As I’ve documented repeatedly here, the fossil fuel industry is fighting a holding action against the clean energy transition, in part by mounting a massive, social media based, coordinated campaign of misinformation aimed at aggrieved low-information citizens in rural areas, and mobilizing them as shock troops who harass, intimidate, and threaten farmers and landowners who seek to site clean energy on their land.
The battleground is everywhere, but nowhere more critical than the American midwest, where a huge clean energy resource exists in reasonable proximity to large electricity demand centers.
In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has introduced a suite of bills aimed at a 100% carbon free energy by 2035 (or 2040, depending on the version you look at).
Part of the push has to include clean energy siting reform, to lift the burden of siting 100 million dollar projects off the shoulders of wholly unprepared township boards, who have been beset by angry mobs, threatened with physical violence, and by recall elections where wealthy conservatives can drop huge campaign donations to win a single township board seat.
Yesterday, that bill was debated before the Michigan House Energy Committee.
Above, multigenerational farmer Clara Ostrander appealed to the Committee to defend property rights and allow her to save her farm for future generations by harvesting the sun.
“Antis” showed up as well. This is typical. Draw your own conclusions.
One of the arguments trotted out by the fossil fuel advocates is the “local control” angle.
Local control is said to be a sacred principle of conservatives everywhere.
Except, there has been no consistent adherence to any such principle here.
In the last decade, the Michigan legislature, having gotten wind that some communities were thinking of banning single use plastic bags, went into hyperdrive to hobble those local governments by passing restrictions on passage of such laws, the so called “plastic bag ban ban”.
During the same time frame, under former Governor Rick Snyder, of Flint lead-in-the-water fame, signed a so-called “Death Star” bill forbidding local communities from requiring minimum wages, or paid sick days by local businesses.
In nearby Indiana, Crawfordsville Climate activist John Smillie told me how legislators used the “local control” argument to scuttle clean energy siting reform, but jumped right in line when fossil fuel interests demanded a ban on local ordinances limiting gas hookups in new construction.
Again, the only “conservative” principle on display was an ultimate loyalty to fossil fuel interests over the future of their own children.