Good morning! Happy Frigid Tuesday. 🌅

Only one more really cold day or so we tell ourselves. Things should moderate tomorrow with rain coming in.

Partly sunny and 16 degrees in Delmar, NY. ⛅ There is a northwest breeze at 11 mph. 🍃. The current wind chill is 3. Things will start to thaw out at around 2 pm. 🌡️

Kind of cold and raw for the morning walk 🚶 but it’s clear and the sun is rising. ☀ April is around the corner 🌷 so even a cold morning isn’t that cold. Red winged Black Birds don’t seem to mind the cold though. No mourning doves around though. 🕊️

Yesterday was a busy day at work 💼 but I kept things moving as more things piled up in the queue. It was a cold day yesterday both for the evening walk and when I got home, though under the covers with the electric blanket and lights out at eight o’clock it was comfortable and I got a good night’s sleep 😴.

Riding the bus home last night, ⛪ I passed a large event packing town hall. Getting home 🏡 I was reading on the Facebook it was a hearing about some large suburbanite development off of Elsmere Avenue heading out towards the Delmar bypass and Wally World. You know the type with the chemically treated lawns, poly vinyl chloride siding and colored televisions 📺. You think I would think it was a cause I would care about but not really. With such massive industrial solar and wind being built, the suburbanite developers are small fish 🐠.

I’m just more focused on making money 💵, and I’m busy and not really interested in politics and all that the time and money it takes to going to public hearings and protests. I don’t consider New York to be my home 🏡, just a place to make some money before leaving for good. I’m well aware of the directions things are going. 🌲 Fighting development in the Pine Bush is a cause I’m into but for everything else I’m mostly just focused on the future 🔮.

I was also reading 📖 an article on NPR about the increasingly radical climate change activists 🌎 which want to site massive industrial solar and wind facilities without serious review of environmental impacts. Solar developers increasingly are ignoring impacts to endangered species, wetlands and prime farm land – and the toxic materials their panels and turbines are made out of. They feel like the climate benefits exceed all others. Maybe the one benefit is they are continuing to drive down the price of solar and supporting equipment – which will be good when I build my own homestead. 🚜

Probably the good news 📰 is that communities are increasingly speaking up against industrial renewable facilities ✊✊🏻✊🏼✊🏿 and some states are passing laws to rein in the abuses and scams of the renewable industry that threaten hundreds of square miles of forest and farm land. People are taking developers to court, fighting for their rights. ⚖ I see renewable energy as the next big fight 🌎 – they are in many ways like the highway developers of the 1960s and the nuclear power ⚛ plants of the seventies. Renewable energy will create this generations Jane Jacobs fighting the power brokers.