By Olivia Murray
“What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.”
Sweetwater is a unique place with a special history, dating back to the days before the American settlers; the name of this small town in central Texas is itself, derived from a word of the Kiowa Indians. The Kiowa were a nomadic tribe that often hunted through “Mobeetie” or in English, “sweet water” but eventually, the tribe was brought to heel by a federal military under the command of Ulysses S. Grant, during the conflict known as the Red River War — Grant didn’t get the moniker Mr. Lincoln’s Butcher for nothing!
Speaking of subjugation … from an article out at Texas Monthly four days ago:
Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.
…
Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades.
For anyone who doesn’t already know, wind turbine blades at this point in time, can’t be recycled, so ordinarily, these expired blades wind up in landfills. According to a study published in June of this year in the Scientific Reports journal, around 2.4% of turbine blades must be decommissioned every year, and per the United States Geological Survey, there are more than 70,800 wind turbines registered in the country. So, assuming each turbine has three blades on it, that means that roughly 5,100 blades every year, just in the U.S., become literal garbage (although arguably, they always were). Blades can weigh anywhere from 5,200 pounds each, to as much as 27,000 — that makes for between 27 million and 138 million pounds of trash bound for landfills annually.
Back to Sweetwater. In 2017, a Washington-state company called Global Fiberglass Solutions came along, promising an exciting new way to repurpose the blades, and since then, GFS has been dumping the blades in the far-off land of Texas. According to the Texas Monthly article, the managing director himself admitted that only a fraction of the stockpile had ever been “recycled.”
Also from the article was the testimony of Pamala Meyer, a resident of Sweetwater:
When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives … she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades … 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.
I assumed the “eyesore” turbines couldn’t look worse than when they were erect and functioning, but boy was I wrong! This is an old X (formerly Twitter) post, which shows you how long this has been a problem for the people of Sweetwater:
But the green aristocrats can’t be bothered with the concerns of the little guy, they’re on a mission to save humanity! (The irony is painful.) Lastly:
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.
A dump. Leftists skirting regulations, contaminating the environment and polluting the landscape, all the make a buck. Classic.
Walter Bagehot, although not consistently reliable mind given his asinine issues with the U.S. constitution (he denigrated the document as“inflexible” … which was the point), did however accurately articulate what the residents of Sweetwater now experience; he once said, “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.”
Green aristocrats live and die by exploitation, and nowhere is that more obvious than their approach to policy and civic life; they don’t even have to have political control, their presence in a community alone brings tyranny!