Red Cloud's Revolution: Oglalla Sioux Freeing Themselves From Fossil Fuel
Red Cloud’s Revolution: Oglalla Sioux Freeing Themselves From Fossil Fuel
“People don’t like being on the grid here,” Red Cloud says, “because they’ve been coexisting with the earth – the sun, the wind – for most of their history.”
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Portable solar arrays helped power the Oceti Sakowin Camp, which rose on the north end of the Standing Rock Reservation in the summer and fall of 2016 in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Though primarily powered by wood and gasoline, the camps also ran on a great deal of solar. (Photo: Saul Elbein)
Henry Red Cloud, like so many Oglalla Sioux young men, left the reservation to work in construction. When he returned home in 2002, he needed a job, and also wanted to make a difference. He attended a solar energy workshop and saw the future.
Today, Red Cloud runs Lakota Solar and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center, which have become catalysts for an innovative new economic network – one that employs locals and connects tribes, while building greater energy independence among First Nations.
The company is building and installing alternative energy systems, and training others to do the same, throughout remote areas of U.S. reservations, thus allowing the Sioux and others to leap past outdated fossil fuel technology altogether.
Henry Red Cloud’s company has another more radical purpose: it helps provide energy to remote Water Protector camps, like the one at Standing Rock protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Solar power and other alternative energy sources are vital at such remote sites, as they power up cellphones, connecting resistors to the media and outside world.
Henry Red Cloud, founder of Lakota Solar and the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center. Photo by Saul Elbein
It’s high summer in South Dakota, and a cruel sun beats down with an endless floodtide of photons that burns skin through t-shirts and tinted car windows. That’s the way Henry Red Cloud likes it. To Red Cloud – descendant of a great Lakota insurgent chief, founder of Lakota Solar, and self-proclaimed “solar warrior” – that July sun is key to the independence of his fellow Lakota and native peoples across America; it also embodies a hot business opportunity. It’s July 5, the tail end of Red Cloud’s Energy Independence Day weekend, first announced in the wake of the Trump Inauguration, and meant to spread off-grid skills throughout Indian country – possibly with radical purpose.
I walked out of the sun and indoors to find Red Cloud leading a solar workshop, holding forth to a group of eager indigenous participants about photovoltaic cells and the danger of phantom loads – the way in which many appliances continue drawing current even when switched off. “Vampire” loads are a constant suck on household energy, consuming electricity and thereby emitting carbon to no purpose – while also draining an off-grid setup with limited juice.
A set up, like, say, the remote, off-grid camps at the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests in 2016.
Red Cloud offers up a hypothetical: “Let’s say you have a Water Protector camp, your solar array is charging, you notice the inverter is on, but nothing is plugged in.” The stocky 60-something instructor, with long ponytail and far-seeing eyes, frowns and shakes his head, indicating trouble. “Well, that empty power strip can draw more than your actual daily use,” draining down the batteries faster than they can charge.”
A bearded man in his late 20s raises his hand. “That bad for the array?”
“Well,” Red Cloud responds, “it’s not a problem if you know about it. Just plug in a couple cellphones,” and charge them up so protestors can reach out to the media from the remote site. That way, he says, at least now the array is doing some work.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/21/red-clouds-revolution-oglalla-sioux-freeing-themselves-fossil-fuel
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I oppose all dangerous fuels, and I'm definitely antagonistic to open air combustion of biomass, since it's responsible for half of the seven million deaths each year from air pollution.
Here's my standard link on the subject:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
I'm not interested in excusing gasoline, or for that matter, dangerous natural gas whenever the sun isn't shining. I want them banned all the time.
On the left, where I consider myself to be mostly because I believe in justice for everyone, including the billions of people on this planet who live on less than ten dollars a day, we have this awful notion that solar energy is clean and green and sustainable.
It is none of these things. Arguably the fact that 10% of the crops in Southern China are contaminated with cadmium has something to do with mining cadmium there to make "green" solar cells.
Worse though is that solar energy hasn't worked; it isn't working; and it won't work. World energy consumption is now 576 exajoules per year, and, after 50 years of blind cheering for them, solar and wind combined don't produce 10 of them.
We spent two trillion dollars on this planet in the last ten years alone on wind and solar energy - which is inexplicably popular among people who claim to give a shit about the environment - and this is the result:
(The "investment" information is here, in the UNEP Frankfurt School Report, issued each year: GLOBAL TRENDS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT 2017)
Now, I'm a scientist, not a cheerleader for mining lanthanides, producing concrete, steel and aluminum for the wind industry, nor for mining cadmium, tellurium, selenium while depleting the supplies of elements like indium and gallium - that rightly belong to future generations as much as ours - to chase the useless, expensive, and failed so called "renewable energy" chimera.
On the left we have gotten rather smug about focusing on the denial and conservatism of the right, but if we are honest, we will confront our own biases and our own conservatism.
We are conservatives because we prefer our dogma over reality.
As a scientist I don't believe that theory trumps experiment. The so called "renewable energy" experiment - after sucking more money in ten years than the entire annual gross domestic product of India, a nation with more than 1 billion human beings in it - has failed.
In 2000, 80% of 420 exajoules being annually consumed then came from dangerous fossil fuels, which kill people whenever they operate normally, as referenced above. In 2016, 81% of the 576 exajoules came from dangerous fossil fuels, which again to repeat as many times as it is necessary to get it through our heads, came from dangerous fossil fuels, which kill people whenever they operate normally, as referenced above.
IEA 2017 World Energy Outlook, Table 2.2 page 79 (MTOE converted to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)
Now there are lots of people who will come up with rote cheering for solar crap, because they don't bother to think what will happen to this stuff when future generations - children being born today - have to dispose with what is essentially the equivalent of the already intractable problem of electronic waste. They don't know chemistry, toxicology, engineering or any other thing relevant to making decisions about these things.
Because they are proceeding in ignorance, they are robbing future generations, leaving them with fewer resources to clean up ever larger messes, the largest mess being the planetary atmosphere, our favorite waste dump, and one which is becoming increasingly toxic.
Am I on the right board?
I don't know. I was banned from one "democratic" board for telling the truth, and it's quite possible I'll be banned from another for telling the truth.
I consider myself a liberal, because I personally deeply believe in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human of Rights, put forth by the person who I regard as the greatest Democrat of the 20th century, then UN ambassador Eleanor Roosevelt and passed by the UN General Assembly in that year:
In particular, I'm enamored of section 1 of article 25 of that declaration which reads:
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Am I'm on the right board? Again, I don't know.
It does seem to me that there is a subset of Democrats who don't give a shit about section 1, Article 25 produced above. They think that being a Democrat is involved in cheering for the semiconductor industry whenever the word "solar" is pronounced - while denying that they are also cheering for the gas industry in spite of the fact this is precisely what they're doing; cheering for that asshole billionaire Elon Musk, his car for other billionaires and millionaires, and his batteries produced from what may well be a conflict metal, cobalt, and seeking to fill pristine deserts, untouched mountain tops, and dying seas with greasy wind turbines that will be landfill in 20 to 25 years.
I'm an old man, certainly scheduled to die soon enough, and perhaps my kind of Democrat is a doomed anachronism.
I expanded on my ideas at more length here:
Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
Feel free to either read or ignore them and to send the admins here a note to offer your opinion as to whether or not I belong here.
I'll say this, I am paying attention to climate change, and in fact wrote about the results of the last 20 years this morning, in this space where I may or may not belong, which I'll now repeat:
and came in at 410.36 ppm at Mauna Loa. (It was 2.97 ppm higher than the same week of 2016).
There were, as I recall, several days around those weeks in mid-May in which individual readings recorded figures around 412, but no weekly average that high.
Nonetheless, 2017 overall was (in 21st century terms) a rather "mild" year, coming in overall "only" at 2.13 ppm average over 2016, which came in at 2.98 ppm over 2015, which came in at 3.05 ppm more than 2014.
In the 42 years recorded at Mauna Loa in the 20th century, only 5 years exceeded 2.00 ppm increases in a single year. One of those was 1998 - also an El Nino year - when the Indonesian and Malayan fires set to clear rain forest for palm oil plantations to provide "renewable" biodiesel for Germany's "renewable fuel portfolio" went out of control. At that time it was a record, 2.93 ppm.
In the 21st century, thus far, 11 years have exceeded 2.00 pm, and one, for the first time ever, as mentioned above, exceeded 3.00 ppm.
2016 was the first year in recorded history during which no single weekly average fell below 400 ppm. No one now living will ever again see a reading at Mauna Loa that will be lower, particularly with our overwhelming impetus to lie to ourselves and to disguise doing nothing as doing something, as pretending to care.
We don't care. We happily run along reporting that future generations will do what we have proved unable to do, which is the big lie between all this "by 2050" or "by 2100" crap put out by Greenpeace and other anti-science "do nothing but offer (mystic) prophesy" organizations.
In any case, the maximal reading in 2017 was 10 ppm higher than the minimum in the previous year.
The minimum for 2017 came a little late this year, in the week of October 1, when it was 402.97 ppm, "only" 2.17 ppm higher than the same week of previous year. This suggests that I have failed to be optimistic, and we will "only" see a maximum of around 413 ppm in May of this year.
420 is probably between 2 to 4 years off, "by 2022" in the parlance of the optimists, depending on the nature of extreme weather swings.
Someone should write to Bill McKibben. I'm sure he's all pumped up to reverse this and bring us back to 350, by slogans or by prayer, if not by engineering.
Whether or not I belong here or I don't, are you sure you're paying attention?
I would submit if you think that cheering for semiconductors and mineral mining and confusing it with either environmentalism or concern for humanity, you're not.
Have a wonderful weekend.
