I would have said that nothing could exceed the folly of wind and solar energy, but biomass may come close. This Vox article is headlined: “Europe’s renewable energy policy is built on burning American trees.” You no doubt have heard of “biomass,” but likely don’t know what it actually means. As the headline suggests, it mostly means American trees.
In the lowland forests of the American southeast, loblolly pines and cypress trees are grabbing carbon dioxide from the air right now. Using power from the sun, they release the oxygen and bind the carbon, building trunks, barks, and leaves.
But much of that carbon won’t stay there. As it turns out, millions of tons of wood from these forests each year are being shipped across the Atlantic, and burned in power plants in countries like the UK and the Netherlands, in the name of slowing climate change.
This chart is revealing, to say the least. I had no idea that burning trees played such a large role in Europe’s “green” energy initiative:
This “green” energy story is all about economics:
[I]n 2009, the EU committed itself to 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, and put biomass on the renewables list. Several countries, like the United Kingdom, subsidized the biomass industry, creating a sudden market for wood not good enough for the timber industry. In the United States, Canada, and Eastern Europe, crooked trees, bark, treetops, and sawdust have been pulped, pressed into pellets, and heat-dried in kilns. By 2014, biomass accounted for 40 percent of the EU’s renewable energy, by far the largest source. By 2020, it’s projected to make up 60 percent, and the US plans to follow suit.
What goes on a “renewable” list depends entirely on political influence. Nuclear energy isn’t on the list, even though it emits no carbon dioxide. Hydroelectric isn’t on many “renewable” lists, either.
There are few bigger players in the biomass industry than Drax Group, whose flagship power plant in the north of England sucks up nearly a quarter of global wood pellet production, about two-thirds of it from the US. The UK has bought big into biomass, and Drax powers 10 percent of the British electric grid, in large part thanks to massive government subsidies: about $1.2 billion a year.
As always, the “green” world depends on subsidies.
Burning wood emits carbon dioxide, of course, but not as much as coal. (Much more, on the other hand, than nuclear or hydroelectric.) At the same time, trees absorb carbon dioxide–it is called photosynthesis, and when I was young, kids learned about this in junior high school. So biomass is doubly questionable if you believe the global warming hype.
The Vox article takes for granted all of the hyperbole about global warming, but points out that the premise on which burning wood is “carbon neutral” is the assumption that all wood will eventually decay and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. That might be true (it isn’t, actually, which is why we have oil and gas) but only on a time scale that is too long to be helpful if you think the world is facing a climate crisis.
To quote an infamous Congresswoman in an entirely different context, it’s all about the Benjamins. Whether an energy source is denominated “green” or not depends on the political clout of the companies that profit from its use.
This discussion of biomass reminds me of how retrograde “green” technologies are. Wood burning? Yeah, that was a great idea in 1000 AD. Wind energy? It works intermittently, at a low level. When I was growing up in South Dakota, every farm had a windmill. They were used mostly to drive pumps for wells, I believe. But they became extinct as better, more reliable sources of energy became universally available. Do today’s greenies have any understanding of how hopelessly old-fashioned their policies are? I doubt it.
Meet Brandon Straka, a gay former liberal encouraging others to #WalkAway from Democrats
Brandon Straka became a conservative-media darling after posting a video about “walking away” from the left.
By Tim Fitzsimons, at Fox News:
Three months ago, Brandon Straka was a New York City hairstylist and aspiring actor with a small social media following. Now, he’s a frequent Fox News contributor with nearly 70,000 Twitter followers, whose posts have been shared by Donald Trump Jr. and Sarah Palin.
“Once upon a time, I was a liberal,” Straka says in the six-minute video, looking directly toward the camera. “For years now, I have watched as the left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric.”
As screenshots of race-themed articles float by — like 37 Things White People Need To Stop Ruining In 2018 — Straka continues: “I have watched as formerly sensible people who claim to reject racism have come to embrace the principles of universally hating and blaming all of society’s problems on all people who have white skin.”
Straka’s story of being a white, gay, Manhattan liberal-turned-conservative proved irresistible to those on the right. Just weeks after “coming out” as conservative, Straka rose from political nobody to right-wing somebody. His video — with the catchy hashtag urging people to #WalkAway from the left — has been viewed millions of times, catapulting him to Fox News fame.
Those on the right are eager to hear stories — true or not — about a shrinking left, and Straka is delivering. By aggressively promoting his contrarian opinions on social media, he has followed a now well-worn path to conservative media stardom that’s been traveled by Tomi Lahren, Candace Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos and Chadwick Moore. InfoWars’ Alex Jones even donated $10,000 to Straka’s GoFundMe page for “#WalkAway Campaign Startup Costs.” As of this week, the campaign has raised more than $67,000.
“NO SUCH THING AS VICTIMHOOD”
Straka, 41, hails from rural Nebraska, where his graduating class had 18 seniors. He said he faced violence and discrimination for being gay in his conservative hometown.
After high school, he moved to New York to pursue acting and singing. However, things didn’t go as planned. Straka couldn’t find much work in the competitive entertainment industry, so he worked at bars and restaurants before falling into alcohol and cocaine abuse.
“That problem got very, very bad,” he said. At 38, he realized he had to get sober, and he did. Straka said he had his last drink on Jan. 18, 2015.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but [getting sober] was very instrumental in my transition into conservatism,” he said. “There really is no such thing as victimhood unless you choose to be a victim.”
#WalkAway founder Brandon Straka on Fox News.FOX News
Straka said he voted for Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election and despaired when Donald Trump emerged victorious. However, in retrospect, he said he had already begun to drift toward the GOP.
Straka traced his journey to conservatism to mid-2016, while he was eating lunch on a park bench in Manhattan.
“A man who happened to be Hispanic and happened to be homeless and probably also happened to be crazy came up to me while I was on my phone and just stuck his hand in my face and said ‘I need the money! I need some money,’” Straka recalled.
“I was just like, ‘Get away from me, get your hand out of my face,’” he added. Straka said the man then punched him “and started screaming how I was a white privileged piece of s—.”
Shaken, Straka took to Facebook to vent. But he didn’t find the sympathy he had expected.
“There was a barrage of social justice warriors who started jumping on my post and saying, ‘Well, I’m a white person, and I’ve never experienced something like that’ … ‘You must have provoked him in some way. I don’t think you’re telling the whole story,’” Straka recalled.
In the social media backlash, Straka saw what he described as “people’s desire to try to perpetuate this narrative that white people are so terrible and people of color are incapable of ever doing anything bad.”
“That’s what started to drive me away from liberalism,” he said.
Straka said his “red-pilling” — or his journey from liberal to conservative — was furthered by watching YouTube videos that alleged the “liberal media” was trying to take down Trump.
He came to believe that news outlets conspired to paint Trump as “the most racist, most homophobic, most horrible person in the world” and made it so “anybody who supports him is painted as the same.”
#WALKAWAY: OR HOW TO GO VIRAL IN 60 DAYS
The #WalkAway video did not go viral on its own, and it was not Straka’s first attempt at getting attention for his political views on social media.
Brandon Straka@usminority
In an October 2016 Facebook Live video, Straka complained about the lack of response to his social media posts. “Frankly, when I post things, there’s nothing but tumbleweeds blowing across my Facebook page,” he said.
Earlier this year, he posted a few short videos about gun control, but they were less produced and less dramatic than the #WalkAway video. They were also unquestionably flops: Only a handful of users engaged with them.
