Environment

Destroying Countrysides to Save Earth from a Climate Non-crisis

Paul Driessen — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:35:17 -0500

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects.

Many don’t want the installations blanketing wildlife habitats, scenic vistas, croplands or their backyard viewsheds; especially when the unreliable electricity is exported to faraway, power-hungry, virtue-signaling cities; and particularly when they are expected to help pay for installations and transmission lines that serve another state: North Dakota ratepayers to help Minneapolis, for example.

Other locals worry about health risks posed by light flicker, low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Many people also get riled up over the real costs of “green” energy – the total actual costs … versus deliberately lowballed costs that advocates emphasize.

This opposition is not only an American phenomenon. French and other European towns are also raising concerns, as are others around the world.

A recurrent sales pitch is that wind and solar power costs are declining and are now lower than coal, gas or nuclear electricity, ensuring lower prices for consumers. The claims leave out important but studiously unmentioned costs – economic, environmental and human.

“Save with renewable energy” promotions typically look only at initial costs associated with installing wind turbines and solar panels – which often come from China and are manufactured with cheap labor, using materials extracted with child labor, in mines and facilities with minimal or no workplace safety or environmental safeguards, with every phase fueled by oil, natural gas or coal.

Promoters also ignore sneaky subsidies paid via taxes and hidden charges on electric bills. They ignore payments to companies for not producing electricity when they must shut down because of high winds or when generation exceeds supply or grid capacity.

They don’t mention the costs of constructing, maintaining and operating duplicative backup systems: coal- or gas-fired power plants that must operate full-time at low throttle and go full-bore whenever wind and sunshine are inadequate. Or the mining and pollution involved in manufacturing all these technologies.

Grid-scale backup batteries cost tens of billions of dollars and carry significant fire and toxic emission risks, as with the 300-megawatt battery inferno at Moss Landing, California.

Offshore oceanic wind turbines must be replaced frequently, due to salt spray and storms. Hailstorms can destroy entire solar panel installations. The trillions of dollars keep adding up.

Read the rest of this piece at Townhall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and human rights. Special thanks to researcher T.H. Platt, author of The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, for assisting with this article.

Oregon DOT via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Climate Censorship and Integrity at COP30 and Beyond

Paul Driessen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The Roman god Janus had two faces: for comings and goings, beginnings and endings, the interim between war and peace, and transitions both tangible and abstract.

Climate Cultists might hail him for presiding over the demise of fossil fuels and the advent of wind, solar and battery power; or of an idyllic past, tumultuous present, and calamitous future if we don’t make that transition.

Most of us might herald Janus as looking back on decades of fantasy and fanaticism over manmade climate crises and magical “renewable” energy – and forward to an era of realism about natural climate change and reliable, affordable energy as the foundation of civilization and living standards.

p>Of course, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of that fanaticism. It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of global economic suicide.

For Climate Cultists, the thirtieth Conference of Parties (COP30) ended in dismay and disarray. Every mention of eliminating fossil fuels to reach temperature targets was stricken from the global outcome document. Demands that rich nations pay trillions of dollars to mitigate or stop climate change were replaced with calls for funding “adaptation” and “loss and damage” compensation.

Worse, those new funding demands include no concrete mechanisms for raising and distributing funds, no enforcement mechanisms to compel countries to contribute, and no countries actually willing to provide more than a pittance.

Perhaps worst for COP Climate Cultists is the latest global energy number. Even after decades of gaslighting about greenhouse gas emissions, rising seas, worsening weather and the “inevitable” energy transition, 86% of the world’s energy is still oil, natural gas and coal.

It may indeed be the end of the beginning of global economic suicide. Happy tidings for all.

But COP30 also highlighted another Janus, the two faces of climate censorship: an incessant stream of climate alarmism and renewable energy fantasy – and continuous efforts to silence voices of realism about both illusions. The UN, academia, search engines, activists, news media and others are guilty.

Read the rest of this piece at TownHall.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.

California Gov. Newsom is Oblivious That Electricity Came About After Oil

Ronald Stein — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:01:39 -0500

The State of California sent a large delegation to the Conference of the Parties (COP) in Belém, Brazil, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and top officials from the California Natural Resources Agency, Department of Food and Agriculture, Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, and Governor’s Office of Tribal Affairs.

Interestingly, the leaders of the world’s most-polluting countries – China, India, and Russia decided to skip this year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Newsom told the LA Times that he “absolutely” sees California as a proxy for the U.S. at the COP30 conference, the leading global venue for countries to strengthen their commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

Newsom remains unaware that the demand by humanity for more than 6,000 products and transportation fuels is the only reason for using crude oil! To stop climate change, Newsom wants to stop the world! Ceasing the use of products and transportation fuels is the only known way to rid the world of crude oil usage.

The global population has surged from 1 to over 8 billion in less than 200 years. This growth has been supported by the dramatic increase in the number of products and transportation fuels made from oil, and food production made possible by synthetic fertilizers, all of which did not exist before the 1800s, just a few hundred years ago.

He remains oblivious to the fact that wind turbines and solar panels can only generate electricity, but cannot make any products for the 8 billion on this planet. Without a replacement for oil, he wants the world to go back to the 1800s by reducing the world’s product usage, which translates to promoting the reduction in the number and size of hospitals, airports, and military forces around the world.

With the world’s population projected to grow beyond 9.5 billion by 2050, rather than focusing on wind and solar to generate electricity, Newsom should be inspiring humanity to review and control its materialistic demands toward a viable future for all humans, animals, and plant life on this planet.

Newsom has no clue that a replacement for crude oil has yet to be identified to maintain the supply chain of all the products and various transportation fuels demanded by the world’s 40,000 planes, 100,000 ships, 1.4 million automobiles, and hundreds of millions of commercial vehicles in operation worldwide.

Newsom cannot comprehend that the one thing that’s going to kill billions on this planet is running out of crude oil before we’ve identified its replacement to support the supply chain of products and transportation fuels demanded by humanity. Even the grease he uses to comb his slick hair is made from crude oil.

The 70,000 attendees at the COP30 in Brazil, including Newsom and his entourage, are oblivious that electricity came after oil, as all electrical generation methods from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are all built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there can be no electricity

In addition, electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can make an iPhone; thus, everything that needs electricity consists of products that are also made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

Without Crude Oil, there will be nothing that needs electricity.

The world extracts from Mother Earth over 100 million barrels of oil per day, while the United States consumes around 20 million barrels daily. That oil is not being replenished, and those poorer developing countries want to be “like us”, thus worldwide extraction rates may increase to meet the demands of humanity for all 8 billion now on this planet.

Obviously, Newsom and world leaders are all in favor of ridding the world of crude oil usage, but we have yet to identify a clone or replacement to oil that will support our materialistic needs for all the products and transportation fuels that allowed the world to populate from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 years.

Thus, without crude oil or its replacement, to support the supply chain of products made from oil, Newsom wants the world to go back to the pre-1800s, when the world did not have all those products and transportation fuels.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Climate Cult Fantasy and Duplicity Precede COP30

Paul Driessen — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Cheeky claims about causes and solutions for an illusory climate crisis must be challenged

The 30th Conference Of Parties on climate change (COP30) will promote its climate, energy and economic fantasies and demands November 10–21 in Belém, Brazil. Some 70,000 grifter scientists, activists, politicians and journalists (plus observers) will attend.

Despite pre-summit hype and proclamations of hope, the summiteers are nervous.

Increasing evidence demonstrates that claims of a planetary crisis are rooted in meaningless computer models and fearmongering, not in actual science, data or fact.

More voters worldwide are rejecting and rebelling against Net Zero/anti-fossil-fuel policies that have raised energy costs, destroyed jobs and industries, and crushed hopes and living standards.

Even the poorest US state (Mississippi) now boasts a higher GDP per capita than climate-obsessed Britain, where the average household price of electricity is US$0.35 per kilowatt hour (likely to rise to $0.55/kWh by 2027) – compared to a 17.5¢ US average and 13.5¢ in Mississippi.

UK industries now pay the world’s highest electricity prices – 27% more than equally obsessed Germany – and conservative/alternative political parties in both countries are surging in popularity against the entrenched interests that imposed these destructive, job-killing, unsustainable policies.

The United States economy is outpacing Europe’s largely because the Trump Administration has re-embraced abundant, reliable, affordable fuels, petrochemicals and electricity, while Britain, Germany and most of Europe refuse to drill or frack for oil and gas or retreat from their unattainable climate pledges.

Trump agencies have slashed subsidies, favoritism and environmental fast-tracks for wind and solar projects … and clawed back billions of dollars that the Biden Administration had given to “green energy” and “climate justice” groups during its last weeks in office.

President Trump again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, may not let US representatives participate in COP30, and is unlikely to allow US taxpayer money to flow into UN slush funds for climate “reparations,” “resilience” or “losses and damages.”

Mr. Trump also excoriated Net Zero policies before the UN General Assembly, calling them a “green scam” concocted by “stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.” UN member states chastened by the Russia-Ukraine war, growing dependence on Russian gas and Chinese minerals and wind turbines, and their own economic demise were hard-pressed to disagree. Developing countries also paid attention.

Meanwhile, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance – beloved by eco-imperialists for opposing and preventing financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa and around the world – has ceased all operations, following a mass exodus by its US, Canadian, British and Swiss bank members.

“The 2.1 billion humans who suffer in abject energy poverty” and families of “the 16.5 million loved ones” who died from “indoor air pollution during the 5-1/2 years the Alliance was working” can now breathe sighs of relief, said energy realist and human rights campaigner Ryan Zorn.

The EU Parliament agreed to roll back multiple environmentalist mandates and regulations on businesses, in what Politico calls an “emerging rightward rupture that is reshaping European policymaking.”

Read the rest of this piece at Heartland Institute.

Photo: courtesy the author.

Why is California Losing Good Jobs to Other States? It's Not Rocket Science

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For a century, it worked, and brilliantly. The “California model” rested on massive investments in higher education, development of industrial zones in places such as the South Bay and Silicon Valley, and persistent upgrading of basic infrastructure.

Yet the system that made California dynamic and prosperous for so long is now broken and backward-looking. The state still provides ample opportunities for technological and financial elites but leaves behind a broad spectrum of the middle and working classes.

This failure is reflected in the state’s poverty and unemployment rates (both the highest in the nation), and its tepid job growth. Meanwhile other states — Texas, Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas and Tennessee, for example — have copied the California model and they have done it, as Californians once did, based on the goal of lifting up all classes. Long reactionary in their politics and social structure, these states’ business-friendly policies now have something to teach the progressive Golden State.

The defense and aerospace industries are showcases for California’s problem and missed opportunities. The state still leads in numbers of aerospace engineers and creates cutting-edge technologies. But once companies develop products based on all that innovation, they’ve tended to move the manufacturing, with its high paying blue-collar jobs, elsewhere, chasing fewer regulations, cheaper energy and a less expensive cost of living.

Take Jet Zero, which makes fuel-efficient planes. The company, based in Long Beach, is ready for prime time, with large orders for its new planes. But those jets will be built in Greensboro, N.C., in a $4.7-billion plant employing more than 14,000 people over the next decade. The company also plans to move its headquarters to Greensboro when the plant is finished.

Elon Musk’s story is well-known. The space economy is expected to be worth trillions, but Musk’s rocket company has already decamped in large part from California to Texas. Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have built large test facilities in Brownsville and Van Horn, Texas, bringing a blue-collar bonanza to traditionally poor regions.

Even companies that plan to stay headquartered in California are making big investments elsewhere. Anduril, a fast growing tech-driven defense company, designs its systems in Orange County but has announced plans to build a 4,000-job plant in Ohio and is also expanding its operations in Mississippi.

This pattern should alarm the state’s leaders who seem more concerned with boosting green energy, fighting Trump and saving Hollywood. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi has been pushing for a space commission, as exists in Texas and Florida, but so far to no effect. The California Coastal Commission’s recent rejection of Space X’s request to double launches at Vandenberg Space Force Base, ostensibly over environmental questions, is another sign that the state’s focus is anywhere but on aerospace.

Read the rest of this piece at: Los Angeles Times.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo credit: SpaceX launch of Iridium-4 from Vandenberg AFB by Kevin Gill, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Wind Brake

Robert Bryce — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

During more than 15 years of reporting on the opposition to solar and wind projects, I’ve never seen anything like the opposition to the Lava Ridge wind project.

As I explained in these pages last September, the entire state of Idaho was against it.

In 2023, the Idaho House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution stating its opposition to the proposed project, which aimed to put a 1,200-megawatt wind project on 57,000 acres of federal land near the southern Idaho town of Dietrich. Residents objected to the project for multiple reasons, including concerns that it would infringe on the Minidoka National Historic Site, which commemorates the incarceration of thousands of Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

Despite the state’s fierce opposition, the Biden administration predictably did Big Wind’s bidding. On December 11, 2024, less than six weeks before Joe Biden left the White House, the Department of Interior published a short note in the Federal Register saying that it would issue a permit for New York-based LS Power to build the 231-turbine project on acreage owned by the Bureau of Land Management.

Last Wednesday, in a move that numerous Idaho politicians applauded, the Trump Administration rescinded that permit. The Interior Department said it “will no longer provide preferential treatment towards unreliable, intermittent power sources that harm rural communities, livelihoods and the land.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the decision “defends the American taxpayer, safeguards our land, and averts what would have been one of the largest, most irresponsible wind projects in the nation.”

Now that the Trump administration has done the right thing on Lava Ridge, it should also put a stop to Philip Anschutz’s massive Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind project in Wyoming, which aims to use even more federal land than Lava Ridge. Anschutz, a Denver-based billionaire, is a major Republican donor. If he succeeds in getting his Wyoming wind project built, it will have a deadly, long-term impact on America’s Golden Eagle population. It will also slaughter thousands of other birds and some 6,300 bats every year.

Let’s take a look.

The wind industry’s deadly impact on birds is well known. I have been reporting on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act for more than 30 years. For decades, the wind industry has largely been exempted from the enforcement of those statutes.

Read the rest of this piece at: Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Jon Nelson, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Democrats Are Not Backing Away from the Green New Deal

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

As they contend with their lowest approval ratings in recent memory, Democrats may wish to reconsider some of their least popular positions. Some even suggest the party is preparing to jettison Joe Biden’s “Green New Deal” — once central to his floundering economic agenda. As Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have largely stopped using the term, even as they continue their relentless attacks on all things Trump.

This is just one example of a subtle effort to distance themselves from positions such as climate alarmism, transgender ideology, reparations, and affirmative action — all increasingly out of step with their once-reliable working-class base. But this should be seen less as a genuine change in conviction and more as a tactical retreat from the loudest rhetoric that risks derailing their political recovery. After all, only a handful of Democratic members of Congress voted against the original Green New Deal and they can be expected, like good cadres, to embrace another round as soon as possible.

To date, green politics and opposition to Trump’s climate policies remain one of the most reliable bridges between the two dominant factions within the party: the oligarch-funded establishment and their progressive counterparts. Both support the idea of “net zero”, eliminating all fossil fuel production, and forced urban densification. They may differ on issues such as anti-trust, capital gains, and income redistribution, but not so much on green policies.

Of course, any shift back toward fossil fuels will meet ferocious opposition from progressives and their green allies. The progressives are aware, as the British historian James Heartfield once suggested, that “green capitalism” provides a perfect opportunity for the wealthy to maximise their returns on artificially scarcer resources. They can achieve this from land and agricultural products, notably through mandates and tax breaks for renewable energy.

Ultimately, this hurts middle- and working-class families by raising prices for housing, electricity and gasoline. California, the dominant ideological force in Democratic politics, suffers the highest energy prices in the continental US. The Golden State’s energy prices are double the national average, which has exacerbated “energy poverty”, particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

These prices reflect the real impact of climate policy. Indeed, in 2023 the California Air Resources Board disclosed that current state climate policies will disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Read the rest of this piece at: Unherd.

Photo: Victoria Pickering via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

Selling the Public Lands

Randal OToole — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.

Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands.

The 1980s saw a movement to privatize national forests (about 193 million acres) and Bureau of Land Management (about 247 million acres) lands, but it never got very far. However, I examined the arguments made by the privatizers and realized they were hard to refute. The lands were poorly managed, they said, and almost any environmentalist would agree. The politicization of federal lands meant that people fought over them rather than cooperated with one another to see that they were used for their highest values. Federal land mismanagement had bad influences on adjacent private lands. Privatization could have solved many of these problems.

Maybe I’m selfish, but I never supported privatization because I liked the idea of being able to freely travel across and through large scenic areas. However, data published by the Forest Service revealed that there were enough people like me that the most valuable use of about 98 to 99 percent of federal lands was for recreation, wildlife, and other so-called amenities, meaning things other than timber, grazing, and minerals. The remaining 1 or 2 percent included some Wyoming coal fields as well as oil & gas fields, which are distributed widely but can be extracted by occupying only a small amount of the surface.

Instead of privatization, I proposed marketization: letting federal land managers charge fair market value for all resources and funding those lands exclusively out of a share of those revenues. Managers would then have incentives to allocate the lands to their most valuable uses and competing user

My proposal was more complicated than that and eventually included a number of checks and balances aimed at protecting endangered species and other resources whose values might not be fully captured by the market. My original 1988 proposal gained some traction within the environmental movement until the fall of the Soviet Union, when the movement was taken over by people who wanted to control public lands from the top down.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Grizzly getting a good look at some of the nation’s federal lands. (As it happens, since I took this photo a week ago, this land has been burned in a wildfire. Although the Forest Service has concluded the fire was human-caused, we didn’t do it unless the zooming of a one-year-old dog was enough to ignite the grass.) Courtesy the Antiplanner.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, of Electric Vehicles

Ronald Stein — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Electric vehicles are being mandated in California, but Governor Newsom is oblivious to the fact that it’s just another product that cannot exist without oil, as all the thousands of parts and components of EVs, from tires, insulation, and computers, are made from the oil derivatives manufactured out of crude oil.

Newsom’s efforts to “transition away from fossil fuels” have yet to comprehend that humanity is not addicted to fossil fuels, but they are addicted to the products and transportation fuels made from those fossil fuels to meet the materialistic demands of humanity and the economy. Despite the demand for the products and transportation fuels that so-called renewables cannot make, only wealthy economies, like that in California, have “green” movements and are pursuing them with mandates and costly subsidies.

The recently released documentary “Electric Vehicles: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” isn’t just another documentary that lazily cheerleads the industry, though there is a fair amount of marveling at the technology and underscoring its benefits and potential. It’s an enlightening, educational, and entertaining 90-minute documentary that is a MUST viewing by everyone to enhance their Energy Literacy and help them decide for themselves if EVs are good, bad, or ugly. The documentary is available for purchase at $12.99, or you can rent it for a 72-hour lease for $9.99.

It’s appalling that the policymakers, just in wealthy countries, are setting “green” policies that continue to support humanity’s atrocities and environmental degradation in poorer developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals to go “green.”

The documentary demonstrates the environmental degradation and humanity’s atrocities to people with yellow, brown, and black skin in those poorer developing countries as unethical and immoral, just for materials to make EV batteries. The documentary is narrated by Larry Elder, a talk radio host, author, politician, lawyer, and former candidate for governor of California.

Read the rest of this piece at America Out Loud.

Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book "Clean Energy Exploitations."

Photo: courtesy America Out Loud.

Global Tally Of Alt-Energy Rejections Passes 1,000

Robert Bryce — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The rejections keep coming. Since the beginning of May, a provincial government in Queensland has rejected an enormous wind project, a county board in Illinois spiked a solar project, and a district council in East Devon vetoed a battery project.

Let’s take those in order.

Last week, a $1 billion wind project in central Queensland was rejected by provincial authorities. The 450-megawatt project, which included battery storage, faced fierce opposition from local residents. According to one news report, 142 residents responded to the government’s request for comments, and 88% opposed the project.

One of the project opponents was a grazier (the Aussie’s word for rancher) named John Ellrott. He told a reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that “the Moonlight Range has got some very significant flora and fauna on it that needs conserving and doesn't need to be flattened...We don't need all our ranges covered in wind towers.” The rejection of the wind project adds more friction to the Australian government’s barmy plan to achieve net zero by 2050. (More on that below.)

Solar projects continue to see fierce opposition. In mid-May, county officials in Will County, Illinois, voted 16-5 to reject plans for a solar facility in New Lenox Township that was opposed by the township and nearby homeowners. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, “More than 80 residents of the nearby Fieldstone Subdivision signed a petition stating the commercial solar energy facility would negatively impact their property values.”

Battery projects are also being rejected. In mid-May, the BBC reported that planners with the East Devon District Council rejected a lithium-ion battery storage project “after a three-and-a-half hour debate which saw residents raise concerns about fire risks and pollution. Despite the developer stating its equipment was 100% safe, examples of BESS [battery energy storage system] fires around the country were highlighted as evidence about why the scheme should be refused.”

As I have explained many times, these rejections don’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly promoted by climate activists and their myriad allies in the legacy media about “green” energy. But the numbers are real, the numbers are growing, and they provide irrefutable evidence that land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the growth of alt-energy. In all, when combining the 814 rejections of wind and solar projects in the US that I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database with the global rejections of solar, wind, and batteries, the total number of alt-energy rejections or restrictions now exceeds 1,000 — it’s 1,011 to be exact.

Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.

Photo: Queensland cattle rancher John Ellrott has refused to lease his property to Big Wind. Credit: ABC News & Ellie Willcox.