by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTO, left to right:
Terry Werner, Donna Tisdale, Peggy Mitchell, Bill Page, Carlos Pelayo
In the Bible,
young David took on the seemingly invincible Goliath with a slingshot, killed
him and saved his community. At the Activist San Diego (ASD) meeting April 15
at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest, five local environmentalist
Davids described their challenges to the modern-day Goliaths — giant energy and
utility corporations, the state and federal governments, and even mainstream
environmental groups like the Sierra Club — that are foisting huge wind and
solar installations on the people of San Diego’s East County region. They also
talked about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking” —
a new, environmentally devastating way of extracting oil and natural gas from
the ground — along with the havoc the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will wreak
on the planet, and the malign philosophy behind the corporate/government plans
to exploit the environment at all costs.
The first three
speakers — Donna Tisdale, chair of the Boulevard Planning Group and activist
with Back Country Against Dumps; Terry Werner of the Desert Protection Council;
and local attorney Bill Page — all talked about the intense conflict between a
handful of East County residents and their supporters against utilities,
renewable energy companies, government, media and mainstream environmentalists
over the plan to turn huge amounts of public land into giant wind- and
solar-powered energy factories. Not surprisingly, given America’s sorry history
of exploiting and driving out its Native people, Native American reservations
are being particularly hard-hit with these developments.
“Almost the
entire Campo reservation is going to be turned into turbines,” said Tisdale,
who cut her activist teeth with a successful 20-year campaign to keep Campo
from being turned into a garbage dump. According to Tisdale, she and her fellow
activists spent 15 years working through an official planning process and
finally got County approval for a master plan that would keep Campo, Ocotillo
and Boulevard, where she lives, relatively undeveloped open space: “One
dwelling every 80 acres,” she recalled. Then the federal and state governments,
Sempra Energy (San Diego Gas & Electric’s parent company) and various developers
of so-called “renewable” projects seized on all that open space until now, as
Tisdale acidly put it, “They’re going to turn us into an industrial park.”
Tisdale threw
out so much information on the potential dangers of these installations that at
times it was hard to pick out what about them riled her the most: the direct
effects on local residents, the potential long-term environmental damage or the
way the projects are being “fast-tracked” so they don’t have to undergo normal
environmental review. “California environmental standards and laws don’t apply
to ‘green energy,’” Tisdale said. “San Diego and Imperial Counties and even the
federal government are running over us. Governor Jerry Brown says ‘we have to
crush’ the opposition to these projects.”
One of the
objections Tisdale raised to the wind projects is their sheer size and scope.
The towers planned for one East County development are 400 to 515 feet tall —
over 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. The actual windmills — the
assemblies of three blades and a hub that contains the gears and other
mechanisms that make the things work — are the size of a Boeing 747 airliner
and weigh over 150 tons. The construction of these installations requires
destroying huge amounts of farmland to build not only the wind towers
themselves but also the substations that collect any power they generate and
transmit it to long powerlines like the Sunrise Powerlink (recently completed
despite heavy objections from Tisdale and her fellow activists), where — like
all long-distance power transmission — much of the energy generated will be
lost along the way.
According to
Tisdale, previous communities where giant wind and solar installations have
been built have become virtually unlivable. That’s not only because they make
huge amounts of noise; even worse, they suck great amounts of water from the
ground and thereby threaten people’s drinking and washing supplies. They also
increase the danger of wildfires, Tisdale said, because in lightning storms the
towers conduct giant amounts of electricity to the ground, where it can ignite
brush and other combustible materials. What’s more, cancer rates have gone up
in areas where modern-day wind turbines have been built, which Tisdale suspects
is due to the huge amounts of microwave energy these things collect. Indeed,
Tisdale cited scientific studies that argue that microwave energy is as
important a cause of climate change, if not more so, than carbon emissions.
Terry Werner
isn’t an East County resident — she lives on the edge of the I-8 corridor in
Hillcrest — but because it’s easy for her to get on the freeway and go to the
desert for camping trips, she often went there and took an interest in
preserving it. She joined the Desert Protection Council, which has existed since
1954. “Our mission is to educate people about all the features of the desert,
and hopefully lure people out there so that they’ll love it instead of just
driving through it,” she explained. She talked about the reason these
giant-scale “renewable energy” projects are being pushed: because they fit
“renewable energy” into the business model of giant utilities like SDG&E
and Southern California Edison instead of allowing individual households to
generate their own power through small-scale solar installations.
“We don’t need any of these big ‘renewable’ projects,” Werner said.
Instead, she argued that the future for home energy use should be conservation
first — “Do we really need lights
and air conditioning on all night, and other wasteful uses of energy?” she said
— and then to “look to your local rooftops, schools and public buildings, put
solar panels on them and distribute energy to local communities. Large energy
projects are 20th century technology. We don’t have to transmit electricity over long distances.” Werner
also showed a heartbreaking series of slides showing how the obsession with
building large so-called “renewable” energy projects in the desert is
destroying the natural beauty, as well as threatening the bighorn sheep and
plant species that exist nowhere else with extinction.
Attorney Bill
Page talked about his own activism to stop the giant wind projects, the wall of
media silence on the issues and the serious questions over whether these
installations will actually generate any electricity. “My dad and I did what we
were supposed to do” to stop the Ocotillo turbine project, Page said. “The
entire project was fast-tracked, moved up one year and approved from January to
May. We filed umpteen lawsuits, and now we have 439-foot structures with 747’s
used as pinwheels. An aerospace engineer now has this structure just
three-tenths of a mile away from a house he built. Who’s going to listen to us?
Can I get the media’s attention? They’re not going to rock the boat over this
‘green energy’ project.”
So Page started
to research whether the wind projects would actually generate meaningful
amounts of energy. What he found wasn’t encouraging. Stonewalled by the local
companies — who declared their measurements of wind speed on the site
“proprietary information” and refused to share them with him — he went to
Siemens, the German company that actually built the turbines. What he found was
that the most each of these turbines can
generate is 2.3 megawatts of electricity, and whether they come anywhere near that
number depends on how fast the wind blows. Page showed a graph from Siemens
documenting that the efficiency of the turbines drops dramatically as the wind
speed slows, and that in order for them to produce enough electricity to be
useful, the wind has to be blowing between 24 and 30 miles per hour. When the
wind blows faster than 30 miles
an hour, Page explained, it’s considered a storm and the turbines are shut down
for safety reasons.
The project
developers originally claimed that their installation would generate enough
electricity to power 125,000 homes — Page grimly noted that they used that
figure instead of an actual number of kilowatt-hours, the usual way electric
power generation is measured — but their own report lowered that estimate to
94,000 homes. But that’s only valid, he explained, if the average wind speed in
the area is 25 miles per hour. According to Page’s figures, the actual wind speed in the area is a shade under 14 miles per
hour — and that means the system will power 10,000 to 14,000 homes. Page said
that there are only a few places in the world — “off the coast of Ireland and
some parts of Mongolia” — where the wind regularly blows at the
25-mile-per-hour speed needed to make these Siemens turbines work.
“How do these
projects get approved?” Page said. “The state doesn’t care how much power the
turbines actually produce. They just care about capacity. The wind companies
have $534 million in federal subsidies and about 50 to 80 employees. They sell
these projects on a benchmark nobody else uses to sell electricity.” He
explained that the “number of households” measure is especially deceptive
because it ignores that two-thirds of all generated electricity goes to
industrial rather than residential uses anyway. What’s more, he said, the
utilities ordering these plants from the wind companies that develop them are
well aware that they’re not going to produce significant amounts of
electricity. They’ve shown that, Page explained, by building 400 megawatts of
natural-gas fired “peaker plant” capacity for every 250 megawatts they’ve
ordered from “renewable” sources.
Companies, Government to
Environment: Frack You!
Peggy Mitchell,
representing the local branch of 350.org — the international organization
founded by climate-change activist and writer Bill McKibben to put pressure on
government and corporations to get the percentage of carbon dioxide in the
earth’s atmosphere down to 350 parts per million (it’s now at over 400 and
climbing) — gave a broader presentation on so-called “fracking” and the
controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal. “Fracking” — short for “hydraulic
fracturing” — is a process that involves extracting oil or natural gas that’s
impossible to get out of the ground through older-style drilling techniques.
It’s been widely publicized in the East and Midwest but few people know it’s
actually going on in California, Mitchell explained.
California’s
fracking is happening along the so-called “Monterey shale,” which, as Mitchell
pointed out, “covers 1,750 square miles along the Coast and edges up to
agricultural land.” It’s also next to the notorious San Andreas Fault which has
generated many of the state’s legendary earthquakes, she added. Mitchell argued
that fracking is not only environmentally destructive in itself, the oil extracted
by it is also going to release so much carbon into the atmosphere that it will
literally render the earth uninhabitable. If California’s known oil deposits
are fracked, Mitchell said, “we’re talking about 80 million more tons of carbon
per year, and it’s really sour, ‘tight’ oil” — meaning that both refining and
burning it generate more pollution than the cleaner “light, sweet crude” from
Saudi Arabia that’s the world’s benchmark for oil quality.
Mitchell gave an
extensive description of just how fracking is done. It involves drilling into
the oil or gas deposit horizontally,
then injecting materials to break apart (“fracture”) the ground and release the
oil. The fluids used to frack contain 80 percent water; most of the rest is
sand or glass, but about 1 percent is a blend of benzene and other volatile
chemicals that are dangerous in themselves. What’s more, the energy companies
doing the fracking have declared that the composition of their fracking fluids
are “trade secrets” and therefore don’t have to be revealed to the public — and
a bill former vice-president Dick Cheney slipped through Congress in 2005
exempts fracking companies from all
environmental laws to protect the air and water supply, so the companies can
dump toxic chemicals into drinking-water supplies and release them into the air
— and no government agency can stop them.
One reason to
oppose fracking, Mitchell said, is the immense amounts of water it uses. “It’s
going to take millions of gallons of
fresh water,” she explained. “San Diego doesn’t have oil or gas, but it does have a major water problem.” According to Mitchell,
energy companies have already diverted 2.3 trillion gallons of water from homes
and farms, and they’re bidding two to three times what farmers can afford to
pay for the remaining water. If the Monterey shale is fracked extensively,
Mitchell warned, San Diego’s chronic water shortages are only going to get
worse — and the Imperial Valley, California’s breadbasket, could dry up and
revert from productive farmland to desert.
What’s more,
Mitchell argued, fracking itself can trigger earthquakes. It’s already done
that, she said, in areas like North Dakota that don’t have a history of seismic activity. And because
California’s legislators have been slow to address the issue, the state has
virtually no regulations in place to restrict fracking or make sure it happens
with as little risk as possible. She pointed to a set of proposed fracking
regulations from the state’s Department of Oil, Gas and Resources (DOGAR)
released in December 2012 and said they had a few good things “but four times
as many bad things as good.” The biggest problem with them, Mitchell said, is
they don’t require that companies notify nearby homeowners in advance before
they frack.
“Even if we get
tight regulations, is fracking going to help us?” Mitchell said. “President
Obama has talked about this wonderful natural gas production that’s going to
give us 80 years of energy independence, but the world’s population is
increasing and developing countries are using more energy as they try to catch
up to our lifestyle.” Mitchell said fracking is not going to be a solution to
the world’s energy needs because not only is it environmentally destructive,
it’s also inefficient and energy-intensive because the fracked fields burn out
and stop producing sooner than drilled oil and gas fields. “Just to keep us at
steady-state they have to keep drilling
new wells,” she explained. “There’s a nearly $10 billion gap between the $42
billion per year to produce the gas and its $32.5 billion value.”
Mitchell also
discussed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run from Alberta, Canada — home
of “the dirtiest oil on earth,” she said — to the Gulf of Mexico. Contrary to
the rhetoric of pipeline supporters, Mitchell said, most of the oil pumped out
of Canada and shipped through the U.S. via Keystone would be sold to other
countries rather than used in the U.S. What’s more, she said, “Keystone will
unleash 200 billion tons of carbon, taking us from 400+ parts per million of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to over 600 parts per million” — which led
climate scientist and pioneering anti-global warming activist James Hansen to
say that if Keystone is built it’s “game over for the climate.”
The final
presentation at Activist San Diego’s environmental meeting was given by Native
American activist Carlos Pelayo, who talked about the history of how Native
lands have been singled out for environmentally destructive projects: first
gold, silver and copper mining; then oil drilling; later uranium mining; and
now fracking and the sorts of massive so-called “green energy” projects
Tisdale, Werner and Page oppose locally.
The other
speakers had used PowerPoint slides in their presentations. Pelayo went farther
and presented film footage of government hearings at which Native concerns
about such projects were ridiculed. He also showed about two-fifths of a
documentary about the Colorado River, in which two young men set out to kayak
down its length and make a film about it — only they eventually had to trade in
their kayaks for rafts, and then give up watercraft altogether, because well
before they got to the U.S.-Mexico border the once-“mighty” Colorado had turned
into a series of ditches and all that flowed in them was agricultural runoff.
Pelayo exploded
the myth that Native Americans will necessarily believe in the environmentalist
traditions of their ancestors and seek to protect these lands. “Many Native
people are trying to survive economically, so they’ll sell out to the energy
companies and take the money,” he explained. “They’ve gone to the same schools
as the rest of us and their values can change. You disconnect the people from
the land, and they’re not going to protect the land because they won’t have any
idea of the value of it.” He said white authorities have deliberately
indoctrinated Native people against their environmental traditions so they’ll
see land the way whites do: as a commodity to be bought and sold. “If all you
want to do is escape [the reservation], you have no connection to the land
you’re on and you don’t care about it as long as the water comes out of the
tap, the lights go on and the trash is picked up.”
After Pelayo
showed the film of the two young men rafting the Colorado River, he noted that
most of the wastewater from fracking is going to end up in what’s left of the
Colorado and will ultimately get dumped into the sea. “It’s just one thing
after another,” he said. “As long as the people who are connected to the land
are eliminated, or their historic, traditional or spiritual memory of the land
is cut off, how much support do you think you’re going to get from the general
public? We’re talking about a whole different world view of how we live and
where the source of our life comes from. We have been so disconnected by our
Western view — all of us. We’re all guilty of it. We value other things. And
that is why the things that have been presented to you tonight happen. This
isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the only time. But we know that this
industry — energy, mining, oil, whatever it is — is always about short-term
profits, never thinking long-term. We’ve already done that in the United States
and now we’re doing it in the Amazon, in Mexico, all over the world, so we can
have our little cell phones operating.”
