The Grand Canyon National Park will stay noisy from air tours, thanks to last minute secret maneuvers during passage of a federal transportation funding bill by Congress before their July Fourth recess.
The compromise legislation includes several anti-environmental measures pushed by Republican leadership in the House, but this provision was in neither the Senate nor House version before final negotiations started. The provision is very similar to legislation introduced earlier earlier this year by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and endorsed by Arizona's Senators McCain and Kyl.
Ironically, this came immediately before the National Park Service was prepared to issue final recommendations on reducing air tour noise over the Grand Canyon. This followed years of agency noise studies costing $6 million and after gathering almost 30,000 public comments.
Photo courtesy of National Park Service
The Park Service plan was expected to extend quiet hours in the morning and evening, move air tour routes away from popular beaches, trails, and overlooks during certain seasons, and limit air tour numbers in the future.
"Congress locked into place the noise we have today at Grand Canyon," said Rob Smith, Senior Organizing Manager for the Sierra Club in Phoenix, Arizona. "They stopped the Park Service from protecting the natural quiet of our premier national park."
The law is now changed to allow half the park to have unlimited aircraft noise, and allow the rest of the park to hear air tour noise 25% of the time throughout the day. Plus air tour numbers can increase without limit into the future.
"President Teddy Roosevelt set aside this special place to protect its naturalness for future generations, but commercial interests dominated this time," said Smith. "The Grand Canyon should not sound like an airport."
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The U.S. is overly endowed with wind energy - when fast onshore wind, shallow water offshore wind and medium speed onshore wind resources are added up, it's close to 29 times or more electricty that this country is currently producing. And even when the natural gas /oil now used for room temperature heating, ammonia production and some electricty to replace some of the oil proucts used for transport are added in, we still have at least at least 15 times present usage of spare. So resource wise, lack of wind is not a problem, nor is "wind depletion".
But it costs money to tap the wind, and so far, Americans are unwilling to to pay what it really costs. And to invest $2.5 trillion and lose money on that does not make sense, which would be the case if investors (private or government) can't at least cover costs with sales of electricity. And not being able to make a profit on $2.5 trillion of investment (or more) will not get any private investment funds motivated, which is not good...
So, until it is actually profitable to make electricity (and not extraordinarily so, just to a "medium" extent), wind sourced electricity is not going anywhere in this country to the extent that it should (which should be as the MAJOR source of electricity in this country). It is and will be much lower cost than solar PV, even when it is made is USA wind turbines versus made with slave labor in China PV panels. So, allow wind to actually be profitable, and not just a way for the extremely rich to avoid paying taxes (which is how the present "initiatives" work, sort of).
We really need Feed-In Tariffs, big time, at least in states like NY which are plagued with casino gambling like pricing systems for electricity. That way, wind energy advocates also become job and business creation advocates, and the task of going renewable gets a lot easier to accomplish.
But, if you don't get the pricing system(s) for renewable electricity correct, wind energy will remain a trivial shadow of what it could be. So how about more articles about that, and less of these "warm fuzzy and meaningless" articles about a future that never seems to get paid for except by magic (just like nuclear reactor economics....)? Those offshore wind farms in Europe are happening becuase of both a need for jobs and the fact that they are being paid for by electricity consumers, so investors are likely to be able to justify these investments. Like the roughly $US 25 billion in offshore wind projects now actually UNDER construction, and not merely being planned. Money talks, and fertilizer walks is a polite version of the relevant expression in this case....
Dave Bradley
Buffalo Wind Action Group,
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