KARRE Kansas Alliance for Responsible Renewable Energy
Issue #5: July, 2020 Welcome to KARRE's July 2020 Newsletter!In this issue:
LAWSUITS CONTINUE IN MARION COUNTYTo better understand the frustrations, divisions, and expenses of wind development throughout Kansas, you need to look no further than a couple of pending suits in Marion County. For those of you who are interested in the most recent lawsuit, click on the following link to visit the Kansas District Court Public Access Portal. Then, click on the "Smart Search" button at the bottom and enter the court docket number, MN-2020-CV-000025. The plaintiff is Expedition Wind, LLC, et al. and defendants are Randall Eitzen et al. Among other things, Expedition Wind, LLC is seeking damages in of at least $35,000,000 from six non-participating landowners in the southern part of Marion County. Don't miss the "declarations" at the very bottom of the page--in the Documents section--they're worth a read in order to get a better idea of what's happening in Marion and what could potentially happen anywhere. You can also check out the prior lawsuit, which was filed by non-participating landowners in 2019. The plaintiff is Randall Eitzen et al. The defendants are Board of County Commissioners of Marion County and Expedition Wind, LLC. To view that case, enter district court docket number MN-2019-CV-000040. Litigation is on-going in each of these suits. LABETTE COUNTY UPDATEThere are two county commissioner positions to be decided this November. Brian Kinzie, a supporter of industrial wind energy projects in Labette County, is running unopposed to fill the seat currently held by Fred Vail. Bill Hogelin and Cole Proehl are both vying for the position being vacated by Doug Allen. Commissioner Lonie Addis (who is concerned about the suitability of commercial renewable energy developments in Labette County) isn’t up for reelection. Candidate Hogelin has indicated that he feels industrial wind energy projects need to be carefully looked at to determine likely impacts to the local residents, economy and wildlife. Candidate Proehl hasn’t publicly taken a position on the issue. TP&L is fully operational as a component and logistics hub serving several wind development projects. Here’s a video that shows a typical movement out of Parsons. The video also shows the first completed turbine in Neosho County.
From the Trenches – July 2020CAMPAIGNS! CAMPAIGNS! CAMPAIGNS! ELECTIONS! ELECTIONS! ELECTIONS! What a critical time for our county, our state and our nation. We are trying to hold campaigns and elections during very uncertain times. Certainty, trust, and time seem to be in short supply. While we are mired in this 2020 cornucopia of events, it is so important to try to stay grounded and focused. One very important thing to add to your list in this next critical month or so is to study and learn about the candidates who are running for an office that you will have the opportunity to vote for. Call around, talk to your friends and leaders in your area. Public forums and debates will be limited this year due to the pandemic. It will behoove you to do your own homework this time. While some citizens of our county, state and nation are informed and thus try to learn the facts (as hard as that can be sometimes), we also have to deal with citizens who live in the cocoon of the uninformed. People who live in the cocoon, don’t ask questions, don’t pay attention, choosing instead to live their lives in a fog of blissful ignorance. They also sometimes vote. I can even remember doing this myself when I was much younger, was busy raising a family, lived overseas, but I was still a registered voter in my “Kansas Home of Record”. And yes, I lived in the cocoon. I suppose many of us have at different times in our lives. I knew nothing about the local elections because I wasn’t there and it was very hard to get information about the candidates back in “those days”. There wasn’t social media, the internet, or cell phones. Heck, we barely even had a phone in those days. We had one T.V. channel called the Armed Forces Network. We got just the general news of the day and it was all mostly national and international. As a result, there were several absentee ballots that I chose not to vote for anyone, because I didn’t know the issues and I didn’t know the people. I had been gone for too long. So, in light of the impending elections, I want to give you some important dates to remember and also will try to enlighten you on the consequences of not voting in the primary elections. The first date to remember is the AUGUST 4th Primary Election. This is the critical election for voting in the following races:
To find out who is running in your county, contact your COUNTY CLERK'S office for a listing. Some counties have these listings on their web page. Look there first to save everyone’s time. Check out the folks who were brave enough to file in your township or city ward. Do you know them? Everyone in the county will be able to vote for some of these candidates - ex. county attorney, county sheriff, register of deeds, etc. Many of these elections will be OVER IN THE PRIMARY. (Example – you have two candidates for one position. They are BOTH registered republicans. No Democrats have filed. Therefore, the race will be decided in the primary election.) In our county, we have many of these, so voting in the primary election is VERY IMPORTANT! Do you need to find out who is running at the state and federal levels in your district? Here is a great website - BALLOTPEDIA! All you have to do is type in your address and all the candidates that you are eligible to vote for will come up. It is quick and easy. Lastly, the date for the general election is NOVEMBER 3, 2020. This is the election that will determine who will be the next president of our nation, as well as other crucial elections. If you don’t feel comfortable going to your normal polling station on Election Day, it is NOT too late to order an advance ballot by mail that you can complete at home. Most counties have advance voting in person too. You can just go into your county courthouse and vote ahead of time with shorter lines. Check out in advance what you need to bring with you. Example: driver’s license for sure and there might be other things your county requires. Again, contact your County Clerk’s office before you go or view on-line to see what the requirements are. NOW is the time to make sure you are REGISTERED to vote! Then, VOTE in the primary AND general elections! Column by Bev Kavouras, McPherson County Defending Localities vs. “Saving the Planet” There is no single “environmentalism” anymore. When it comes to industrial wind developments (IWDs), wildlife advocates often find themselves on one side and climate activists on the other. That has certainly been the case at the hearings I have attended and the ones I have spoken at. Our Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism has wildlife-protective siting guidelines for IWDs, and I have frequently testified against proposed IWDs that violate these guidelines. Wherever I have done so, a representative of a climate organization has also testified—but on the other side, for the IWDs. Why this split in the “green” movement? It may have something to do with belief and it may have something to do with money. Let’s explore those possibilities in future issues of Common Sense Dispatch. But in this column I want simply to set forth the extent of this split because it is occurring all over the world: Entities that see industrial-scale “green energy” as a solution to climate change are on one side, while defenders of specific ecosystems, local wildlife, and local communities are on the other. Here are just a few examples: On the one side is the State of New York, committed to an ambitious climate goal of 85% “renewables," and on the other are two little rural communities, ironically named “Freedom” and “Farmersville." Those towns have been resisting the construction of the 30,000 acre Alle-Cat IWD, and they have elected town board members with anti-turbine platforms. But the state has responded by passing an energy bill that removes siting decisions from local control. The new Siting Board just voted to approve the Alle-Cat IWD and impose it on the area. “Our decision today to approve the largest wind farm to date will help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels,” explained the chair of the Siting Board. Similarly, the state of Maine committed to getting 80% green energy in ten years and 100% in thirty years, is looking at proposed new hydropower dams in Canada to meet its goals. Opposing the dams are Canadian First Nations, whose hunting grounds and fishing areas would be impacted by the side-effects of hydropower. The necessary flooding would put naturally-occurring mercury from the land into the water column, where interactions with aquatic biota would produce methylmercury, a neurotoxin. But climate activists have a higher priority. “Look at the project, look at what it does, as far as making an impact on the climate crisis,” says Sean Mahoney, head of a Maine advocacy center. “If we’re really serious about the climate crisis, we have to look at the project that delivers at that scale.” But residents of the targeted area, such as Nanatsiavut conservation officer David Wolfrey, are looking at specifics instead. “The methylmercury is going to come down the river and into our food chain and the fish and the seals won’t be fit to eat. When they poison the water, they poison us,” Wolfrey says. A similar conflict is playing out in the mountains of Vermont. On the one side is Bill McKibben, head of the climate organization 350.org, and promoter of industrial-scale “green” energy. On the other, are his neighbors in Vermont who tried unsuccessfully to get him to join them as they protested the removal of a local mountain top to create a flatter space for IWDs. In an essay in Vermont Digger, off-the-grid farmer Suzanna Jones writes about her encounter with McKibben and the painful divergence of environmentalism into those protecting nature next door and those who will sacrifice anything local in the name of global warming. Further illustrating this split are climate idealists who trivialize the deaths of birds today because they fear warming in the future. Save the Eagles has been documenting eagle mortalities at IWDs and claiming the numbers are greater than officially reported. They get pushback on their web site from people more concerned about the planet in the future. Typical of the critical comments is this one from “Paul”: “If we have to trade off some bird population losses for saving the planet overall, that’s a decent trade to make. [Birds are] much more likely to go extinct from runaway climate change than they are from wind farms.” On the other side, writing for today’s birds is novelist and birdwatcher Jonathan Frantzen, who takes the National Audubon Society to task in a famous essay in the New Yorker. Frantzen criticizes the NAS for focusing on global warming and computer modeling of projected future bird losses, while abandoning its traditional advocacy for real birds in real places. “What upset me was how a dire prophecy like Audubon’s could lead to indifference toward birds in the present,” Frantzen writes. Conflicts such as these—between concern for specifics in the present and concern for the globe in the future—are occurring in the thousands—literally in the thousands, according to a new study by, among others, Jose Rehbein of the University of Queensland’s School for Earth and Environmental Studies. The study warns that renewable energy projects threaten over 2000 biodiverse areas. “Aside from the more than 2200 renewable energy facilities already operating inside important biodiversity areas, another 900 are currently being built,” Rehbein says. It’s numbers such as these that lead Jonathan Frantzen to conclude, “As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe.” The two branches of environmentalism approach things differently. Localists focus on multiple factors—the almost endless array of things that make up a vibrant community and that constitute quality of life. They know these specifics well, and they insist on knowing what proposed industrial projects would mean for each one of them. They look at industrial-scale “green” energy with “hard eyes.” In contrast, globalists elevate a few factors overall—CO2 levels, computer projections of a warming future, fossil fuels, electrical generation. They make an astonishingly dangerous leap of faith—that the direness of a crisis correlates with the efficacy of proposed solutions. That industrial-scale “green” energy projects are effective mitigators of climate change is to them an unquestioned article of faith—and an "unquestionable" one, as they try to censor critics such as Michael Moore who challenge that basic premise. They look at big machines with "soft eyes." Thus, all over the world, there are conflicts between those who value a locality—such as our friends in Reno County who want to “Keep Reno Heavenly”—and those who are willing to sacrifice people’s “heaven” to save us from the hellfire of global warming. --Margy Stewart
KCC Investigates EvergyWind Energy Drives Up Kansas Electric Rates A few days ago, the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) launched an investigation into a deal made in February of this year between Evergy and hedge fund manager, Elliot Management, to increase Evergy’s profit margin. Elliot is pushing Evergy to increase wind energy across the state of Kansas, and in January, Evergy vowed to do just that. But, there’s good evidence to suggest adding more wind farms to our state would only drive electric rates higher. In the first part of a commissioned rate study by London Economics Inc. (download here), released in January, LEI reported that the cost of installing transmission lines has driven up electric rates in Kansas as a result of the way the cost of those lines is allocated. “This allocation framework has resulted in a large proportion of costs of transmission lines constructed within Kansas allocated to Kansas ratepayers, where a number of stakeholders believe the benefits are accruing outside the state. In their respective rate studies filed between 2018 and 2019, both KCC and Evergy identified additional transmission costs as a driver for increased retail rates…” [p.229 (6.7.2)] According to a January 2020 article published in the Topeka Capital-Journal, Kansas doesn’t have enough transmission lines to carry all the power new wind farms are generating. Elliot Management and other Evergy stockholders stand to benefit if Evergy builds more wind farms, but Kansas electric rates are already higher than those of neighboring states, and if Evergy complies with Elliot’s directive to build more wind farms, Kansas ratepayers will pay even more if they continue to bear the financial burden of new transmission lines. It doesn’t seem prudent for energy generated in Kansas to be sold in other states while Kansans pay for the transmission lines that take the power out of here. From My Front PorchFifteen years ago, our 40 acres in the wilderness found us. Truly, it was a “God Thing” how we came to be here, but that’s a story for another time. Being friendly (but not necessarily social) folks, we have found our heart here in the country. Early mornings and evenings are spent observing and enjoying various forms of birds and wildlife. Some of our residents are deer, turkey, bobcat, raccoon, badger, opossum, skunk and turtle. In 2007, I saw a mountain lion crossing the clearing. My husband laughed and teased me, until he was sharing my story with a neighbor. The neighbor assured him with a straight face that there is, indeed, a mountain lion in our area – he and several others have seen it from time to time. We revel in the quiet, and we do not consider the aviary and pond creature sounds “noise”. Rather, we feel that those are the soothing sounds of contentment. Of course, country living isn’t for everyone. We do not farm or ranch, but upkeep and maintenance on the home and acreage is continuous and can be hard work. For the person who enjoys over-the-fence chats with the neighbors, living ¼ mile from the next home would be lonely. For those of us that it suits, however, life from our rural front porch is near perfection. Column and photo by Debra **************************************************** We would love to hear from you. Please share your front porch stories and pictures with us. You can email them to frommyfrontporchKS@gmail.com. If you post pictures on Instagram, etc. please use the hashtag #frommyfrontporchKS or #frommyfrontporch so that we can share our stories and pictures with each other. Thank you. Send corrections and story suggestions to editor.karre@gmail.com.
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