This article appears in the August 5, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
TEXAS CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE
Joel Dejean: Turn the Tide Against the Texas Gulf Wind Farms
[Print version of this article]
July 30—The Biden Administration announced last week that the first offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico will be positioned off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana. The first selected area was described approvingly in the July 22 issue of The Texas Tribune by Mitchell Ferman. It is “24 nautical miles off the coast of Galveston [Texas], covering 546,645 acres— bigger than the city of Houston—with the potential to power 2.3 million homes, according to the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.” The other project, praised in Houston Chronicle headlines, will be near Port Arthur [Texas] covering 188,023 acres, 56 miles offshore, with power potential estimated at 799,000 homes. Public hearings are to start in August.
Two issues come immediately to mind. First, in the description of both projects, the phrase ”potential to power” is used. The figures given represent 100% potential productive capacity, but the wind usually delivers only 30%, and often even less.
The second issue is the positive political and scientific reality of last year’s success of a mobilization of citizens in Illinois and across the country, which stopped the planned shutdown and probable destruction of both the Byron and Dresden nuclear power plants. These facilities in northern Illinois are vital to the power base of the Upper Midwest. With their timely action, those citizens saved nearly twice the capacity presently projected to be built in Louisiana and Texas, and they saved skilled jobs and tax revenue as well. Each of these nuclear sites has two reactors (one GW apiece) requiring approximately one square mile to operate. They provide full power, full time to their four million-plus household base.
So, a real discussion must begin, and real subjects addressed, on the wind farm madness. The tide must be turned against the Gulf of Mexico wind farms, now planned for one of the world’s worst hurricane zones!
Joel Dejean, candidate for U.S. Congress in Texas’ 38th C.D., located in greater Houston, has been leading the charge on energy sanity. He is a LaRouche Independent, an electrical engineer, and well known for his policy leadership in the region, long before the 2022 mid-term election.
‘Bury the Global Green Deal’
The Dejean campaign hosted a lively event July 28 on Facebook, titled, “We Can Bury the Global ‘Green Deal’ and Light Up the World!” Participants included Dejean and Dr. Neil Frank, a well-known KHOU-TV meteorologist and former Director of the U.S. Hurricane Center in Florida. The moderator was Joe Jennings, a long-time political figure in the region, and campaign manager for Joel Dejean.
Jennings set the tone in his opening: “Houston, the Eagle has landed!” He spoke of how NASA and the American people rose to President Kennedy’s “call to greatness,” which Kennedy had issued at Texas’ Rice University 10 years earlier, in 1962. There were many Houston developments—the port, the medical center, the energy sector, the industrial corridors, the education and cultural opportunities, etc. All are reflections of the ability to act effectively.
But, Jennings then said, there is the second, very well known “Houston” quote as well: “Houston, we have a problem!”
Joel Dejean began his comments by relating what he and Jennings had been doing back before the “Texas Freeze” electricity blackout hit in February 2021. Dejean and Jennings gave testimony before the Houston City Council and Mayor Sylvester Turner on February 9, 2021, detailing the danger of focusing the power grid on “renewables” such as wind and solar. The proper scientific approach, Dejean stressed, involves the concept of “energy flux density”—the power of energy to do work and the organization of that power and effort in ever more efficient technologies. Most importantly, work must succeed in bringing on new power sources like thermonuclear fusion.
Not only were there no questions at that Houston City Council meeting, but on February 15th, one week later, the power grid collapsed. It went into a brutal 48-72 hour shut down, affecting 90% of Texans on the grid, and taking far too many lives. But still, there were no questions asked.
Next, in April and May 2021, Dejean recounted, he participated in two trips to Austin, going to the state capitol, delivering the dossier, “The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Crushes the Green New Deal” (issued by The LaRouche Organization, March 2021), and exposed the Green Deal agenda as a core function of the financial bailout—‘The Great Reset.’ Again, there was a glaring lack of response from the government and both mainstream parties. There was agreement from many individuals, but a lack of courage to step up and act.
Dejean ended his opening remarks by reemphasizing his determination to return to principles and science to guide policy, especially to pursue the frontiers of scientific search exemplified by the recent deployment and activation of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the challenge of the development of nuclear fusion power. He pointed again to the flawed thinking and intention in the Malthusian outlook by quoting University of Texas–Austin Emeritus Professor Robert Jensen. As a full advocate of all “climate-change” matters, Jensen recently said we must be honest and admit the fact that renewable resources cannot support 8 billion people on this Earth, so therefore, we must set a more real carrying capacity at 4-6 billion. Moreover, there are many among Dr. Jensen’s friends and collaborators who would say that figure is much too high.
Neil Frank: Get Real on Energy, Climate Science
Dr. Frank picked up on Dejean’s comments regarding the shutdown of the Texas electricity grid in February 2021, relating that the real problem with storm systems, hot or cold, is that the system often “parks” above an area and then there is no wind. Another factor is that the blades must be tethered in major storms to avoid damage. The intrinsic problem with wind is its instability and variability.
Regarding CO2 being the controlling climate factor, he dismissed it as insignificant. Frank first used a vivid analogy. Think of a 100,000-capacity football stadium as representing the components of the atmosphere, he said, and assign seats according to each component’s proportion in the atmosphere. Nitrogen would fill 70,000 seats, oxygen 20,000. CO2 would get 40 seats! Dr. Frank then focused on the positive effects of CO2. For example, when greenhouses increase the amount of CO2 by three times to 1200 parts per million, the effects include thriving plant life.
On climate, Dr. Frank said that the real study of climate change and its causes involves looking at many integrated cycles and dynamics, over very long periods. He spoke of 100,000-year glacial cycles, 10,000-year intermediate cycles, 1000-year and 100-year cycles.
As Joel Dejean would add: “CO2 is not the barometer of climate change.” Dejean stresses in his campaign that the climate discussion has many voices that need to be heard.
The importance of this point is dramatically evident in the case of Dr. Frank himself, a senior figure in U.S. meteorological practice. He is the former director of the U.S. Hurricane Center, a 20-year meteorologist on public TV in the Houston area, a known expert in these matters, regionally, statewide and nationally. Yet, in the recent period, Dr. Frank is regularly censored and blocked by the Houston Chronicle and others pushing the Malthusian narrative.
Light Up the World
Whatever the attempted censorship of voices and of open dialogue, the truth Is coming through more and more, and will out. Take just the lesson of the Texas Freeze, which is that “renewables” are unreliable, and it is self-inflicted economic damage to continue them. But because there are no moves to end the green finance binge for wind and solar in the U.S., Texas and the entire Central States northward are now on official notice to expect brownouts and blackouts during peak hot and cold periods, as stated by NERC (North American Electricity Reliability Corporation) in its May 2022 assessment. Texans have already twice in July had daily directives for how many and what hours they should not use their home appliances, in order to prevent electricity outages. This is having the shock effect to get people to straighten up and take notice.
Look at continuing the green stupidity another way—taking the push for wind and solar to its logical extreme. A full shift of the energy base in the “green” direction, will have predictably dire consequences. If the world economy were to be fully active, and building necessary modern infrastructure (transportation, housing, hospitals, etc.), there would be a need for 8,000 GW of electrical power globally, along with 1.5 billion productive jobs.
To make that much electricity with wind turbines would require a land area the size of Canada and the United States combined! With solar panels, it would require a land area covering 75% of the lower 48 states.
[Option location for diagram on “How much land area is required” diagram, if Stuart provided it.]
This is crazy, as Dejean repeatedly makes clear in his campaign. Instead of wind and solar, the opposite is shown—as a pedagogical example—by the fact that the global electricity need for 8000 GW could be supplied by small modular nuclear reactors such as NuScale’s SMRs, which would only require a land area the size of two boroughs in New York City—Queens and the Bronx.
Besides taking up huge land areas, the wind turbines themselves are engineering horror stories. The world’s largest offshore wind turbine is Siemens Gamesa’s SG 14-222DD prototype at the test center in Ostrild, Denmark. It surpasses the giant GE Halide-X14MW, which stands in the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands, at a towering height just 64 meters shy of the Eiffel Tower’s 324 meters.
One is reminded of the reported answer of Albert Einstein regarding the difference between “genius” and “stupidity”: “Genius has its limits.”
Dejean says he is conducting his campaign to mobilize Texans, and all Americans, in concert with people internationally, to reverse the tide on the stupid, lethal green energy agenda, and switch to science and progress.
