Payne in Germany, Part 3: Green ugly

(Michigan View editor Henry Payne traveled to Germany this month to revisit Berlin and Frankfurt for the first time in 28 years. He reports on what has changed in the once-divided country and what Market Socialist Europe – the troubled economic model for the Granholm and Obama administrations – portends for the U.S. Third of three parts)

Koblenz, Germany - The Eifel Mountains were once one of Western Germany’s spectacular landscapes with farmed, pine-rich hillsides rolling up from river valleys.

But those vistas are fast disappearing thanks to the Green movement and its wind turbine eyesores.

From Eifel to Braunschweig to the Baltic, where blue sky once met green grass or aqua sea in a symphony of beauty, now ugly, white windmills chop at the horizon. Twentieth century technology had created efficient, centralized, 600 MW power sources like coal and nuclear plants – their white cooling towers and transmission lines limited to a few corridors stretching between metro areas. Now 21st century environmentalist’s preferred, inefficient windmills choke the landscape – Germany has 200,000 and counting – as turbines gulp the intermittent wind of open land. Far from population centers, this antiquated grid forces lines in an expensive criss-cross of nature back to metro areas.

This is Michigan’s future too as Greens – inspired by Jennifer Granholm’s Euro-topia – push a ballot measure to force 25 percent of the state’s power from alternative sources (read wind) by 2025.

Like Germany, Michigan’s once beautiful forests and Great Lakes would become ugly squatting grounds for garish pinwheels – their utility lines cutting swaths through pristine vistas back to metro areas. In return, Michigan would get higher utility bills and lower tourism as travelers seek out prettier venues.

Thus has the Green religion come full circle.

As an elementary school student in the ’70s Earth Decade, I was marinated in the then-Green gospel: Visual pollution is bad. The movement’s edu-stooges drilled us on the damage that billboards, trash, and junkyards did to the natural landscape around us. We students drew posters decrying the cluttering of the Earth’s landscape. How times have changed.

In Michigan as in Germany, citizens today protest the Green eyesores ruining their natural landscapes. Once upon a time, these residents would have been green for opposing visual pollution.

Today they are enemies of the polar bear.