Before I get into this, check out the latest chapter of The Crider Chronicles – Forest over at Glibertarians.
Now then; I wrote this up as a VIP (paywalled) piece at RedState, but it pisses me off enough that I wanted to give you all a thumbnail here as well – these big, ugly, “renewable” energy windmills are killing eagles, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service won’t tell us now many.
We should note that bald eagles, our national symbol, are not the only birds affected. The equally magnificent golden eagle is also prone to injury by these ugly monsters, although golden eagles are more likely to inhabit mountainous areas where there are fewer windmills. Big soaring hawks, especially of the genus Buteo, like red-tailed hawks, are also at risk.
And FWS refuses to give us the numbers.
Why? Why is this a secret? Why would FWS hide this from the public? Why are the numbers of our national symbol being killed in the name of climate change being hidden?
The only possible reason I can think of is that the numbers of eagles and other birds killed by these contraptions is shockingly high, higher than any of us may have suspected. We should note as well that, were you to come across one of these dead eagles and pluck a feather from the carcass, you would be subject to criminal charges and a hefty fine – but the builders of these windmills are in no way held responsible for these eagle and other raptor deaths.
As noted, this is being done in the name of climate change, and now our national symbol, the bald eagle, which was an endangered species not so very long ago, is threatened by the very environmental activists who were (rightly) concerned about its existence. It’s a great irony—not that it matters to the raptors being killed by these big, ugly contraptions.
Well, sometimes there’s cause for hope.
In Kentucky, a judge, one Benjamin Beaton of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, slapped down the Biden administration’s rule clamping down (again) on emissions from motor vehicles.
In a sweeping judgment late Monday, Judge Benjamin Beaton of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky ordered the Federal Highway Administration to stand down on the rules, which the agency finalized in November. The ruling represents a major victory for the State 
of Kentucky, which challenged the regulations alongside 21 other states.
“President Biden’s radical environmental agenda has lost touch with reality, and Kentucky families, farmers and workers are paying the price,” Republican state Attorney General Russell Coleman said on Tuesday. “Like all Americans, Kentuckians love our trucks, cars and vans. With this victory in court, we’re slamming the brakes on the Biden administration’s politics that make no sense in the commonwealth.”
It’s a start. And the basis of the suit is that the Biden administration’s rule exceeds statutory authority, nothing new for this administration.
Kentucky filed the lawsuit in December, one month after the FHWA 
finalized the regulations. According to the lawsuit, the FHWA overstepped its legal authority in attempting to regulate vehicle emissions since it attempted to force states to implement federal regulations.
Beaton agreed in his ruling, declaring that the regulations exceed the FHWA’s statutory authority and are “arbitrary and capricious.” Instead of granting plaintiff states’ motion for preliminary injunction – which would have blocked the rule during litigation – he granted their motion for summary judgment, vacating the rule immediately.
OK, that’s great, and it’s a step in the right direction; the Biden(‘s handlers) administration has been ignoring any statutory limitations since, well, the day they took office. But there’s a bigger issue: What about the constitutional issues? Why is nobody talking about those?
Here. Show me anywhere in there where the federal government is authorized to pass laws or make regulations governing the emissions of privately owned vehicles. Go ahead, have a look; I’ll wait right here.
Back already? OK. You didn’t find it, did you? That’s because it’s not there. Now, square that lack with the 10th Amendment:
Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Why is nobody bringing this up? Why is nobody – well, almost nobody, since obviously here I am talking about it – talking about this callous disregard for the Constitution, which is supposed to be the highest law in the land? We can amend it, but we cannot ignore it – and yet the federal government has been ignoring it since at least 1860.
This ruling is a good start. But at some point, it has to come back to the Constitution.
Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Bacon Time, Pirate’s Cove, The Daley Gator, and Flappr for the Rule Five links!
I’ve often found the idea of a “generation ship” interesting, at least from a sci-fi standpoint. While in my own work, I tend to lean on the likely-impossible idea of superluminal travel (see: Device, Plot, 1 each) an enormous ship capable of sustaining a population for several generations is a more likely way of scattering human populations among the stars.
The idea of having multiple generations of humans live and die on the same spacecraft is actually an old one, first described by rocket engineer Robert Goddard in 1918 in his essay “The Last Migration.” As he began to create rockets that could travel into space, he naturally thought of a craft that would keep going, onward, farther, and eventually reach a new star. More recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA launched a project called the 100 Year Starship, with the goal of fostering the research and technology needed for interstellar travel by 2100.
Here’s where I see a problem: By the time our population of humans gets to their destination, they will have changed, culturally, maybe even physically. Maintaining a one-gee simulated gravity wouldn’t be easy; one would think that the best a ship could do would be some fraction of one-gee, which would result in later generations being taller, slimmer, and more lightly built. And consider our own society a hundred years ago; things were quite a bit different than they are now.
The result of this, if it succeeds, would be populations of… well, humans, but not humans like the ones that live on Earth. The result would more likely be planets, separated by decades of radio or laser signal, likely by centuries of travel, and those populations would be so widely spaced that they would gradually become unrecognizable to one another. Languages would diverge, and humans physically may even diverge due to differing conditions on other planets, to the point that there are far-flung speciation events. The people on those planets would still be human – but not H. sapiens anymore. Maybe they would be H. taucetiensis, maybe something else.
It’s an interesting problem.
Thanks as always to Flappr, The Other McCain, The Daley Gator, Pirate’s Cove, and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Now then: It sure seems like folks are trying to avoid Boeing airliners lately.
Some fliers nervous to travel aboard Boeing aircraft following a stream of flight problems in the last three months say they try to book flights on other planes while others say they’ve turned to prayer or medications to get through their trips.
The shift in response toward Boeing took off in January after a panel plugging the space reserved for an unused emergency door blew off an Alaska Airlines jetliner 16,000 feet above Oregon. While pilots landed the Boeing 737 Max 9 safely, the incident has left a mark on many travelers.
“I just can’t step on that plane,” Leila Amineddoleh told NBC News, referring to Boeing aircraft. “Even if the chance of getting hurt on a Boeing flight, even with all these incidents, is slim.”
The last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner occurred in February 2009 in an industry that saw 9.6 million flights last year. More Americans die in motor-vehicle crashes each year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Yeah, air travel is, statistically, pretty safe. In my previous, non-journalism career, I traveled a lot – lots of it international travel – and never was involved in an incident where I felt I was in any danger.
The problem with air-travel events is that they are pretty spectacular. When an airliner goes down hard, typically everyone dies, and that’s hard to swallow. It makes people nervous, just as it’s making people nervous right now, with stuff happening like emergency doors blowing off in flight and tires dropping off the landing gear.
In the end, it probably won’t make a great deal of difference. Take us – if Mrs. Animal and I want to see our kids and grandkids, who are all down in the lower 48, we have to fly to go see them. Not seeing them is inconceivable. So fly we will. We may feel a little nervous about it, but we’ll fly. And, I imagine, so will plenty of other folks.
Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove, Bacon Time, The Other McCain, The Daley Gator, and Whores and Ale for the Rule Five links!
Now, to answer what appears to be a rhetorical question: No, it’s not only suckers that buy electrical vehicles (EVs) but a large number of suckers do buy electrical vehicles.
The latest evidence that electric vehicles are nothing more than environmental snake oil can be found in a recent Wall Street Journal article pointing out that these “clean” cars are actually more polluting than their gasoline-powered brethren.
By polluting, we mean actual pollution, not carbon dioxide emissions – which is not pollution but plant food.
The Journal was highlighting a study from 2022 that, naturally, was ignored by the mainstream press at the time. What the study found was that “brakes and tires on EVs release 1,850 times more particle pollution compared to modern tailpipes.”
Why? Because EVs are as much as 30% heavier than gas-powered cars, which means more stress on their “regenerative” brakes and much faster tire wear.
Sure, that’s a problem. I have and still do maintain that there are circumstances in which an EV may make sense – for instance, someone who has an urban/suburban commute of, oh, 10-12 miles and who can charge their vehicle overnight. Wouldn’t be my choice, but for that person, an EV may make sense – or at least, for them, the choice isn’t downright stupid.
The pollution problem remains, though:
Car buyers expect their tires to last 40,000 miles. But EV owners are finding that they last only 13,000 miles. Not only does that significantly increase the cost of ownership of an EV, but it also adds to air pollution.
That’s because tire wear, in case you didn’t know, is a major source of “fine particulate matter” – often called soot – which the Environmental Protection Agency, in case you didn’t know, considers “one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution and it’s linked to a range of serious and potentially deadly illnesses, including asthma and heart attacks.”
This, True Believers, is known as “unintended consequences.” Of course, the people who design these cars, presumably being, you know, automotive engineers, should have known this and disseminated this information long before now.
Feature, not bug. When embarking on an agenda like this, there are always one or two facts best suppressed until the agenda is at least partly accomplished – and that sure as hell looks like that is what happened here.
Before I start on today’s tech stuff, check out the final chapter of Barrett’s Privateers – Plague Ship over at Glibertarians, and stay tuned over there next week for another tale of the adventures of Captain Jean Barrett and her crew.
Now then: A superconductor breakthrough at MIT may have implications for the development of practical fusion power. Wait – where have we heard that before?
More than two years since MIT claimed its scientists achieved a breakthrough in fusion energy, the university is claiming that new research “confirms” that the magnet-based design used in those tests isn’t just impressive in a lab setting, but is practical and economically viable, too.
These findings come from a comprehensive report which features six separate studies published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity this month, assessing the feasibility of the superconductor magnets used by MIT scientists in their landmark test conducted in September 2021.
“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day,” Dennis Whyte, former director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and a professor of engineering, said in a release. “Now fusion has a chance.”
Uh-huh.
Fusion has had a chance for quite a while now, and yet it hasn’t been used for anything other than bombs yet; it seems that industrial-scale fusion power is and always has been ‘thirty years away.’ Granted my scientific background is in biology, not physics, but I’m skeptical that this breakthrough in superconductors, interesting though it may be, is going to result in an explosion in fusion power plants dotting the landscape and providing abundant, cheap, clean energy.
Now that I’m in my sixties, I’m pretty resigned to the idea that I won’t live to see a working, production-scale fusion reactor. My grandkids might. I hope they do. But in my lifetime? Best to keep those fission plants running, along with coal and gas, because no matter what MIT may be working on, we still need electricity now.
It seems the bottom has dropped out of the hydrogen-car market. This should, of course, come as a surprise to no one. MasterResource’s Robert Bradley Jr. has the details:
EVs compete against hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles–at least in California where some one hundred hydrogen dispensing stations are. The range and fill-time of HFCVs is quite competitive with EVs. But it is downhill from there–and a major mess for sellers and buyers. The California Energy Commission (remember Methanol?) has failed again.
Consultant James Carter on LinkedIn summarized a recent article in Jalopnik, by Logan Carter, Toyota Offers $40,000 Discount On A Car Most People Can’t Fuel Up.” His autopsy (verbatim):
Toyota’s innovative Mirai might just be the best deal on the car market right now, but access to hydrogen fuel is getting harder.The incentives – taxpayer money, in most cases – are there because nobody would look twice at these cars without them. Free markets are a great thing, but when it comes to these green boondoggles, of 
which hydrogen cars are but one example, the market is anything but free.
But wait! There’s more! Here are the details of the costs of operation:
Vehicle: $66,000, less $40,000 discount
Finance: $6,500 interest, less $6,500 discount
Fuel for 5 years /15,000 miles annually: $45,000, less $15,000
So, in total, this car will cost you $56,000 over 5 years, which is roughly the same as a Model Y Performance mostly charged from home. Perhaps add $5k for interest payments for the Y.
Here’s the rub: At the end of 5 years, that Model Y will be worth about $25,000. The Mirai? Likely $2,000 to $3,000, based on history. In other words, that hugely discounted Mirai is still a BAD DEAL.
Why is it still bad? Because the only Hydrogen stations are in California, and all suffer very irregular supply. In other words, there’s no guarantee you’ll get fuel when you need it. Which, unfortunately, is rule #1….
The reason to have a private auto is so that it will be available when you need to use it, and so that you can go where you need to go. In this, the various hydrogen autos fall short. Not only are they prohibitively expensive without subsidies, they don’t age well.
What’s not mentioned here is the production of hydrogen: That takes electricity, and plenty of it, and sufficient power won’t be 
supplied by windmills and solar panels; meanwhile, the same people pushing these green boondoggles are opposing nuclear power.
Granted, new technology always gets cheaper and more efficient over time. But this seems like a stretch, to try to lay in an entirely new infrastructure when we already have an established infrastructure, mature and efficient, that delivers gasoline and Diesel fuel when and where we need it.
Maybe someday there will be an unsubsidized market for hydrogen-powered vehicles. But that day is not today, and it won’t be tomorrow.