While running errands yesterday I notice the leaves on some of the swamp maples and birches are already changing color, the maples shifting to red and the birches to yellow. At the moment I am seeing these colors only here and there, but that will change soon enough. I figure it will be another three weeks before we start seeing the rest of the trees start changing.
I have no idea what the colors will be like this fall, particularly since the summer was considerably wetter than normal. If they are halfway normal I expect we’ll see a large number of tourists – so-called “leaf peepers” – visiting to take in the reds, oranges, and yellows that will replace the green. It also means the locals will be using the back roads away from the tourist traffic. The only downside will be the restaurants will be crowded, particularly since most of the summer places closed after Labor Day.
It’s one of the prices we pay for living in a resort/tourist area.
At least we’ll get a break between the end of foliage season and the beginning of ski season.
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“There can be only one.”
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Talk about irony:
It turns out a Kansas electric vehicle battery plant owned by Panasonic will be powered by a coal-fired power plant.
You couldn’t make this stuff up even if you tried.Here, it’s anathema to power ‘green’ industries with coal-fired power plants. In China, almost all green industries are powered by coal-fired power plants. The only difference is that since China is an ocean away and the factories (and power plants) are out of sight and some of the labor in the factories is slave labor, it’s perfectly fine with our domestic Greens and their ‘woke’ brothers and sisters.
A new electric vehicle battery factory in Kansas is demanding so much energy that the state is delaying the retirement of a coal plant to make sure the facility has enough power. https://t.co/gU3LACRuT0Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels.
— Cowboy State Daily (@daily_cowboy) September 22, 2023
The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.
In testimony to the Kansas City Corporation Commission, which is the state’s equivalent of the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a representative of Evergy, the utility serving the factory, said that the 4 million-square-foot Panasonic facility creates “near term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective,” according to the newspaper.
As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plants to transition units at the plant to natural gas.
But use coal-fired plants here and those same folks talk about murdering the planet.
What a bunch of hypocrites.
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The war on agriculture continues.
We’ve seen actions taken by the courts in the Netherlands working to destroy farms because the Greens demanded elimination of fertilizer use. No one ever bothered looking into where the food would come from if farms were put out of business/destroyed on the behalf of the lunatics. Farmers rebelled, protesting and starting political action that ended up throwing out members of their respective parliaments who supported such actions.
Now many of those same type of people have decided a war on beef is the only way to save the planet...for their masters.
‘‘For those of you who don’t know my home country, The Netherlands is a tiny country in North-West Europe and when I say tiny, I mean tiny.The speaker, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, went into detail about what happened and how the farmers fought back. She also talked about the same thing happening here in the US.
For reference, the state of South Dakota alone is 5x the size of my entire country.
We might be small in size, but we’re big at one thing. And that’s farming.
Farming is the backbone, not just of our economy, but of our nation’s history, identity and culture.
The foundations of modern agriculture in the Netherlands were laid in the early 1500 and oftentimes farmers who are alive today come from families whose farming history dates back hundreds of years.
As a result of this, we are now amongst the world’s most lucrative, productive and technologically advanced farmers in the world.
In fact, after you guys here in America, we are the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the entire world and the largest exporter of beef in the European Union.
It’s not an overstatement to say that we together, The United States of America and The Netherlands, feed the world.
For now. Because Unfortunately the most powerful people in the world, want to stop us.
So let me tell you a real life cautionary tale. Let me tell you about what exactly has been going on with the Dutch farmers and what prompted them to go out and protest.
In 2019, a group of environmental activists sued the Dutch government, claiming that Dutch natural reserves were under threat because of a so-called ‘nitrogen crisis’ and that the Dutch government violated Dutch law and European regulations by failing to sufficiently protect nature.
As the saying goes, Read The While Thing. There’s also a YouTube video of Eva addressing the issue. It’s well worth the time.
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One a few occasions I have mentioned how my town has been handling the explosive growth of Short Term Rentals (STRs), also know as collectively as AirBnBs.
I live in central New Hampshire in an area known as the Lakes Region. It’s a summer resort area that attracts people from all over the Northeast. It turns out AirBnBs have been popular which has led to some issues between the owners/renters, neighboring home owners, and town governments.
Different towns have handled a number of different ways. For instance, my town allows them but regulates them and requires STR owners to apply for permits which include a number of requirements.
One of the problems we were having is that we didn’t always know who owned them or who to contact if there were problems. The regulations included requirements for providing contact information. They also required inspections to insure the properties were safe and to verify information provided in the permit applications.
Some towns imposed draconian regulations that made it difficult to offer STRs. Some tried to ban them outright which led to at least one lawsuit that went all the way to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
A town adjacent to mine is now working its way through the minefield of regulating Short Term Rentals. Hopefully it will look closely at how other towns are handling them, seeing what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work.
I wish them luck.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is more fall-like, a few leaves are starting to turn color, and where thoughts of raking leaves in the future are intruding.