I, Michael Dee, have lived most of my life on Lake Erie. In 1955 my Dad escaped the city and bought a place on the lake, hoping to expand a boat livery there. But the devil fools with the best laid plans. Lake Erie nearly died in the 1960s, as did our boat livery.

Today, while fishing five miles out, I ponder the magnificent fishery, the tranquility of a summer day, the impressive spring waterfowl migration, the majesty of winter ice, and the awesome storms of Lake Erie that rival the surges of hurricanes.

25,000 years ago the half-mile thick glacier that covered us for the previous 2.5 million years started melting away as the Earth warmed out of the Ice Age. Lake Erie formed 11,000 years ago, draining the upper Lakes into Ontario and the Atlantic. It must have been a freshwater Eden before the hand of modernity arrived.

In the 1920s, lamprey eels found their way through the original Welland Canal and into Lake Erie from the Atlantic, allowing them to bypass Niagara Falls. These blood suckers wiped out lake trout and other species by 1950 until biologists found ways to defeat them. But new threats were already emerging.

Lake Erie was home to industries that contaminated her waters with PCBs, dioxins, and other poisons. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969 from all the chemicals and junk floating on it. Today the Cuyahoga (and all of Lake Erie) is again safe for fish, with the old contaminants safely sequestered (for now) under years of sediment.

During the 1960s the lake was a dumping ground for human waste, which included raw sewage and phosphates from detergents. This waste was powerful fertilizer, causing massive algae blooms that rotted on the bottom, depleting the water of oxygen. Algae blooms wiped out the legendary “blue pike” (a unique Lake Erie walleye strain). The lake was declared “dead”.

When I was young, we had to push our boat through rotting algae (a.k.a. gook) up to our waists in order to go “deep swimming” away from the ecological disaster along the shore. The gook persisted from June through August.

Eventually phosphates were banned, and new sewage treatment systems ended the raw sewage problem. In time, the lake generated a new biology, and in the late 1980s, Lake Erie began its future as a walleye gold mine, with great bass fishing as well. But another threat was already on the horizon.

By the late 1980s, zebra mussels arrived in the bilge of ocean freighters from the Caspian Sea. These little critters exploded across the lake, and had a profound effect: Besides displacing the natural mussels and clams of Lake Erie, they filtered the water, making it clearer than ever before, which pushed the fish into deeper water, again changing the lake’s biology. Later the gobies arrived and threatened other species.

Then the politicians introduced ethanol mandates and subsidies, purportedly to lower our carbon footprint. Forget that ethanol has no effect on our carbon footprint — let us not allow facts to interfere with corporate welfare for Big Agra. To harvest the lucrative ethanol subsidies, farmers across the Lake Erie watershed planted massive areas of fallow land for corn production.

Corn requires massive fertilization, and that fertilizer (made in a fossil fuel intensive process) ran down rivers like the Maumee into Lake Erie. It created a new round of algae blooms so large they were visible from space. Clueless politicians had created another man-made disaster. Yet, we still subsidize destructive and useless ethanol.

Now, sitting five miles offshore fishing for those wonderful walleyes, we look upon the Dunkirk power plant and remember the yellow streaks of yesteryear emanating from the stacks – sulfur dioxide.That problem was fixed many years ago, but now the power plant now sits unnecessarily idle. Some very powerful special interests forced us into the nonsense of Wind/Solar/BESS instead of converting Dunkirk to Natural Gas, which would have been faster, cheaper, more reliable, and much more environmentally friendly than Wind/Solar/BESS. We marvel at how acts of such stupidity continue to emanate from Albany.

From our fishing spot we scan the southern horizon where the once beautiful Chautauqua Ridge now resembles an industrial wasteland.

Wind turbines, too numerous to count, dominate the ridge and remind us of how ridiculous our energy policies have been. Wind is the most expensive and environmentally destructive energy technology, both in terms of direct costs, as well as its massive land-use and equalmaterial processing requirements. Wind and solar power require 500 to 1,000 times as much land per MWH of production as fossil fuel or nuclear based production, and require fossil fuel generation infrastructure to be built for backup anyway. Or, we could build four to five times as much wind and solar, and use BESS for backup. Insanity!

We could have avoided the whole mess by repowering Dunkirk with natural gas, but that wouldn’t have satisfied the Big Wind investors who owned the politicians. Now the turbo machinery is no longer usable in Dunkirk. It has been idle too long to restore. What a waste.

After all our insults to Lake Erie in the past, we have new legislation in Albany to force wind turbines into the lake to meet the insane mandates of CLCPA. Installation will stir up all the toxic sediments that were safely sequestered 50 years ago, again poisoning wildlife, fish and yes, humans. Wind turbine operation will cause massive kills of migratory birds, while producing our most expensive electricity yet. Just look up the projected “strike price” that Albany will require you to pay- four times normal.

Wow! Another walleye on the line! That is, until the Wind Turbines make it illegal to fish here.

My Lake Erie memories fade away as I am again reminded of the industrial-strength stupidity and greed of Leftist New York politicians and their Wall Street puppet masters.

Michael Dee is a Silver Creek resident. He writes with Scott Axelson of Jamestown.