Osage Oppose Wind Power At Tallgrass Prairie 147
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Tulsa World reports that Principal Chief John D. Red Eagle of the Osage Nation says the tribe, although not opposed to alternative energy development in general, has found significant reasons to oppose wind farms on the tallgrass prairie, 'a true national treasure' whose last small fragments remain only in Osage County and in Kansas. The Osage County wind farms would not be built in the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, located northeast of Ponca City, but would be visible from it and Preserve Director Bob Hamilton has urged the county and the state to steer wind development to areas of the county that are not ecologically sensitive. 'Not all areas in the Osage are sensitive,' says Hamilton. 'What makes the tallgrass prairie so special is its big landscape. It's not just local — it has global significance.' The Osage also fear that large wind farms will interfere with extracting oil and gas, from which royalties are paid in support of tribal members as the Osage retain their tribal mineral rights owned in common by members of the tribe. 'They weren't thinking about the mineral estate — just about compensating landowners,' says Galen Crum, chairman of the tribal Minerals Council. 'How are we supposed to know the price of oil in 50 years?'"
Environmentalists (Score:2, Insightful)
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Good to know that the noble natives are still the stalwart guardians of nature and the environment. Mining companies come and go, but a windmill will stain the land forever.
Huh? Why would a windmill be more permanent than a well head?
Re:Environmentalists (Score:4, Insightful)
He was being cynical! The chief is being a bit of an idiot! They think that the windmills destroy the "special" grass, but hey if oil and gas companies want to dig and drill that's OK!
Ok me being cynical! No wonder they bleeding lost the wars! Wanna make a bet the windfarm will be more valuable in 50 years than some oil or gas...
Re:Environmentalists (Score:4, Interesting)
Oil and gas can be drilled from "far" away - windmill on the other hand tend to stick out; and in great numbers.
Re:Environmentalists (Score:5, Insightful)
Drilling derricks can be visible from far away too. Once the derrick is done, the well pumps dot the landscape too, they aren't tall, but every well will get a pump. It seems like their second core objection is that windmills will reduce the market value of the fossil fuels they own. I really don't think that argument has merit. For one, oil is not used for grid power generation. Natural gas is used for power generation, but such an argument from one group to deny another group's ability to compete like that is just silly.
I really don't get the cultural objection to seeing windmills, I don't get why it's such an effective blocking force. Cities might not have skyscrapers if landowners from miles away can block them from being built, in the same way this argument is used to stop windmills from being built.
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Yeah, but they get a cut from the oil.
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You would think that windmills are more distasteful than goatse. The fact that they are rejecting this is truly disgraceful. I'm not singling them out. It's representative of all people.
I don't understand why it is not perceived as elegant, modern, and clean.
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Then you haven't been living next to them.
From far away, they look peaceful and elegant, up close they are massive and make a lot of noise.
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It seems like their second core objection is that windmills will reduce the market value of the fossil fuels they own. For one, oil is not used for grid power generation. Natural gas is used for power generation, but such an argument from one group to deny another group's ability to compete like that is just silly.
That's not their argument, at least not the way you are making it out to be. It's an issue of access to minerals, not market price being affected by windmills. From the article:
"The areas being initially considered by the first two wind development companies cover approximately 30,000 acres and are located in a prime area for future oil and gas recovery," Red Eagle's statement says.
Galen Crum, chairman of the tribal Minerals Council, whose job it is to protect the mineral estate, said that the council has met with two wind companies planning on erecting about 200 turbines on the prairie.
"They are talking about using an awful lot of ground," Crum said. "They weren't thinking about the mineral estate - just about compensating landowners.
Crum said wind leases last a half-century.
"How are we supposed to know the price of oil in 50 years?" [..] Crum said the area is home to many active and plugged wells, some ripe for reopening as the price of oil rises and new technology makes extraction more efficient.
ok. that is blatantly racist (Score:3)
there is no way to interpret your statements other than racism.
Osage history is not any more or less 'brutal' than the rest of oklahoma history. including the incident in 1921 in which a white mob burned down 'black wall street' in a single day. so ....
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Better watch them wind spills!
They'll pollute your aquifers, unlike tasty petroleum mixed with fracking cocktails.
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I'm not convinced that native American Indians were ever really the environmentalists they're frequently made out to be in the modern day sense...
Agreed. There is evidence that the Anasazi (of Northern Arizona and the Four Corners region) caused some large ecological problems, including deforestation (of one of their major food trees) and other problems. There is some evidence of various Mesoamerican tribes also collapsing due to environmental degradation.
A large part of the the myth is because most tribes were relatively small, nomadic, and not at all technologically advanced, which generally precludes much impact. Evidence supports that once tr
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I'm all out of mod points, so all I can do is make a post agreeing with you. Human nature never changes; the only difference between the natives of today and the natives of hundreds of years ago is that now they're surrounded by (relatively) rich white people they can exploit. Just like the white people exploited the natives when they were conquering the Americas.
People are the same, no matter where or when you go. We exploit things, the environment, even other people. Always have, always will.
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Native Americans (really, thought they came across a land bridge)
Everyone came from Africa one way or another. Point is they got there first.
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Actually, with the confirmation of the pre-Clovis peoples, we can say that the current Native Americans got here second, at best. Maybe third or fourth.
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My point was that you don't have to evolve from some simpler lifeform on a land mass to be the "natives," you just have to get there first. Now what was your point?
Figures (Score:5, Insightful)
The Osage also fear that large wind farms will interfere with extracting oil and gas, from which royalties are paid in support of tribal members as the Osage retain their tribal mineral rights owned in common by members of the tribe.
There's looking out for the environment and there's looking out for number one. Now we know where they stand.
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that money goes to pay for healthcare (Score:2)
and a lot of other stuff for the poor people in the tribe.
just because you are native doesn't make you automatically rich.
please just stop talking about stuff you don't understand.
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Re:Figures (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because the planned wind farm wasn't going to give them a penny, the oil and gas though lines their pockets nicely.
The environmental claims are just a smoke screen for their greed.
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They could just build their own, the windmills aren't so expensive or heavily regulated that a small community can't build their own.
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Why build your own when you can get others to do the building, while you do the earning?
They didn't have to spend a penny or lift a finger to get the oil and gas revenues, they want the same deal with the wind power.
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They can. There is nothing about either tech which interferes with the other.
Cast aside romantic notions about Native Americans. Losing a war doesn't make them better then those smart enough to beat them, and greed is universal.
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Look at Cherokee Casino if you want to see hypocritical attitudes. First, gambling was wrong, but then it was ok if it was only "games of skill" not "games of chance", so they installed "lock and roll" slots, which are still not exactly games of skill. Ok, that made money, so they just put in real slots. Then they put in digital 21 and poker. Finally, they now serve "firewater". My ancestors were native to America (Cherokee and Apache). That doesn't change the fact that most of the governments of the
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I'm actually impressed. Who else is this honest? Most people wouldn't mention the oil and gas, just the environmental impact. Whether or not I agree with them, I respect the straightforwardness.
Re:Figures (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking out for the environment is looking out for number one, unless you'd rather live in Mordor.
Firmly in the NIMBY camp, the same as pretty much everyone else. And since windmills require a lot of land - a lot of people's backyards - to produce significant amounts of power, this is yet another reason why renewable energy isn't a viable alternative to nuclear.
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You might ask the neighbors of the fukishima plant in japan how having a nuclear plant in their backyard worked out.
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I don't normally consider people 35 kilometers away my neighbors.
But Fukishima was a very sharing neighbor.
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Weird. I lived near a place where they were actively developing wind farms in Canada. The local farmers were competing to literally have windmills located in their back yards.
Go ask a banker or government (Score:2)
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Disclaimer: I have nothing against the Chinese people, just the quality of their exports.
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And since windmills require a lot of land
Wait, stop. Windmills require almost no land. They take up little postage-sized pieces of dirt in the middle of vast tracts of land that is usually being used to graze cattle if it's being used for anything at all. They're complaining about being able to see windmills not on their land but from it. And to them, I say that is bullshit.
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A windmill takes up a little postage-sized piece of dirt. It also produces almost no power, and even that only randomly. Windmills in sufficient qualities to produce a significant portion of an industrial society's power needs, their grid connections, and the storage systems to work around the r
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if that land is located in the middle of nowhere, you need even more windmills to cover the transmit losses.
We lose less than 5% of all of our power in transmission. When people start spewing figures about transmission loss they are including conversion.
You don't have storage systems to work around the psuedorandom power output on the same site as the wind farm. That's what the grid is for.
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We lose less than 5% of power now, when power plants pretty much immediately convert to high voltage. You can't do this with windmills, because a high-voltage line is far more expensive to erect than a low-voltage one, and most wind farms aren't going to be anywhere near the size of a normal power plant, which means you need far more of them.
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Are you surprised? There's this persistent idea that aboriginal people, and native Americans in particular, were such great caretakers of the environment. The truth is that as soon as they acquired the means to significantly affect their environments they did so, just like the rest of us, from helping drive the mammoth to extinction to cutting down all the trees on Easter island.
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But given the Native American nations' historically much-vaunted regard for nature and the environment, it comes across as a savage indictment against them when their leaders put naked pecuniary interests ahead of ecologically sustainable energy.
Extracting oil (Score:3)
Wind power has some serious drawbacks, but the fact that it might stop you from extracting oil is not one of them.
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This is the part that I don't understand either. Who's saying that, and why are they saying it? It makes no sense. I couldn't get through to the main article, so all I have to go on is the summary.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Aesthetics... (Score:1)
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Maybe I'm just weird or something, but I think they're beautiful.
I agree.
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Of course, everybody is jumping immediately to the conclusion they're wrong in this case, and that nobody should ever object to any site for windmills, or else all environmentalists are hypocrites. That's not logical. Being in favor of wind power doesn't mean you have to be in favor of putting them everywhere, there are still better and worse places, and aesthetics are one perfectly valid consideration. J
Re:Give me alternative energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, idiots. The windmills don't look that bad, you'll quickly get used to appreciating the sight.
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That might be a bad comparison. The power cables are all underground everywhere I've lived. Out of sight, out of mind. The few times I've had to deal with that outside a window, other than the car window, I thought it was a hideous eyesore.
Driving through rural areas though you definitely see the power and telephone lines strung up on evenly spaced poles along the side of the road.
But then, driving through those same rural areas these days I see the occasional windmill dotting the landscape. So I agree
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Frankly, it's an improvement if it draws your eyes from those things (especially the high-voltage lines that look like ominous Space Invaders enemies made manifest).
When I come over a hill and see them lined up across the landscape I have a hard time deciding between space invaders and recognizers.
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Those things don't belong in the middle of populated areas, if a disaster occurs and they fall over they should be far enough away from any other structures to cause no damage. Also ice can form on them which is very dangerous when it thaws and falls off. Having the windmills a kilometer or so away from the nearest town already makes them obstruct so little of your view that it doesn't matter.
Hugh (Score:1)
Hugh must be related to T.Boone [wikipedia.org].
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
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Simple really (Score:2, Insightful)
Wind farms take up an enormous amount of area for the power they generate compared to other sources of energy. Oil fields can get by with one pumping area in many cases and by law most are limited to their foot print. Then besides having all those towers someone has to maintain the access between each tower, usually a road, maintain the lines connecting each, and to top it off you get to hear them all day and night long. Currently there are many regulations governing what protections must be maintained for
actually it is (Score:3)
uhm when you drive into the preserve there are oil heads and stuff.
appearances more important than reality? (Score:2)
Part of the reason why it's so special is the fact that we've destroyed every other area of the world with mining, oil and gas extraction, agriculture and pollution. Windmills are part of the solution to that, and in the long term may help restore other areas to that condition. We should be caring more about the actual quality of our environment instead of focusing on how good it makes us feel to have one last place that is visually untouched (as opposed to [actually] untouched)
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But if you place a windmill farm within sight of the prarie, this feeling of it being untouched will be lost.
Sorry that feeling is already lost. As I've actually traveled around the Flint Hills (further north than this proposed wind farm) you'll find the previous centuries oil rush junk abandoned everywhere. That and the power lines crisscrossing the landscape further spoils the view.
I've found the view of vast grasslands dotted with giant windmills rather attractive. Here is a picture I took from the Beaumont wind farm:
http://www.howardedin.com/test/20081108_MG_1149.jpg [howardedin.com]
Thats about 150 miles north of the Os
Re:I agree (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, there are no installations of windmills anywhere near my house in the Portland area (this area doesn't have the sustained winds and lack of high trees that the northeast area of Oregon has), so maybe I'd feel different if they were in my backyard - but I'd like to think I'd be OK with it. I'd definitely be OK with putting wind farms off the coast of Oregon, which is being discussed, along with tidal power farms. Come on people, it's not like very much of this country is "untouched" any more. I love to get out in the wilderness and camp and canoe, but planes do fly over still. You really can't get away from civilization completely.
I'm all for preserving natural ecosystems, but they're not talking about building the windmills IN the Osage preserve, the objections are that the windmills are VISIBLE from the preserve. Come on - turn around and look the other direction if you don't like seeing the windmills. If we want to get off oil and coal, we need to get away from this NIMBY attitude.
I also don't see the problem with building windmills AND going for the gas and oil underneath. It's not like building a windmill forever ruins the land underneath. If you decide later to mine, just remove the windmill and mine.
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I assure you that whatever house you live in, wherever on earth it may be, does not have clear title back to the primordial soup. At some point a human being almost certainly forced another human being off of that piece of land under threat of serious bodily harm without compensation. By your argument, nobody has a right to live anywhere...
having been to the tallgrass prarie (Score:2)
you can see horse barns, oil heads, etc. they have had to buy patches of land from prior landowners to create the preserve, its still in the middle of a bunch of cattle ranches and oil leases. the whole thing about 'pristine view' is kind of silly.
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Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I love seeing windmills on our coastline and I feel good every time I look at them. They are a MUCH nicer view than the smokestack from a coal plant...
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>>Everyone loves wind power, as long as the mills aren't located anywhere near themselves
Yep. Eco-friendly Ted Kennedy sued to block windmills going up near his estate.
Hell, the DC lawyers that worked against NIMBY lawsuits on windmills filed a NIMBY lawsuit when they found out that windmills were going to go up near their farm in backwater Virginia.
The hypocrites come out of the woodwork. It's always "we like wind power, just not here". We seriously need to restructure how these sorts of lawsuits can
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Except they have far fewer of them in a much smaller area.
People are poo-pooing this, and it is a relatively small problem, but it is still an actual problem with wind power (well, the intersection of wind power and light aircraft designed to fly low, and take off and land on unpaved surfaces). It seems solvable though. Maybe the windmills could broadcast something other than visible light which is picked up by required instrument in such light aircraft.
I don't get why people think you can only have one p
Translation question? (Score:1)
What's "NIMBY" in the Osage tongue?
oil (Score:2)
Give me a break (Score:2)
"not opposed to alternative energy development in general"
Ah yes, the classic bullshit qualifier. Sort of like when people start their sentences with, "I'm not a racist, but..."
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..or "I'm all for free speech, but..."
greed (Score:1)
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I assume you mean aesthetics, not ascetics [wikipedia.org]?
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all about the view (Score:3)
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Wind power must be stopped in tallgrass prairie (Score:2)
lest it lead to Tulsa's Doom
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Thulsa Doom? [wikipedia.org] Can't the Midwest just ask California to loan them Schwarzenegger?
The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve (Score:3)
It is the most populous (44,000) and the second-largest geographically (to Corson County, South Dakota) of the six U.S. counties that lie entirely within an Indian reservation. Osage County, Oklahoma [wikipedia.org]
The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy.
It is protected as the largest tract of remaining tallgrass prairie in the world. The preserve contains 39,000 acres (160 km2) owned by the Conservancy and another 6,000 acres (24 km2) leased in what was the original tallgrass region of the Great Plains that stretched from Texas to Manitoba.
The tallgrass prairie owes its existence to fire, whether caused by lightening or manmade. Without fire, the prairie quickly becomes brushland. The Indians were aware of this and burned the prairie regularly to nurture new growth of succulent grasses and to kill intrusive trees and shrubs. The Nature Conservancy has continued this practice with a process called "patch burning" in which about one-third of the prairie is burned each year.
Prior to its purchase by the Nature Conservancy in 1989, the preserve was called the Barnard Ranch which had been part of the Chapman-Barnard ranch of 100,000 acres (400 km2).
Tallgrass Prairie Preserve [wikipedia.org]
The tall grass can be ten feet high.
The geek has no sense of distance or scale as the westerner understands it. The view the Osage wants to protect is a tiny fraction of its holdings ---
and there nothing the like of it to be found anywhere else on earth.
Fine (Score:2)
Tailgrass Prairie (Score:2)
Shoulda wiped them out (Score:2)
If you leave any younglings alive, shall they not avenge?
If you're going to be the Empire, be the Empire. Don't leave any of them alive. Not. One. Single. Bothan.
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Yeah, let's make these assholes give up something for the good of the white man, to their own detriment. That's a reasonable thing to ask of them.
Maybe we can compensate them by resettling them somewhere.
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"good of the white man"? As far as I know, their houses and casino (with Freestyle Cage Fights!) use electricity too.
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No, this is NIMBY-ism, plain and simple. The argument of the Osage people is exactly the same, and just as invalid, as that of the Massachusetts landowners who complained that an offshore windfarm would ruin the view from their beachfront homes.
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Oklahoma does not count as 'giving back' (Score:3)
Oklahoma was originally called 'indian territory', it was a place 'in between states' where dozens of tribes were sent, including the Osage whose homelands were further east.
if you were really goin to 'give back' land you would give back parts of ohio & kentucky
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As a native american I usual side with tribes, but in this instance your post is spot on.
I have also seen my tribe become greedy, selfish, and out of touch with reality.
The reality is pollution is bad, mmmmmkay ?
Another reality is peak oil mmmmmmmkay ?
So again, alternative energy is not an alternative, its going to be required.
Even if abiotic oil exists its natural production exceeds out 85 million barrel A DAY consumption.
I'd prefer that we move to biological hydrogen production, until something better com
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Doesn't exceed...
if you had ever been there you would get it (Score:3)
the Tallgrass prarie preserve is very special. if you havent been there, you wont understand it, but if you go there, you will.
just watch out for the bison.
although i suspect there is more to the story, becaus you can see little pumping stations and stuff mixed into the preserve, and there are cattle ranches all around it.
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That logic would mean we shouldn't criticize Israel for acting like giant pricks.
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Conquest was perfectly acceptable i.e. "not wrong" at the time. Morality changes over time.
Do also note that Native Americans fought lots of wars before the paleface arrived, and in the case of the Spanish conquests often sided with the conquistadores against their opponents.
Neal Young is a great rocker, but don't take his songs as history.