By Charlie Meadows

Over the past few months, the activities of grassroots citizens have really ramped up in an effort to put a halt to continued growth of the green energy sham and all that accompanies it. I would say the war is against the giant wind turbines, solar battery farms (which actually eliminate portions of farms and ranches), the building of new electric transmission lines, and carbon capture pipelines.

The traditional sources of energy today and in the past are coal, oil, natural gas, hydro and nuclear energy. More recently, wind and solar energy have come along. Not because they are a better source of energy, because they are not. They are far less reliable, but they supposedly produce no Carbon Dioxide (CO 2).

For the past few decades, we have been told CO 2 is bad, it will cause global warming or climate change, and is an existential threat to the future existence of mankind. Some might remember many years ago, the Al Gore produced movie called An Inconvenient Truth which basically told us the sky was falling and if we didn’t reduce CO 2 we would face a catastrophe beyond our imagination. Some of his contemporaries such as Congress woman Cortez told us about five years ago we only had 11 years to fix the problem, or we would destroy ourselves. Every bit of this doom and gloom is based upon junk science.

Much of this irrational hysteria is thrust upon our children in our government schools, as well as some private schools, which causes a great deal of stress and hopelessness upon our young people today. However, children of 40 years ago had a very different view of CO 2. Based upon real science, students were taught that CO 2 was vital for life. Without CO 2, plants can’t produce oxygen to breathe, and without CO 2 plants won’t grow to produce food. Through technology, most of the CO 2 produced smog has been cleaned up.

According to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (www.cornwallalliance.org), the preeminent group of world class scientists, manmade CO 2 does create a very slight amount of global warming, and the spending of trillions of dollars might lower global temperatures by a very negligible amount. However, not to worry, global warming would actually be a good thing. With modest global warming the growing seasons, especially toward the North and South polls, would be extended so more food could be produced which would lessen starvation and help keep the cost of food down. That would benefit everyone, especially the poor.

Therefore, there needs to be a war upon wind and industrial solar energy – a few solar panels upon a person’s roof is not the same as industrial solar farms. In Oklahoma, all the ugly wind turbines that have popped up over much of the State have produced a growing consternation among many folks. It is not just the natural scenery that they destroy, they produce many other problems. With time, the blades shed fiberglass, they can throw ice, the noise can be a source of constant irritation, and they also kill a lot of birds.

I had a distant knowledge of these issues until I attended a meeting in Enid on November 18th, hosted by one of the County Commissioners. There were around 300 people attending. The subject was the Delta Plains National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor (NIETC) which was proposed to extend from the panhandle through the Northern half of Oklahoma and down to near Fort Smith Arkansas. The corridor was to range from 4 to 18 miles wide with eminent domain used if necessary to allow transmission lines to be built. In addition, there was also concern about a smaller Cimarron Link within the NIETC. The crowd that night was in no mood for excuses, they wanted the transmission lines stopped.

Shortly after that meeting I attended another meeting about 10 miles north of Guthrie. The overflow crowd of about 130 exceeded the size of the venue, with several elected officials attending. I next attended a meeting in Woodward held in a church with about 180 folks in attendance. We had a special presentation by two attorneys from Wyoming explaining ways in which to fight these unwanted transmission lines and future wind towers.

Of course there were other counties such as Payne, and Lincoln County which was all fired up, so much so, that longtime State Representative Kevin Wallace, the House Budget chairman – probably the second most powerful representative in the House – was decisively defeated by newcomer Jim Shaw, partly because of the wind turbine issue. Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back was the meeting in the House District of newly elected Speaker of the Oklahoma House, Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow), which had about a thousand people attending. The Speaker was able to announce to the gathering that the federal Department of Energy decided not to proceed in its designation process and the NIETC transmission line was dead.

On November 30th we had a special presentation on these issues along with others by Saundra Trewik at our County Commission meeting where we also passed a climate change resolution in opposition to any more wind turbines or additional transmission lines.

On December 15, I spoke at a special meeting at the Crosspoint Assembly of God Church in Crescent, OK, along with a couple of other elected officials. We not only discussed these issues, but also the very dangerous Carbon Capture Pile lines.

A presentation on the Federal Sustains Act and Carbon Capture Pipelines by Mindy Patterson at our County Commission meeting on December 13 prepared me to produce and get passed a resolution titled: No Carbon Capture Pipelines, Lets Make CO 2 Great Again at our December 31st meeting.

For the sake of space, I want to mention just two parts of the resolution. 1) On February 22nd of 2020, one of these high-pressure pipelines ruptured near the small town of Satartia, Mississippi causing great harm with many people having difficulty breathing and when they tried to escape, their vehicles would not start. First responders coming to their rescue found their vehicles died when when they drove into the oxygen starved area and some of them were also overcome in the situation. I urged people in the resolution to view the recently produced documentary named THE PIPELINE DECEPTION which can be found on Youtube at MAHAnow.org.

Another important part of the resolution was the urging of citizens and elected officials to spend some time on the website of the Cornwall Alliance For The Stewardship of Creation, www.cornwallalliance.org to understand the true science regarding the Green Energy agenda and its falsehoods as touted by the liberal Democrats and all of their minions marching to a false narrative of foolish spending and false notions. Thank God President Trump is about to weaken and hopefully destroy that whole movement.

One final thing, on Tuesday, January 7th there was a large rally at the State Capital on all these issues with several legislators speaking, as well as State Education Superintendent Ryan Walters and Attorney General Getner Drummond, both opposing the wind turbines. The only problem I saw with some of the content of the lawmakers was discussion about set backs and spacings. Legislation such as that is like trying to deal with just the bad fruit of the wind part of the green energy movement. The only way to deal with the green energy movement is to stop it all together, and hopefully the elimination of all federal subsidies will take care of that.

With the growth of AI, Crypto Currencies, data centers and simply population growth, we will need a great deal more energy in the future. Looks to me like the best way going forward for more energy is through modular nuclear energy reactors. One promising prospect is being researched at Abilene Christian University know as Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors.

These modular reactors are small, needing only one third of an acre to produce as much electrical power as can be produced by 130 square miles of wind turbines. Their cost would be miniscule compared to traditional reactors. They are exceedingly safe, don’t need copious amounts of water and use recycled nuclear fuel. They could be built at key locations to provide power to high use centers and would eliminate the need for these many miles of land to build transmission lines. Oklahoma needs to thoroughly research this possibility, and if viable, take the lead in the nation for this reliable and reasonable priced power.

Charlie Meadows is the founder and former president of the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC). He was later elected County Commissioner for District 2 in Logan County. He may be contacted at: charliemeadows7@gmail.com