Early yesterday, an out-of-control container ship ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore. Early reports claimed that a dozen vehicles and 20 people went into the cold water, with only two survivors, so far, being rescued; last I heard, however, the total went down to six missing after the initial rescues.
It looks like an accident, and accidents happen, sometimes horrific ones. There’s a reason “thoughts and prayers” are mentioned at such times, all other talk seeming vastly inappropriate.
Nevertheless, President Joe Biden immediately promised that the federal government would pay to replace the bridge.
Eleven days earlier a more humdrum disaster gave us greater license to speculate. “Thousands of panels on a solar farm southwest of Houston, Texas, were damaged by a powerful hailstorm on March 15,” a Newsweek report informs us. “Aerial footage showed rows of cracked photovoltaic cells at the Fighting Jays Solar Farm near Needville in Fort Bend County.…” A vast array of solar panels, ruined by something not unheard-of in Texas: “baseball-sized hail stones” falling from the sky.
And seeping out of the panels? Toxic chemicals.
This is something that we, the voting public, must confront: the fact that most “green energy” replacements are fragile and often environmentally hazardous. Compared to natural gas they are ecological disasters.
While Joe Biden yammers about funding a new bridge, we need to force a more important conversation, about removing subsidies for pseudo-green alternative energy sources.
To save us from the poorhouse as well as from environmental disaster.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “The Hail of It”
Our ruling class plans to be more honest about the various problems of green and ostensibly green technologies — after prior technologies have been set aside and plant has been disassembled or has been allowed to crumble. Then the resources made available to more ordinary persons are to be administratively rationed.
And, when the chocolate ration is reported as increasing from thirty grammes to twenty grammes, many people will cry-out their thanks to our leaders, and react with contempt, bewilderment, or fear if anyone does the math.
Paul:
Please weigh in on why the Baltimore Bridge event was planned. Part of a terrorist campaign (foreign or domestic or both) to ruin us. Financially and militarily of course, but also by even more FBI and lawfare prying into our lives. As they protect us all the way to national oblivion. And yet the terrorism has to stop. How to do that while protecting the other side of our lives? I guess I’m thinking of the disasters attendant to the post 9/11 Patriot Act.
While it is possible, according to the EPA, that some solar panels may contain lead and cadmium in concentrations that would classify them as hazardous waste, until these particular panels are tested, we don’t know. Your affirmation that toxic chemicals are leaking from the damaged panels seems, at best, premature, and more likely, caused by fear of technology. I am astounded that a blogger would fear technology.
I’m appalled that you suggest that Paul fears technology, and then in the very next sentence proceed as if that conjecture is established fact. Mind you that my being appalled does not involve my being astounded. You’re conforming to a familiar template of sophistry.
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners denied that the panels had cadmium telluride, one of the toxic substance often found in solar panels; but CIP were silent about the presence of any other such substance. If the panels simply had no toxins, CIP could have declared as much. CIP too is conforming to a familiar template of sophistry.