Green Waste

We were flying out to California to see our son, Hans. Alegiant goes from Des Moines straight to Orange County. If it was American Airlines, hitchhiking might be a better option.

As we crossed into California from Nevada I got some photos of the giant solar power stations called Ivanpah. I assumed the phone store had initiated a save feature but they didn’t and when the phone needed repair the photos were lost.

The Ivanpah project uses 173,500 computer controlled mirrors to reflect the sun at a steam turbine 459feet in the air. That makes the wind turbines littering our area here look like Yugos. Just think of a computer controlling thousands of actuators following the sun all day every minute to aim sunlight. It’s awesome.

Ivanpah is closing in 2026 after only 12 years due to its inefficiency compared to new advancements in photovoltaic solar panels. The owners suggest they will repurpose the land with these.

Well that’s cute. Once a junkyard, always a junkyard, eh? Alright, it’s the Mojave Desert. But every square inch of this earth should be considered a gift from God. Having grown up with National Geographic taught me how to approach the earth. In the desert there is this miraculous method for distributing rare resources, just like an actual free economy. The scarce plants are absolutely equally spaced. The populations of creatures are the same. There are ants that have a timer that tells them when to go back underground so they don’t turn into ant jerky. As a kid, I had a tortoise, Digger. He lived under a pile of firewood. We never burned that part.

The unexpected cleansing of the oil spewed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by naturally occurring bacteria should show how precious and resilient the earth is. (Remember the maps showing the dead ocean spreading all the way to Europe?) That doesn’t mean we should be careless. Of the $2.2 billion cost of Ivanpah, $1.6 billion came from U.S. Energy Department guarantees. What that means is that the Ivanpah project went ahead with our money, not the ones who would profit if the shaky technology proved viable. When the owners take the risks, more care goes into the decision to build.

It’s turning out that green energy pollutes more than proven oil based energy.

If you saw an ad in the paper or a pop-up on your quilting app asking you to invest in 173,500 motorized mirrors that cook birds, would you bite? There’s a huge myth going around that nothing ever gets done unless the funds are filtered through the government.

I loved my time on the fire department and was fascinated by the elaborate equipment available. But two townships needing a two hundred thousand dollar truck seemed unnecessary. After farming and doing my own spraying for 40 years I found that a truck, a plastic tank and a pump shouldn’t cost that much. It’s just that the ice cream socials funded half the truck and the matched funds from taxpayers represented a leaky bucket driving the country to hidden interest costs and eventual bankruptcy.

African children mining cobalt with their bare hands, giant windmill blades being buried by bulldozers, and broken mirrors represent the bad luck produced by the slavery that is government central planning. Our lives where we can go to a store and reliably find essential tools of life represent the part of the economy produced by free people doing business with other free people.

Please add to the conversation with a letter to the editor or directly to me at 4selfgovernment@gmail.com.