Danish Minister compares peaceful protesters to mass murderer

The Danish Minister of Integration and Development, Søren Pind, wrote on Facebook that the activists attempting to stop the cutting down of a forest to erect giant wind turbines are like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik:

Ekstremismen tager til. Flere og flere mener sig berettiget til at tage sig selv til rette. Optøjerne på Nørrebro. Kirkebesættere. Østerild. Og ekstremismens hidtil mest sataniske fjæs nu i Norge. Det er 70’erne om igen. De næste år handler om demokratiets og retsstatens klippegrund. Nok er nok. Enten er man med. Eller også imod.

Extremism is growing. More and more people see themselves entitled to take the law into their own hands. The riots in Nørrebro. Church occupiers. Østerild. And the most satanic extremism now in Norway. It's the 70s again. The next year is about democracy and the rule of law. Enough is enough. You are either with. Or against.

The Nørrebro church occupation refers to a group of rejected Iraqi asylum seekers who sought refuge in 2009 and the citizens who tried to block police from entering. Østerild refers to the citizens who for 10 days blocked the cutting down of trees in the klitplantage (dunes park) there. The Danish Nature Agency plans to clear it for the companies Vestas and Siemens to erect giant (250 m tall) "test" turbines. The blockade ended today when the number of tree-cutting machines was more than doubled and more than 50 police arrived, armed and with dogs, to clear out the activists and planning to keep guard around the clock until the first round of cutting is done.

Anders Breivik, of course, is the man who killed scores of people in Norway last Friday (July 22) in what he considered to be a strike against multiculturalism. Søren Pind, a member of the ruling right-wing Venstre party, is well known in Denmark for his own attitudes against multiculturalism. That well fits his obvious hatred of people who question their government's actionsculture.

Click here for the story in Danish.

Murðer Denmark

Cartoon by Jens Hage:

"As long as it's green — it doesn't hurt!"
"Nice mounds!"

(This is about the Danish government plan to cut down the forest in the Østerild Klitplantage (dunes park) in Thy to erect giant wind turbines for a "test center". The victim is "Mother [Mor] Denmark". The title in Danish is "Mord [Murder] Danmark". Since 2002, almost no new wind capacity on land has been erected in Denmark. From left to right are: Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Prime Minister, Ditlev Engel, Vestas President and CEO, Anders Eldrup, DONG Energy CEO, and Karen Ellemann, Environment Minister.)

(Similarly, a resident of Vermont in the USA wrote in 2005 about “blasting vermont's lovely ridgelines to ram monstrous turbine assemblies into the earth” [link])

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

Lucian Freud, 1922-2011

"Flesh and Its Discontents" by Jeffrey St. Clair

The Bourne Trilogy

The last of the three books on which these movies were based was published in February 1990. Now, thanks to Barack Obama, everything criminal in these movies is completely legal. Even so, they are superbly made thrillers. (Thanks to my son for introducing them to me.)

REMINDER

The war in Afghanistan costs only two billion dollars a week.

Going green

We use a lot of energy. This has been possible because of the energy density of fossil fuels — coal, oil, methane (natural gas). But the consequence has been a continuing decimation of the environment, not only due to extracting and burning these fuels, but also because of the massive human population they have been able to support, which simply crowds out other life, flora as well as fauna.

And now oil is running out. Obviously, extraction of the other fossil fuels also can not go on forever.

Hence the clamor for biofuels (plant-derived ethanol and diesel, even jet fuel) and renewable energy (wind and solar). We would have to ramp these up dramatically if we are to meet our future energy needs without depending on fossil fuels (or nuclear, with its own set of limitations and consequences).

But biofuels require taking crop land away from growing food, or mowing down new swathes of forest for temporarily lucrative monocultures. And the energy in the wind and sun is extremely diffuse, requiring massive plants (measured in square miles rather than acres) to collect any significant amount. Even then the sun sets each night, and the wind is intermittent and highly variable, requiring more build-up for storage and for tying together very widely separated facilities with the hope of providing some measure of steady power.

This is madness.

Just as more humans simply means fewer other species, our use of more green energy means even less for other life on the planet. At least fossil fuels aren't being used by others; "green" fuels are. The more we take, the less other lives have.

On a large scale, renewable energy is more harmful to life on earth than fossil fuels. It is madness to think that the wind and the sun can replace coal and oil and nuclear.

The only way to minimize the impacts of our energy use is to minimize our energy use.

Instead of ramping up large-scale wind and solar to meet our energy needs, we need to ramp down our energy needs to meet reality.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Wind energy's benefits always in the future

A new report commissioned by the Canadian Renewable Energy Association touts the creation of jobs in Ontario due to wind energy development — in the future, however, with little regard to the actual past record.

The language of the report's announcement in North American Windpower, July 2011, illustrates the problem: can create, in the next eight years, projected benefits, will flow, will contribute, will also boost. Not a word about jobs already created, despite an established history to draw on.

But this is typical of the wind industry in general. Even after decades of experience, it can only claim that actual benefits are still in the future.

A reality check is way past due.

wind power, wind energy