If there's anything our government is good at these days, it's bad ideas and making crap up. For instance, I recently watched a replay of a U.S. Department of Energy webinar I missed back around Thanksgiving. The supercilious dweeb reading the power point slides with absolutely no interest or elaboration, and certainly no enthusiasm, actually said this in response to a question around minute 26 of video:
Proactive engagement with all of these stakeholders can lead to stronger projects and better outcomes, increase transparency, and the reduction or elimination of associated risks that can often stall transmission projects before they can be constructed.
The "stakeholders" he's planning to engage with to create transmission utopia?
Labor unions
Local governments
State energy offices
Tribal governments
Community based organizations that support or work with disadvantaged communities.
Sorry, Utopia Wish Man, but those are NOT the groups that create the risks that stall transmission projects before they can be constructed. The groups that delay and cause the cancellation of badly planned transmission projects are composed of affected landowners. Affected landowners are not necessarily members of any of those groups, and I've never seen any of those groups become engaged with the transmission opposition groups that cancel transmission project ideas. Those groups simply don't care unless somebody pays them to wave signs and recite canned speeches at public hearings. It's landowners who hire lawyers, intervene in the regulatory process, file appeals, and cause public relations sh*t storms. Only proactive disengagement with landowners can ameliorate the risks that stall transmission projects.
Proactive disengagement? What's that? It means designing new transmission projects so they don't affect or engage landowners in the first place, like routing them on buried existing linear rights of way or under bodies of water. If you don't engage landowners by threatening to condemn their properties and place a dangerous, ugly obstruction on it, then you will proactively prevent the risks that stall transmission projects before they can be constructed. I guarantee it! You won't need any of those peanut gallery folks who are not affected by the transmission project.
What won't work is pretending you care about "community impacts" when you really don't. That whole equity thing just doesn't work with electric transmission, whose victims are usually large rural landowners who use their land to make a living farming. Agricultural land is targeted over and over again simply because it's cleared land that has existing pipelines and transmission lines. When will these folks have done enough? When their entire property is chopped up and useless for farming?
How about this vapid quote:
Labor unions
Local governments
State energy offices
Tribal governments
Community based organizations that support or work with disadvantaged communities.
Sorry, Utopia Wish Man, but those are NOT the groups that create the risks that stall transmission projects before they can be constructed. The groups that delay and cause the cancellation of badly planned transmission projects are composed of affected landowners. Affected landowners are not necessarily members of any of those groups, and I've never seen any of those groups become engaged with the transmission opposition groups that cancel transmission project ideas. Those groups simply don't care unless somebody pays them to wave signs and recite canned speeches at public hearings. It's landowners who hire lawyers, intervene in the regulatory process, file appeals, and cause public relations sh*t storms. Only proactive disengagement with landowners can ameliorate the risks that stall transmission projects.
Proactive disengagement? What's that? It means designing new transmission projects so they don't affect or engage landowners in the first place, like routing them on buried existing linear rights of way or under bodies of water. If you don't engage landowners by threatening to condemn their properties and place a dangerous, ugly obstruction on it, then you will proactively prevent the risks that stall transmission projects before they can be constructed. I guarantee it! You won't need any of those peanut gallery folks who are not affected by the transmission project.
What won't work is pretending you care about "community impacts" when you really don't. That whole equity thing just doesn't work with electric transmission, whose victims are usually large rural landowners who use their land to make a living farming. Agricultural land is targeted over and over again simply because it's cleared land that has existing pipelines and transmission lines. When will these folks have done enough? When their entire property is chopped up and useless for farming?
How about this vapid quote:
It’s thus critical that Congress pass permitting reform legislation that will add to America’s capacity to transmit clean electricity and speed up the approval of clean energy projects that are waiting to be built, while preserving communities’ ability to make their voices heard on the environmental and other impacts of proposed energy projects.
You can't have both these things... adding new transmission while allowing communities to make their voices heard... unless the only thing you want to hear is some screaming and bad words. I'm not even sure how this is logically supposed to work... speed up approvals for projects that will use eminent domain to condemn private property and then making it all better by allowing these people to "make their voices heard?" What good is that if nothing changes? Isn't the whole point of speaking out to effect beneficial change? What good are community voices when nobody is listening? Stop saying stupid things like that! You sound like an idiot!
But here's the thing... no matter what silly things these virtue signalling morons say, affected landowners will continue to stall and cancel transmission projects before they are constructed. Only proactive disengagement can stop opposition. Anything else is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Like showing up on the battlefield with a squirt gun. Like not knowing your ass from your elbow. What a complete waste of time and tax money.
But here's the thing... no matter what silly things these virtue signalling morons say, affected landowners will continue to stall and cancel transmission projects before they are constructed. Only proactive disengagement can stop opposition. Anything else is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Like showing up on the battlefield with a squirt gun. Like not knowing your ass from your elbow. What a complete waste of time and tax money.
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