12 Comments

On June 25, 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the city of New London, Connecticut, could use the "Eminent Domain" process to take the non-blighted private property of Susette Kelo and sell it to a developer for a "public use" project. New London argued that it was OK to take a private party's property and give it to another private concern because "economic development" would create more tax revenue. The project was never developed. How the Supreme Court decided that selling the land to a private developer constituted a "public use" still defies explanation.

Expand full comment

John,

I take strong issue with your comment on zoning protecting property rights. "Zoning protects the rights of property owners while also protecting the general welfare of the community."

This idea dead wrong and is socialistic hogwash. Land use planning and zoning are statist failures which have no place is a free society.

I urge you and others to get a copy of 'Land Use Without Zoning,' by Bernard Siegan.

Here is a short article worth reading: https://fee.org/articles/houston-says-no-to-zoning/

"Zoning makes business activities and housing more expensive, but the greater cost of zoning is moral. In essence, zoning grants a cadre of public officials and favored private citizens the free exercise of state power to force their designs on the use of someone else’s property. This process trivializes the individual’s basic right to self-determination."

With blunt Regards,

L. M. Schwartz, Chairman

The Virginia Land Rights Coalition

POB 85

McDowell, Virginia FOC 24458

540-396-6217

"Working to Protect the Rights of Virginia's Property Owners"

Expand full comment
author

LMS: In life anything can be abused. Like everything political, zoning is not a perfect solution. However, there is no doubt that no zoning is also extremely problematic. Consider the two simple examples I provided.

Expand full comment

GHE theory fails because of two erroneous assumptions: 1. near Earth space is cold & w/o GHE would become 255 K, -18 C, ball of ice & 2. radiating as a 16 C BB the surface produces “extra” GHE energy aka radiative forcing (caloric).

Without the atmosphere, water vapor and its 30% albedo Earth would become much like the Moon, a barren rock, hot^3 400 K on the lit side, cold^3 100 K on the dark.

“TFK_bams09” GHE heat balance graphic & its legion of clones uses bad math and badder physics. 63 W/m^2 appears twice (once from Sun & second from a BB calculation) violating both LoT 1 and GAAP. 396 W/m^2 upwelling is a BB calc for a 16 C surface for denominator of the emissivity ratio, 63/396=0.16, “extra” & not real. 333 W/m^2 “back” radiating from cold to warm violates LoT 1 & 2. Remove 396/333/63 from the graphic and the solar balance still works.

Kinetic heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules (60%) render a terrestrial BB (100%) impossible as demonstrated by experiment, the gold standard of classical science.

Since both GHE & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible rubbish alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.

Expand full comment

Two more hazards from windmills: Their blades are made of fiberglass bonded by epoxy. Epoxy is used because polyester resin is destroyed by UV in sunlight. A major component of epoxy is Bisphenol-A, which is banned in food packaging in many countries because it's carcinogenic. The average 1 MWe turbine sheds 65 kilograms of microplastic particles per year, largely epoxy. But if that gets into the food chain from windmills instead of food packaging, that's OK because of climate or something.

If a windmill blade breaks over a farm, the land becomes contaminated with fiberglass (and epoxy). Crops cannot be harvested. Livestock cannot graze. Surface water cannot be used for irrigation or livestock. When surface water runs into a neighbor's farm, he has the same damage. When that happens, the windmill lessee will disclaim responsibility and out-lawyer the farmer.

Details (about this and more, with references) in "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving.

Expand full comment

I am not arguing against anything you presented, but it occurs to me that there may be a bigger picture scheme at work. To me, property rights are much simpler. It is the right to own property…period. The Left wants to confuse us with complexity and that is their game. Wind and solar systems are just chess pieces in the game.

Under Socialism and Communism individuals do not legally own property. The State owns all property and an individual gets to hold what the state deems them to deserve. This is where the Socialists are trying to take America. Their game is based on division. Divide and conquer. It is that simple and we keep letting ourselves be confused with gamesmanship. The Left has mastered the game and we continue to be distracted because we have lost track of our Constitution and what it promised. It never mentioned power generation with either solar or wind. Somehow our government is in the middle of all this. That needs to stop.

Expand full comment

"Their game is based on division. Divide and conquer. It is that simple and we keep letting ourselves be confused with gamesmanship."

100 % truth. Leftists confuse and conflate the meanings of the words 'public' and 'government' to justify government regulators owning and controlling property, by saying it is "public property". Government property is not public property. The government is not the public or the people. Government rules the people, and takes their property.

And BTW zoning laws are not necessary. Houston has never had zoning laws and it thrives without them. So why are zoning laws necessary elsewhere? Zoning laws are another way for the government to take control over us.

Expand full comment
author

Jim: In general I agree with your assessment. In this case the argument is actually for owners to have increased rights for the leaseholder and their property...

Expand full comment

You're absolutely correct on this. It like the shell game and the pea in under one of the three nut shells. The dealer shuffles the shell and the 'mark' chooses the shell that they think the pea is under. Unbeknownst to the mark thg he dealer removed the pea.

Moral of the story is do not play that game. It smacks of fraud.

Expand full comment
author

W: Yes, that is a good analogy. The probem here is that this is thrust onto the community, so if citizens say and do nothing, they will be subjected to serious liabilities. In other words, they are forced to play to defend their rights.

Expand full comment

Firstly, the US has fifty states with each having its own laws governing real property. They can range from French traditions in Louisiana, to Spanish traditions in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas, etc. to English common law traditions in the East. The areas of concern that you have raised (as listed below) all revolve around nuisance in common law. How they are resolved by French traditions and Spanish traditions is beyond my learning.

However, the reason that we have special legislation regulating pollution is because existing traditions of common law and civil law (French and Spanish traditions) did not adequately address the complexity of impacts on land that modern technology and inventions cause.

In addressing the concerns raised below one ought to consider the dynamics of laws and what limitations are inherent to them.

In every attempt to regulate by law or statute we have the following conflicts:

Class I Class II

Simplicity which produces: Complexity which produces:

Predictability Uncertainty

Rigidity Flexibility

Order Compassion

Low cost in money High cost in money and time to administer.

and time to administer

The question becomes where do we spend our time and money? On Class I or Class II. Class I allows more time for orderly living, but produces a greater risk that the rigidity and certainty of the system will roll over the statistical outliers in the population. Class II creates a massive administrative state at great cost and loss of living time to assure that the system has flexibility and concomitant compassion for the outliers. As a consequence no system can be perfect. The choice of the tradeoffs and how much of it that society accepts is a political, social, and economic choice.

Based on the above analysis, each of the concerns below will be judged differently in different jurisdictions. And not one of such laws will be perfectly uniform with other state's laws.

I close with this: " Although law is probably the least effective way to regulate human behavior, it is the one most commonly used."

1 - of adverse health effects to their neighbors,

2 - of devaluing proximate homes,

3 - of crop yield reductions to nearby farms,

4 - of causing pollution and other interference with aquifers,

5 - of harm to wildlife and livestock of the community,

6 - of degrading the ecosystem in the area, -

7 - of impacting hunting in approximate lands,

8 - of reducing tourism to the area,

9 - of interfering with regional weather and navigation radar, or

10- of raising electricity rates in the region.

Expand full comment
author

CD: TY for a NYS attorney's perspective. It goes without saying the the wind developer and their allies know the ins-and-outs of things like private property laws, MUCH better than the citizens in the community who are trying to defend their rights.

Expand full comment