Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
It has been a very busy month for CFACT National Director of Grassroots Outreach, Tom DeWeese. It began with an interview on the podcast of Tennessee activist Dave Vance, discussing the growing assaults on private property rights. That interview stirred much interest in the subject and will likely result in a speaking tour of the state for DeWeese.
Next, Tom traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to meet with activists who have been leading that state’s fight to stop the Carbon Capture Pipeline. It was a year ago when Tom first took on the pipeline issue and barnstormed Iowa, challenging local activists, property owners, and county supervisors to take up the battle to protect property rights in the pipeline’s path. That effort took hold as locals packed public meetings and yard signs and billboards sprang up in opposition. The main leader of the activists is Tammy Kobza, who set up many meetings for DeWeese’s visit. Another leader in the fight is former Iowa Congressman Steve Young. While meeting with the Iowa leaders, word was received from South Dakota, where Tom DeWeese had traveled in June, that farmers had taken action and demanded legislative protection. As a result, South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission unanimously denied Summit Carbon Solutions’ application for a state permit to run a carbon-capture pipeline across the state. Tom DeWeese was credited by several activists, including Matthew Monfore, for stirring the farmers onward toward a big win. Armed with the farmers’ drive for action, SD State legislators Karla Lems and Julie Auch then led the fight in that state legislature.
Next on the agenda, Tom headed directly to Minnesota for a six-day, six-city speaking tour, beginning in St. Cloud. Minnesota has become a hotbed of political dispute as radical environmentalists routinely attack property rights and farmers. DeWeese set out to educate citizens as to where the Green assaults originate and what the ultimate result of these efforts will be to the local economy if not confronted. Many new activists joined the call to organize Freedom Pods around the state. Tom then had the opportunity to meet and talk with Minnesota State Senator Glenn Gruenhagen, a staunch proponent of property rights protection. Tom was able to present the Senator with a copy of his Local Activist handbook and will be discussing possible policy recommendations that can be adopted to better protect Minnesotans.
Finally, Tom finished his travels for the month in Dallas, Texas, addressing the Stop 30×30 Summit, Co-sponsored by Americans Stewards for Liberty and CFACT. Tom’s call for action was met with a hearty and enthusiastic response from the gathering of property rights experts, activists, and elected officials.
Across the USA, wind power outfits are being repeatedly busted for dumping their blades and simply cutting and running. Then there are scammers like Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc which makes claims about recycling dumped blades, notwithstanding there is no market for ground up toxic waste, funnily enough.
Principal among the toxic agents to be found in turbine blades is Bisphenol A – a compound banned in numerous countries.
Back in August 2021, Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc was busted for piling up over 1,300 blades at three makeshift dumps in Iowa – despite claiming it would ‘recycle’ them.
It’s a model it has chosen to repeat across the United States, including West Texas where locals are outraged. Stories about recycling blades keep being recycled, while thousands more blades pile up in dumps that resemble ‘green’ energy graveyards.
Russell Gold reports on the American wind industry’s dump and run tactics below.
Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas Texas Monthly Russell Gold 24 August 2023
Every year since 1958, the West Texas town of Sweetwater has hosted the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup, which is exactly what it sounds like. Thousands of the venomous ophidians are rooted out of their dens and brought to the Nolan County Coliseum to be gawked at, “milked,” and often beheaded and skinned. It started as a way for the region to rid itself of some of its least-welcome residents. Now community leaders wish they could do the same with several giant piles of scrap that have for too long been left to bake in the sun. But that’s proving to be much trickier than wrangling reptiles.
About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives, on the west side of town, in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin—kept coming. Each was cut into thirds, with each segment longer than a school bus. Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards. Every few dozen feet, a break among the stacks leads into an industrial hedge maze.
“It’s just a hazard all the way around,” Meyer said. She worries about neighborhood children exploring the unfenced piles and says that stagnant pools of water inside the blades breed swarms of mosquitos. Matt Jackson, who works in a nearby warehouse, has other concerns. The piles create shaded nooks and crannies, perfect for Sweetwater’s unofficial mascot. “It’s just a big rattlesnake farm,” he said.
The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from the impossible task of recycling blades.
Besides the main boneyard—behind Meyer’s apartment—stacks of blades also occupy ten acres a couple miles south of town, and the company is storing blades in other locations in the county. “They have, in my view, abandoned them there,” said Samantha Morrow, the Nolan County attorney. “The county doesn’t have and cannot find millions of dollars to clean this up.”
The Sweetwater piles are also at least partly the indirect result of a rule clarification the Internal Revenue Service issued in 2016. Before then, a wind farm could collect valuable federal tax credits for only its first ten years of operation. But the IRS determined that it would restart the clock on the credits if a wind farm “repowered” its turbines—replacing most of their equipment with newer parts. So, despite the expected two-decade lifespan for turbine blades, wind farms across Texas and other states began replacing many that remained in good shape years early.
Some paid Global Fiberglass to remove the older blades and haul them away. The company set up shop in an empty industrial facility in Sweetwater that was once an aluminum recycling plant, but Don Lilly, the managing director of Global Fiberglass, told me that only a handful of blades have ever been ground up there. He said the company was close to ramping up and would soon mill the blades into pieces the size of coarse sand. “The blade material is sold,” he said, “but I can’t go into that part yet.”
Sweetwater has heard such pledges before. The county declared the stockpile a public nuisance a year ago. City attorney Jeff Allen said Sweetwater’s local ordinances are aimed at overgrown lots, not turbine blades, leaving the city with limited legal options. He said he believes Global Fiberglass “intended to be a viable business” but at some point “it just came off the rails.” (Lilly disputes this and says the delays have come from ensuring “all systems were engineered.”)
The wind industry claims Sweetwater benefits from the local wind farms nearby. Drivers arriving on I-20 from either direction are welcomed by a giant wind turbine blade painted with the town’s name. But even the community’s biggest boosters of renewable energy long ago ran out of patience with Global Fiberglass’s mess. “We’d like to see them gone,” said Karen Hunt, director of the local chamber of commerce. “The sooner the better.”
Sweetwater isn’t the only place Global Fiberglass has stockpiled blades. It has a total of 1,300 in Newton, Iowa, and two other cities in that state, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. After an investigation, the agency concluded in 2021 there was no recycling going on, nor was any likely to happen. It declared the company to be running an unpermitted dump.
Frank Liebl, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation, testified at a state hearing that the initial excitement in 2017 of recruiting a blade-recycling company soon soured. In the intervening years, he asked Global Fiberglass many times when it would begin its recycling. He always got “the same answer: ‘Soon,’ ” he said.
By July 2021, the company owed more than $1 million in unpaid rent in Newton, according to testimony at the Iowa hearing from its landlord’s attorney. In Texas, it failed to pay taxes to Nolan County in 2020 and is now three years in arrears, according to tax records. Last year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the company $10,255 for what it described as illegally stored solid waste. It allowed the company to pay the penalty in monthly installments for three years. In June, Global Fiberglass defaulted, according to the commission.
In Newton, pressure from the state of Iowa seems to have worked. Craig Armstrong, a city employee, said that General Electric recently acquired the blades. It’s unclear whether GE purchased them from Global Fiberglass or from the landlord who was owed the $1 million in rent, who may have taken possession of the blades. The city was promised that they would be sent to a recycling center by the end of the year, although none had been removed by mid-August, according to a Newton city official. Lilly declined to talk about the Iowa blades. Texas Monthly
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