There’s a whole lot of potential for follow-up on yesterday’s item, and much of it thanks to Robert Bryce’s Substack reporting and his “Power Hungry” podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, he interviews Everett Waller, of the Osage Nation, to talk about the tribe’s court victory over what Bryce calls “Big Wind” for encroaching on tribal sovereignty.
Thanks to its ideological green-washing, wind power is presumed to be so beneficial that any criticisms must be suppressed and it should be forced upon everyone regardless of their existing rights as fellow human beings. This was similar to the exploitative attitude that helped fuel the whole range of murders and other crimes against the Osage tribe featured in the recent Hollywood blockbuster “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
If you’ve got the time and interest, here is Bryce’s full reported version of the court ruling against the wind farm owners and in favor of the Osage Nation. A sample:
By thrashing Enel in court, the Osage tribe not only stands to collect millions of dollars in damages and the removal of the loathsome turbines, it also has handed Big Wind the biggest public relations debacle in its history. It’s not just that the wind industry lost; it lost to a Native American tribe. That’s a particularly bad look when it comes to the branding of wind energy as “clean,” “green,” “sustainable,” and, of course, “renewable.”
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It seems that Native Americans are no longer the fashionable cause they once were, so none of these recent events have elicited much attention in national media—not the type of attention traditional media lavished on the “Redskin” NFL team name or the cartoon mascot of baseball’s Cleveland Indians. Apparently, taking rights away from a group of actual living human beings is a-okay, by way of contrast. Especially if the multi-billion-dollar renewable energy industry might come under a critical spotlight as a result.
The leaders of our current culture have an odd set of priorities.
I just bought my husband a solar powered computerized bird feeder with an automatic camera that takes pictures of the birds. I had no idea this existed, but I saw it for sale on NextDoor and made a deal with the seller, a couple of subdivisions up the road.
I rarely get my husband things, because he gets what he wants for himself, but I think he'll like this.
ETHICS IN AMERICA -- I have not yet read today's opening or anything else, but want to jump in and share a link. My daughter sent this to me. It is an old television series of panel discussions of moral and ethical questions, originally recorded by Columbia University in 1989. I vaguely recall this from many years ago and I have only watched the first one today, but I highly recommend it. https://www.learner.org/series/ethics-in-america/