Killing Trees For Green Energy With PECO

Killing Trees For Green Energy With PECO

By Bob Small

PECO is planning a $12 million investment in Swarthmore as part of a larger statewide electricity initiative that calls for removing lots of trees.

You can call the plan “We Kill Trees To Go Green”

The current utility poles are 35 feet tall, and PECO wants to replace them with fifty footers.

The assessment at the Nov. 15 borough council is that 124 trees must go, most of which are decades old. PECO promises to replace them with 2-and-a-half-foot saplings

PECO refuses to use underground electrical lines it was revealed despite their use in Springfield and at Swarthmore College.

PECO cites higher costs as among the reasons they don’t want to tunnel in the dirt in the borough.

Swarthmore Borough Council has been in negotiations with PECO, but has not found a way forward as of last night’s meeting.

In keeping with our tradition, Swarthmore residents are beginning to organize, with letters and phone calls as the first salvo in the battle.

While PECO has not approached my block yet, but we don’t know that they won’t. To be clear, my household is not involved with the organizing.

There are numerous other examples of PECO’s attempts to destroy trees in a similar fashion. A few are listed below.

https://delco.today  ›  2022 › 08 › peco-plan-to-replace-trees-with-poles-sparks-nether-providence-protest

peco-poles-trees-nether-providence – DELCO.Today

https://www.change.org  ›  p › stop-peco-from-destroying-trees-in-lower-merion-township

Stop PECO from destroying trees in Lower Merion Township

https://www.theintell.com  ›  story › opinion › letters › 2021 › 01 › 17 › lte-why-peco-cutting-down-trees-landisville-road-plumstead › 4178989001

Why is PECO cutting down trees? – The Intelligencer

Killing Trees For Green Energy With PECO
Killing Trees For Green Energy With PECO

Westtown Votes Tax Hike For Open Space

Westtown Votes Tax Hike For Open Space

By Bob Small

Yes, you read that right. In a ballot question this past election day, Westtown residents voted 3,459 to 1,745 (67 percent) to approve a tax increase for the preservation of Crebilly Farms as one of Chesco’s major open spaces.

The earned income tax rate goes from 1 percent to 1.08 percent and the real estate tax rate increases from 3.5 mills to 3.92 mills.

Crebilly farms is the site of the Battle of Brandywine on Sept. 11, 1777, then the largest single-day battle of the American Revolution, which was won by the British/Hessian forces. This  victory  led to the British occupation of Philadelphia.

The estimated cost of the tax increase for a household earning $100,000 would be an additional $80 in local earned income tax. A household with an assessed house value of $250,000 would pay an additional $105 per year.

The Natural Lands Trust  hopes to land about $2.5 million in grants, and says they are well on their way to doing that.

The Daily Local News of Chester County has been ovewhelmed with letters.

Here is one.

Westtown Votes Tax Hike For Open Space
Westtown Votes Tax Hike For Open Space

Most Endangered River Provides Water to 40 Million

Most Endangered River Provides Water to 40 Million Residents

By Joe Guzzardi

At a June 14 Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee meeting, environmentalists warned that the Colorado River’s reservoir level drop might bring dramatic cuts to water deliveries provided to the seven states dependent on the river. Those states are Colorado, California, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Nevada. Alarmingly, given its importance, the conservation group American Rivers ranked the Colorado as No. 1 on its list of the nation’s most endangered rivers.

Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told the committee that maintaining “critical levels” at the largest reservoirs in the U.S. – Lake Mead and Lake Powell – will require large reductions in water deliveries. Touton advised the committee that, in the next two months, her agency is negotiating with the seven states that count on the Colorado River to develop a plan for apportioning the water supply reductions. The Reclamation Bureau is the federal agency charged with assisting the western states, Native American tribes and others to meet water needs. An estimated 40 million residents throughout the region rely on the Colorado for water.

Most Endangered River Provides Water to 40 Million Residents

The committee’s witnesses were unanimous in their predictions that acute water shortages are in the near-term future. John Entsminger, the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager, said that the slow-motion train wreck that’s been accelerating for 20 years has created “the moment of reckoning.” Said Entsminger, “We are 150 feet from 25 million Americans losing access to the Colorado River, and the rate of decline is accelerating.”

Because the Western United States is suffering through a relentless drought, analysts predict that next year the affected states will cope with a decrease of between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water. Scientific Americanreported that 2021’s exceptionally dry year created a record-breaking drought, or mega-drought. The last 20 years have been the driest two decades in the last 1,200 years. To date, 2022 is the driest year on record in California. Researchers predict with a 94 percent degree of certainty that California’s drought will continue for at least one more year.

University of Colorado, Boulder climate scientist Imtiaz Rangwala has observed drought conditions increasingly worsen in the western and central U.S. “The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher.”

But neither during the hearing nor in the media writeups was population growth in the seven western states mentioned. The 2000 populations for Colorado, California, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Nevada were 4.3 million33.9 million1.8 million2.2 million494,0005.1 million and 2 million, respectively. And in 2022, the states’ populations are, respectively, 5.8 million39.5 million2.1 million3.3 million579,0007.6 million and 3.2 million. In slightly more than two decades, about 12 million more people have become dependent on the Colorado for water.

The link between more people and more water consumption is undeniable. Yet Congress, the White House, the media and academia refuse to have a rational discussion about reducing the flow of 1 million-plus legal immigrants which, with their offspring, drive population increases. Knowing that the nation’s western states are in a water crisis, opening the border to millions, as the Biden administration is doing, is ecological suicide. Nevertheless, the status quo on adding population continues on autopilot, consequences be damned.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Most Endangered River Provides Water to 40 Million Residents

Population Surges Drying West

Population Surges Drying West

By Joe Guzzardi

The grisly discovery of human remains at the bottom of Lake Mead is a grim reminder of the Southwest’s growing drought crisis. In early May, a family on a boating outing found, partially buried in Lake Mead National Recreation Area’s muddy banks, a four-decades-old skeleton of a man, a suspected homicide, stuffed into a rotted-out barrel. Skeletal remains were also discovered in May at nearby Callville Bay.

Asked if the victim might have been a mob hit, Geoff Schumacher, the vice president of exhibits and programs at Las Vegas’ Mob Museum, said: “I have a feeling that as this water continues to recede, we’re going to be finding more interesting things at the bottom of Lake Mead.” Schumacher may have been referring to the B-29 Superfortress wreckage found in 2015 in Lake Mead’s 130 feet of water; in 1948, when the bomber crashed, Lake Mead’s depth was 260 feet.

While Schumacher isn’t a climatologist, he like other Far West residents is aware of the inevitable and irreconcilable clash between too many people and dwindling natural resources, primarily water. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and part of a system that supplies water to at least 40 million people across seven states and northern Mexico. Today, it’s dropped to its lowest level since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.

As of August 22, 2021, Lake Mead was filled to just 35 percent of its capacity, and now is at 30 percent. The low water level comes at a time when 95 percent of nine Western states’ land is affected by some level of drought; 64 percent is considered extreme or worse. Shrinking capacity continues a 22-year megadrought that some experts consider the worst in 1,200 years. Megadroughts are defined as droughts that last two decades or longer, but they are not measured by their intensity.

Population Surges Drying West

Snowfall in the Rocky Mountains is Lake Mead’s primary water source. But Audubon Southwest’s policy director Haley Paul said, “Even when the Rocky Mountains get to near-normal levels of snowfall and overall precipitation, what we’ve seen in the last few years is below average river runoff.” Paul explained that drought and heat mean thirstier soils and plants that soak up more water before the precious commodity ever reaches rivers – a compounding domino effect that, because the West is on year 22 of an extended megadrought, will take 22 wet winters to climb out of the hole.

An underreported variable in Lake Mead’s water levels is the population explosion – not an exaggerated expression – in California, Arizona and Nevada. In 1950, the population of Arizona, California and Nevada were, respectively, 750,00010 million and 158,000. Today, Arizona, California and Nevada have 7.6 million39.7 million and 3.2 million residents. Their principal cities, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas have, over the same 70-year period, grown from 221,000 to 4.7 million, from 2 millionto 12.5 million and from 35,000 to 2.8 million. Taken alone, the three states in the aggregate have about 40 million more people since 1950 bathing in, cooking with and drinking water. Housing complexes, luxury hotels, golf courses and mega-mansions are major water devourers.

No end is in sight to irresponsible water usage. The best California Gov. Gavin Newsom has come up with is a tepid, ignored suggestion that his constituents voluntarily limit everyday water consumption. The State Water Resources Conservation Board said that per-capita urban water usage rose 7 percent in March compared to last year, and rose 18.9 percent when compared to March 2020.

Although political correctness forbids identifying immigration as population growth’s major driver, Census Bureau facts confirm the reality. In their Center for Immigration Studies analysis that drew exclusively from Census Bureau data, Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler predicted that, by 2060, immigration will add 75 million people to the U.S. population. In 2017, the U.S. had 35.8 million legal and illegal immigrants. Those immigrants had 16.9 million U.S.-born children and grandchildren.

In sum, immigration added 52.7 million people to the U.S. population between 1982 and 2017, accounting for a little over 56 percent of overall population growth. A related Camarota-Zeigler study, which also drew from Current Population Survey’s monthly data, found that in November 2021, 46.2 million legal and illegal immigrants lived in the U.S., the largest number of immigrants ever recorded in a federal government survey or census dating back to 1850.

No one controls rainfall, but the federal government can help alleviate the worsening water crisis by managing immigration to levels consistent with the available natural resources. If officials continue to shirk their responsibility, then an increasing number of West Coast communities will eventually run dry, and civil disruption over water’s absence will likely ensue.

PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org and joeguzzardi.substack.com.

Population Surges Drying West

Fifth Column Environmentalists

Fifth Column Environmentalists — The confidence Russia had in its Ukrainian invasion stems from the world’s dependence on its oil and natural gas.

One of the reasons for this dependence is due to policies passed in the name of environmentalism in Western democracies.

Several European counties — including Germany — have banned fracking, notes Gatestone Institute.

Germany is also shutting its nuclear power plants.

This important nation is almost entirely dependent on Russia for its energy.

Of course, the US can’t help. Two years ago we may have been an energy exporter but now with Green New Dealies running things and pipelines shuttered, not so.

What’s horrifying is that this weakening is not the result of domestic stupidity but out-and-out treasonous greed.

Yes, our environmental activists are getting mega-bucks from Gazprom, the Russian energy giant which is funneling the money through Bermuda.

They are literally fifth columnists.

Bet your left and right foots that our media outlets and politicians are getting cuts as well.

Oh, the Chinese are also giving greenbacks to greenies, says Gatestone.

Be mad, be angry.

Don’t bleat, roar.

Fifth Column Environmentalists
You know they care about the environment because of all the $$ they give environmentalists LOL
Fifth Column Environmentalists

More People Means Reservoirs Shrink

More People Means Reservoirs Shrink

 By Kathleene Parker


Showing reservoirs, including iconic Lake Mead at Hoover Dam, shrunk to a fraction of their intended size, national news media is reporting that the American Southwest is in the worst 20-year drought in 1,200 years.

Yet, no one asked why President Biden is hellbent on increasing immigration – which has exploded the U.S. population by an average approaching 30 million a decade over the last three decades – when he can’t ensure adequate water for those here now. The Southwest is the fastest growing region of ours, the third most populated nation and one of the world’s fastest growing developed nations – something else never reported.

More People Means Reservoirs Shrink


There are roughly 200 reservoirs along the length of the Colorado River – the primary water source for at least 45 million people in the Colorado River Basin and beyond – that were thought to ensure a 50-year water supply in drought. Yet, by the early 2000s, that 50-year supply was sucked dry!

At Lake Mead, the water level recently fell below the trigger point for the first-ever federal water emergency. That will mean mandatory water cutoffs, delivering a body blow to the Southwest’s economy and drying up farmland needed to feed the nation’s exploding population. But even that might not stop a collapse of the Colorado River system, a vast network of diversion projects and reservoirs stretching from Wyoming to the Mexican border. Meaning, reservoirs might run dry and diversions might no longer take water into cities of millions!

Today’s Phoenix, Arizona, was so named when settlers in the 19th century realized that they were building on the ruins of some long-ago civilization – that of the Hohokam – and named their new settlement after the mythical bird that arises from the ashes of another.

The Four Corner states – Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah – today are dotted with the ruins of the mysterious cliff dwellings and towns of the ancestral Puebloans – the Hohokam, the Anasazi and the Mimbres – who were forced into what we call the Great Abandonment, during the prolonged drought of the late 1200s though the mid-1300s. Hundreds of thousands of people fled what had been relative paradises in Colorado’s Montezuma Valley and on the once-verdant Mesa Verde, in the Gila Mountains of New Mexico and on the high uplands of Arizona, relocating to areas, mostly along the Rio Grande, with somewhat dependable water.

Lake Mead, the second largest reservoir in North America, is now 35 percent “full,” but since the bottom 20 percent is useless sludge, that means nearly empty, just as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography warned would happen in the 2020s. In California, some reservoirs can no longer generate hydropower, and Lake Powell, just upstream from Lake Mead and the largest reservoir in North America, also flirts with being empty. Yet, Big Media never ask if Biden grasps:

  1. That this might not be drought, but merely a return to far-drier norms than 1960 to 1995, the wettest time in the Southwest in 2000 years.
     
  2. That there is not “always ‘new’ water” to be found or some miraculous technofix to save us – although, admittedly, more people mean more sewage effluent to process for drinking. Yum!
     
  3. That the current drought might pale in comparison with what climate change might bring.

In 1922, the Colorado River Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California met near Santa Fe to legally divide, or allocate, the Colorado River. But the resulting Colorado River Compactbegan with an “Oops!” of staggering proportions, as 16-million acre feet were divvied up, even though the river usually carries only 13 m.a.f. (An acre foot is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of ground with a foot of water.)

That didn’t matter in a Southwest that at the time supported under 5 million people. But, if immigration continues at the astronomical rates of recent decades, or even increases, the Southwest could see its population double, even as flows on the Colorado will likely average a paltry 7 m.a.f. a year, maybe even as low as 5 m.a.f.

So, twice the people, half the water.

Will that bring our own Great Abandonment, an exodus of 45 million people trying to flee anywhere other than a drought-and-climate-change seared Southwest?

Are you even aware, Mr. Biden, of that possibility?


A contributing writer to Progressives for Immigration Reform, Kathleene Parker, of Los Alamos, New Mexico, is a fifth-generation resident of the American Southwest. A retired journalist who long covered a national laboratory in New Mexico, she now writes nationally on water, population and the need to re-regulate major media.

More People Means Reservoirs Shrink

Biden Violates Environmental Policy Act With Border Wall Stop

Biden Violates Environmental Policy Act With Border Wall Stop

By Joe Guzzardi

Responding to the consequences of President Biden’s wildly out-of-control border mess, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued the administration in the U.S. District Court of Arizona. At issue is Biden’s unilateral decision to stop border wall construction, and to end the policy which requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their petitions are reviewed. The wall and Mexican Migration Protocols are among former President Trump’s signature immigration accomplishments, and helped to slow population growth in Arizona and other states.

Biden Violates Environmental Policy Act With Border Wall Stop

Biden’s irresponsible, illegal border permissiveness violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which President Richard Nixon signed in 1970 and which recognized that population directly affects the environment. Today, 90 percent of that growth is caused by immigration. NEPA requires that every agency considering an action that will affect the environment must analyze and publicize those outcomes before going forward. The published analysis is officially called an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

Yet the Department of Homeland Security and, before it, the Immigration and Naturalization Service have steadfastly refused to comply with NEPA even though it’s federal law. Environmentalists like Julie Axelrod, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Litigation and a former Trump administration senior Environmental Protection Agency policy advisor, who have testified before the Council on Environmental Quality, had their logical arguments fall on deaf ears.

From the Arizona complaint which lays out the indisputable truths:

“Migrants (like everyone else) need housing, infrastructure, hospitals, and schools. They drive cars, purchase goods, and use public parks and other facilities. Their actions also directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which directly affects air quality. All of these activities have significant environmental impact which, as discussed above, courts have recognized as cognizable impacts under NEPA.”

On April 15, Brnovich told Tucker Carlson Tonight that the average border crosser carries about 6-8 pounds of trash. Using the best estimate of 2 million aliens illegally entering the U.S. this year, Brnovich said that translates to “about a million of pounds of trash each month.” Brnovich insisted that the so-called environmental movement, which includes the hypocritical Sierra Club, cares only about raising money, not safeguarding America’s beauty.

U.S. immigration-driven population growth is dire, and should be a matter of grave concern to Congress. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that immigrants and births to immigrants represent more than 80 percent of the nation’s population growth. Yet Congress refuses to develop a responsible immigration policy that would provide a better quality of life for the nation’s native-born and settled immigrants.

Instead, Congress is intent to let unchecked population increases propel the nation, figuratively speaking, off a cliff. In 2016, respected environmental scientist and natural resources planner Leon Kolankiewicz, working with Progressives for Immigration Reform, completed a three-year study which led to a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), an analysis of the long-term, cumulative effects of immigration on America’s environmental resources.

Summarized, the study assessed three alternative immigration scenarios, all projected out to 2100: 1) the No Action Alternative, in which current immigration rates of approximately 1.25 million per year would be maintained; 2) the Expansion Alternative, or 2.25 million annual immigration; and 3) the Reduction Alternative, 250,000 annual immigration, the historic level.

As of Earth Day 2021, the U.S. population stands at slightly more than 330 million. In approximate numbers, the No Action Alternative would lead to a U.S. population of 524 million in 2100; the Expansion Alternative, the option the Biden administration is committed to, would create a 669 million U.S. population in 2100, and the Reduction Alternative would lead to a 379 million U.S. population in 2100, not ideal but the most manageable of the three options.

Assessing each of the three possible immigration levels’ outcomes and their potential environmental impacts on urban sprawl and loss of farmland, habitat loss and impacts on biodiversity, water demands and withdrawals from natural systems, carbon dioxide emissions and resultant climate change, and energy demands and national security implications, the results are widespread, ominous and highly adverse.

Congress has a long way to go to make up for ground lost since Wisconsin’s former U.S. Senator and Governor Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day more than half a century ago. As Nelson’s daughter Tia said, her father would be “deeply distressed” by the lack of progress on environmental causes. And, immigration is intimately related to environmental issues. As the Earth Day founder said, “… (I)t’s phony to say, ‘I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.’ It’s just a fact that we can’t take all the people who want to come here.”

Arizona’s lawsuit puts environmentalists back in the game in a manner earlier suggested by PFIR in the PEIS and the “Let’s Make America Green Again” campaign.

If other border states, such as Texas and New Mexico, joined Arizona, then environmentalists’ important goal – to preserve America’s magnificence – could start to be within reach.

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Biden Violates Environmental Policy Act With Border Wall Stop
Biden Violates Environmental Policy Act With Border Wall Stop

Bidens Pro Ukraine Energy While Anti-US Energy Or Things That Make You Go Hmm

Bidens Pro Ukraine Energy While Anti-US Energy Or Things That Make You Go Hmm –Put this in the category of things that make you go hmmmm. Joe Biden wants to end fracking (and the entire oil industry for that matter) in America. His son Hunter was on the board of directors of Burisma, which is one of Europe’s major producer of natural gas.

Bidens Pro Ukraine Energy While Anti-US Energy Or Things That Make You Go Hmm --Put this in the category of things that make you go hmmmm.
Ukraine Gas Good, US Gas Bad!

Hmmmm. There must be a logical explanation for it!!

Bidens Pro Ukraine Energy While Anti-US Energy Or Things That Make You Go Hmm

Joe Biden Mansions Show He’s Fake On Climate Change

Joe Biden Mansions Show He’s Fake On Climate Change — Working class Joe Biden’s primary residence is a 6,850-square-foot mansion in Greenville, Del. and a 4,800-square-foot vacation house in Rehoboth Beach. Further he is renting a 12,000 square feet mansion that boasts marble fireplaces, a sauna, five bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, and a gym in McLean, Va.

Joe Biden Mansions Show He's Fake On Climate Change
One of Joe Biden’s planet destroying residences.

You seriously think he seriously believes that global warming is a problem?

My Democrat friends, you are being conned.

Joe Biden Mansions Show He’s Fake On Climate Change

Aqua Backing Carolyn Comitta

Aqua Backing Carolyn Comitta — Carolyn Comitta, who is seeking to replace fellow Democrat Andy Dinniman to represent the 19th District in the Pennsylvania Senate, is backed by Aqua America.

The Bryn Mawr-based, now-national water company that once called itself Springfield Water Co. and the Philadelphia Suburban Water Co. but now calls itself Essential Utilities gave a grand to Carolyn in April. Wonder why they want her to win.

Could it have anything to do with their lust for the locally owned Chester Water Authority?

Guess we know where Carolyn, who now represents the 156th District in the State House, comes down on the matter.

Hey did you see where Aqua — excuse us Essential Utilities — is making beaucoup bucks supplying water to frackers in the Marcellus Shale? Not that we have any problem with it but we kind of wonder how much that warms the hearts of Dinniman’s voters.

Aqua Backing Carolyn Comitta
Aqua Backing Carolyn Comitta