“The politicization of energy policy yields little benefit to the environment or the rate payers. but it sure is good for corporate balance sheets.” (Martis, below)
Kevon Martis, a leading foe of uneconomic electricity and energy sprawl (see the appendix below), reported on social media yesterday:
Renewable energy developers and their paid henchmen like Peter Sinclair continue to lie about me.
I am not a lobbyist. Period. I am not for hire by any energy interest. I cherish my freedom of conscience and will not become a salesman for anyone.
All generation has virtues and vices. My sin is that I think energy policy should be established by a rational discussion of those virtues and vices and by a market that values those as well.
For the rent seekers, that is heresy and I must be destroyed.
This is the second hit on me by Apex “Clean’ Energy. This Saturday, I woke up to a guest editorial by an Apex salesman in Montcalm County Michigan. He compared me and my rural land use advocacy organization to Nazi Germany. And he painted himself as a man of God whose mission it was to stop me. And Nazism.
The politicization of energy policy yields little benefit to the environment or the rate payers. but it sure is good for corporate balance sheets.
The video portrays wind and solar as “clean and inexhaustible” but does not mention cost, reliability, or involuntary taxpayer involvement. The smooth voice and music does not mention how wind turbines have negative effects on nearby residents and scar what otherwise is pristine areas.
Bottom line: wind/solar/batteries are not “clean” and “green.” Big environmental has been coopted by Big Bucks. But the grassroots environmentalists are fighting back–and with better arguments and case studies to back them up.
Dense mineral energies (including natural gas from hydraulic fracking) are far better for the landscape. Peter Huber turned the tables against “green” dilute, intermittent renewables with this insight:
The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material than must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.
– Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 105, 108.
Appendix: MasterResource Posts on Kevon Martis
Kevon, much to the dismay of Greenies ( I’m talking dollars, not environment) can’t even arrange a debate or even the same stage as wind energy reps. Wind reps on several occasions in Michigan backed out of giving presentations upon learning that Kevon Martis would also be presenting. They know they would be backed into a corner in front of the audience if Martis were there. Giving a pro-wind presentation while Martis listens, ready and waitng to pounce intellectually can’t be comfortable for a wind rep who knows bullying and money and little else. Martis is not one to be intimidated.
Sort of like Milton Friedman. His opponents did not like to debate when he was in the room.