides in thickets and gives cackling calls. Thrashers spend most of their time on ground level or near it. When seen, it is commonly the males that are singing from unadorned branches. The brown thrasher has been noted for having an aggressive behavior, and is a staunch defender of its nest. However, the name does not come from attacking perceived threats, but is believed to have come from the thrashing sound the bird makes when digging through ground debris. It is also thought that the name comes from the thrashing sound that is made while it is smashing large insects to kill and eventually eat.

Have a good weekend.

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