The Irony Of All Irony

by … Donna Cole

The roots of the “War on Energy” can be traced back to the early 1970s and the end of the Vietnam War. The anti war movement with no more war to protest morphed into leftist environmentalism. However, looking down from the ivory towers of academia and government bureaucracy, the environmental movement had less to do with saving the earth from it’s own inhabitants and more to do with the liberal statist’s desire for control. For them, environmentalism was simply a means to an end.

The 70s should have been a golden age for nuclear power, instead with the demonization and fear mongering of the real “green” no emission energy, making it akin to nuclear weapons, the government has regulated it to near non-existence. While most of the useful hydroelectric power in the U.S. has already been tapped, liberals today are more interested in tearing down dams to restore the environment than building any new ones. This war continued against coal with claims it’s smoke caused acid rain, and climate scientists of those days said the soot was going to block out the sun, causing global cooling. By the 2000s we would be in an ice age with New York City under a mile thick glacier.

Of course the climate scientists now claim the soot is causing global warming and melting the polar ice caps. Today, liberals have fear mongered coal and global warming in much the same way they did nuclear power in the 70s, and mostly due to carbon emission regulations the days of using coal for energy in the United States are effectively over.

Due to this global warming fear mongering that has brought about onerous carbon emission regulations, state renewable energy standards, and the threat of future carbon cap and trade (tax) systems, the government has forced electric power companies to invest in wind and solar power. The federal government has also wasted billions of dollars supporting the unprofitable wind and solar industry with subsides such as tax credits and direct cash grants through things like stimulus funding for “green jobs.”

Now, in what seems to be the irony of all ironies, The New York Times reports the following;

“Duke Energy agreed on Friday (Nov. 22nd) to pay $1 million in fines as part of the Justice Department’s first criminal case against a wind power company for the deaths of protected birds.”

“A subsidiary of the company, Duke Energy Renewables, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Wyoming on Friday to violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a federal law that protects migratory birds. The company was charged with killing 14 golden eagles and dozens of other birds at two wind projects in Wyoming since 2009.”

“In a plea agreement, the company said it would pay the fines to several conservation groups, including the North American Wetlands Conservation Fund, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The company must also put a plan in place to prevent bird deaths in the future, federal officials said.”

The Times’ article goes on to say that Duke Energy is investing in “radar technology to detect birds and using field biologists to look for eagles and determine when turbines need to be shut down.” Those biologists must be what President Obama referred to as “green jobs.”

Here we have a power company, who most likely would have never built these windmills without the government forcing them to, now being shook down for cash by that very same government. And that is all this is, a shakedown. This suit was filed just to get the money for these little lefty environmental groups, it wasn’t to make any restitution for the bird deaths. It was a simple payday for these groups. Likewise, the aforementioned “biologists” are also part of this shakedown, these are make work jobs for some liberals who otherwise couldn’t get a job. Or I should say, a really high paying job.

This is just a tax, and it puts the company in a no win situation. The only way to stop the bird deaths is to shut the windmills down for good. The company can’t shut the windmills down because of the government regulations that forced them to be built in the first place. So, the next time a bird is killed by a windmill, they will have to pay another fine or face another lawsuit. And don’t think this is the only place a suit like this will be brought. This was just the ice breaker. Now, these lefty groups are going to be running around under every windmill in America looking for dead birds so they can sue and get their chunk of change too.

In reality, on the one hand the left has forced green energy on the power companies, on the other hand they have always objected to it as vigorously as they objected to any other form of energy production. Besides outright killing birds, they have claimed windmills cause some mental syndrome in people who live to close to them, that they are blights on the pristine environment, that offshore windmills will screw up both fish and bird migratory patterns, the underwater electric cables will mess with the fish and ruin commercial fishing. The list goes on and on. Similar complaints are lodged against solar power plants. The reflected sun glare confuses bird’s navigation and a lefty group filed suit against a solar project in the Mojave Desert in California because of a tortoise. Again, this list of anti solar energy grievances goes on and on.

All of this leads to an unavoidable conclusion. The leftist environmental movement has nothing to do with the environment. Their objections to the means of energy production are only excuses. It doesn’t matter how one produces electric power, they will find reason to object. They don’t hate the process of production, they hate product the process produces.

Why you ask? When a liberal treehugger chains themselves to a tree to stop a timber company from cutting it down, it is not because they love the tree, they hate the timber company. It stands for everything they think is wrong with the world. Liberal elites have long understood the most important thing in our free market capitalist system, the driving force, is electrical power. Without electricity everything grinds to a halt. You control electricity, you control the whole show.

While some of these Communist Stoneagers would love to see the average person reduced to living in a dark cave, the liberal elites simply want control of the electricity and you achieve this by limiting access to it. You limit access by limiting production. When you limit production, this causes, as the president himself said, electric rates to skyrocket.

The entire goal of worldwide liberalism is two fold, to micro manage the life of the individual and to macro manage the economy. When one can macro manage the economy, the micro management of the individual becomes easy. Just as the vast expansion of food stamps was not done to feed the poor, and Obamacare was not done to heal the sick, these things were done to make individuals dependent on government, energy regulation has nothing to do with stopping the seas from rising. It makes the individual dependent on government for subsides in the form of energy assistance. The government literally has their finger on your light switch and you must ask them to turn it on.

So, when liberals talk about global warming and saving the earth, these are lies. Yes, the rank and file brainwashed lefty zombie may believe this nonsense, but it is not the truth. The truth is the leftist elites want of another chance to prove Marx right, because they believe this time they can get it right.

In what could be called reverse evolution, these Crypto-Marxists think they can centrally manage the economy better than free market capitalism does. They believe they can create a more just society by enslaving it’s citizens for their own good because the people are helpless serfs in the elite liberal mind and they can distribute wealth in an equal manner to whoever they think is worthy verses who earns it by honest means.

This is what the “War on Energy” is really about, statist control of the individual, and as I said before, it is simply a means to an, or the, end. Perhaps this is even a greater irony than the one I pointed out before.

by … Donna Cole