local green councils of deputies
Big Green Radicals
From: Big Green
“Colorado is ground zero for the fracking debate. That’s why national environmental groups are turning their attention and their checkbooks to the state, trying to gin up support for several anti-fracking ballot initiatives that would advance their radical agendas. But rather than being up front about their support and agendas, these groups are resorting to deceptive practices to trick Colorado voters into siding with them.
For example, knowing that its radical agenda would be unpalatable to Coloradans, big green’s out-of-state agitators founded the “local” group Frack Free Colorado (FFC). In addition to receiving generous support from out of state funders, FFC shared Water Defense’s Manhattan-based press secretary Ana Tinsely up until last year. And FFC’s leader, Russell Mendell, worked for Water Defense as recently as 2012 and didn’t even move to Colorado until that year.
That’s not to say that FFC doesn’t work hard to maintain the fiction that it’s a grassroots group. Following Water Defense’s bragging about the role it played in helping to pass several Colorado fracking bans in 2013, FFC deleted all mentions of Water Defense from its website. FFC also keeps quiet about its other outside Colorado founding members, including Food & Water Watch, Fractivist.com (run by a Sierra Club operative), and Patagonia, a California clothier. Unfortunately for big green’s agenda, Coloradans know the difference between grassroots and astroturf.
Big green groups are also deceptively using the Trojan Horse strategy to advance their radical agenda. Rather than present their true motivations – a complete ban on responsible energy development – they advance the notion of mere “local control.” (Surely they have been told that this doesn’t sound as radical to Coloradans, who – as poll after poll shows – overwhelmingly favor responsible energy development.) Of course, local control is anything but: City, county, or statewide bans violate one’s local property rights, the sanctity upon which Colorado and the country was founded.
This is a dangerous game that big green is playing. As its deceptive practices are exposed, it risks real backlash from Colorado voters, who hate deceptive groups pretending to be from Colorado even more than they hate outside groups themselves.”
Project Veritas stings anti-frackers
intensity X intelligence = a constant
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Bruce S. Thornton
The Costs of the Environmentalism Cult
The central mistake of the romantic environmentalist is to gloss over the profound differences between human beings and the natural world. We are not “natural” creatures. What makes us human is everything that exists nowhere else in the natural world: the mind, language, consciousness, memory, higher emotions, and culture. None of these exist even in the highest primates. Apes do not craft tools, marry, name their offspring, bury their dead, live by laws or customs, or respect inalienable rights. This radical uniqueness of human identity means that we do not have a “harmonious” relationship with nature, but an adversarial and conflicted one. The natural world is the alien, inhuman realm of blind force, indifferent to suffering, death, and beauty. It is meaningless, for only humans bestow meaning on the world. And that meaning reflects our knowledge that each of us is unique, a creature that appears only once, and that each of us must die.
Most important, unlike everything else in the natural world ruled by necessity, humans are free. As French critic Luc Ferry writes, “Man is free enough to die of freedom.” And from that freedom comes morality, all the things we are obligated to do or not do, particularly in regard to our fellow humans. The nexus of consciousness of our individual uniqueness and necessary death, our freedom to choose to act against nature’s determinism, and our moral obligations to one another is what makes us unnatural––and human. Nature is our home only by dint of our alteration of it to make it suitable for such creatures, and that process is one of conflict and struggle against the brutal forces of extinction and destruction that have characterized the natural world for the 3.6 billion years life has existed.
The unnatural uniqueness of humans makes talk of “harmony” with nature the Disneyesque fantasy of rich people protected from nature’s cruelty by a high-tech civilization. Thus the proper view of nature should be how do we interact with our world and use its resources in order to benefit the greatest number of humans today, and to ensure that those who come after us have the resources to live well. Every environmental policy should start with that assumption. And we should determine the goods we want from nature––from economic development to the preservation of natural beauty––through the democratic process, not by the diktats of self-selected elites who mask their preferences as science rather than taste, and enlist the coercive power of the federal government to impose those subjective preferences at the expense of the well-being of everybody else.
As it is today, the biggest beneficiaries of our civilization indulge a sentimentalized nature love the cost of which is borne by others. They attack the technology and the free-market economic system that have created the unprecedented wealth, comfort, and leisure that they take for granted, but that their policies deny to others less privileged. The irrationalism and hypocrisy of modern environmentalism is a “black-market religion,” as Chantal Delsol puts it, a feel-good cult that makes its adherents feel superior to the grubby masses and the corporate barbarians who create the wealth and products that make their existence possible. Meanwhile jobs are not created, economic growth is burdened by costly regulations, and our national interests are compromised by the failure to exploit our country’s resources. That’s too high a price to pay just so some people can enjoy a pleasing fantasy.
Greens spending the gold
Big Money And Radical Activists Lurk Behind Fracking Bans Across Front Range
October 16, 2013
Cliff Willmeng, seen here on Facebook expressing his views to oil and gas executives, is a key leader in a network of hyper-confrontational activists who guide the anti-fracking movement in Colorado
The debate over the fracking bans in Broomfield, Fort Collins and Lafayette on the November ballot has been a heated one in recent months, with plenty of media coverage of claims by opponents of fracking.
But missing from any media coverage of the ideological crusade against fracking is the checkered history of the most influential voices in the anti-fracking movement, and the underground money machine that sustains it. [Read more…]
green crisis mongering
The shameless use of Colorado’s floods to attack drilling
Workers replace dirt displaced by recent flooding at a natural gas extraction well head run by Encana Oil & Gas in Erie on Sept. 25. (Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press)
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” — Winston Churchill [Read more…]
delay, confuse, obfuscate
Several of the below issues have already been effectively adjudicated negatively in the first round of failed regs that conflicted with COGCC rules. Persistence in their inclusion reveals a purpose to delay oil & gas development by any means until leases run out on operators.
Enough with the oil & gas zoning edit committee sideshow.
RE:
Elbert County Oil and Gas Regulations/MOUs Update
September 14, 2013
The county commissioners continue to undermine public input. The commissioners and the Director of Community and Development Services have held meetings to rewrite the regulations in secret venues; public participation was denied. There is supposed to be an ‘editing committee’ meeting at the administrative building this Tuesday, the 17th, at 6:30 pm. The CDC director is going to present her rewritten regulations and ask to send them to the Planning Commission (their meeting will be held on the 26th).
If you can attend, stress the importance of:
1. No open pits should be used for fluid storage in the county. Only closed loop systems can be used in the county.
2. No flow back or produced water should be spread on open land or roads.
3. All residents, and other resources, should be used to determine if there are abandoned wells in the vicinity of new exploration.
4. Vapor recovery systems, to minimize escaping gas, must be required.
5. Increased setbacks from homes and public places must be required.
6. Extensive baseline water well testing (and continued testing) is imperative.
7. Elbert County should allow green frack fluid only. (This may be a ‘sore point’ and ultimately against State regulations (but will certainly help protect our water, for which the County does have a right to ask.))
Commissioner Schlegel has told us that he does not have to rule by ‘committee’; he wants to run us over for his own personal gain. Commissioner Rowland follows suit
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
‘Greenfellas’ Flimflam
Greenfellas: The Italian Mafia Muscles In On Green Energy Racket
Posted 01/28/2013 07:02 PM ET, Investors Business Daily
Big Government: For an industry all puffed up about its supposed environmental virtue, green energy sure is attracting a dirty crowd. Witness its latest entrant, Italy’s Mafia. The mob knows a good fraud when it sees one.
Alongside strip joints, drug smuggling, human trafficking, leg-breaking and political shakedowns, Mafia soldiers have moved in on the something-for-nothing world of green energy.
The Washington Post, in a page-one story, reported last week that a major sting operation by Italian authorities yielded a swarm of corrupt front groups run not by green hipsters, but by the Cosa Nostra of Sicily and the Calabrian syndicate known as ‘Ndrangheta.
The plot was “part ‘Sopranos,’ part ‘An Inconvenient Truth,'” the Post noted, with the mob shaking down legitimate farmers for title to their land, and then accepting EU subsidies for windmill construction, paying off political players to ensure the subsidies came.
It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing story of corruption continuously surrounding green energy. In 2009, Italy’s National Association of Wind Energy boss Oreste Vigorito was busted for building wind farms on public subsidies that sopped up state cash and delivered nothing. In 2010, cops seized $2 billion in 43 solar and wind fronts from “businessman” Vito Nicastri, known as “Lord of the Winds.”
Can’t happen here? Along with pay-for-play subsidies that have rolled into politically tied companies like Solyndra, green Mafia scams have reached the Netherlands, Britain, Ireland and Spain. Meanwhile, in Germany, carbon trading has drawn corruption of its own.
Italian blogger Pasquale Trivisonne denounced the waste of these scams in Italy — with wasted farmland and noisy windmills, but zero jobs and no energy.
It’s money in the pockets of criminals. Green millionaires such as Vigorito got their seed capital from U.S. sources, Trivisonne noted. Vigorito, for one, had ties to Bryan Caffyn, founder of the “Cape Wind Project” in Massachusetts, which has been criticized for giving taxpayers little value for their money.
The Mafia only moves in on industries that have no need to create anything of value.
The green energy industry is shot through with government cash and “direction” because it can’t stand on its own. Its inability to turn a profit legitimately leaves it one of the least-free markets.
A nonfree market is like a dung heap for creepy crawlies. No wonder the face of green is increasingly a mob face. It’s an offer the Mafia can’t refuse.