There is not a telephone pole, fence post, or another human in sight.

You can hear the flapping of the wings of a lone raptor as you trudge up a ridge in the southern Diablo Range.

As you near the crest you hear it.

It’s a whoosh.

Or is it a whoop?

No, it’s somewhere in between.

Once on the ridge, you’ll be looking down at Dinosaur Point hugging the western edge of the manmade San Luis Reservoir.

Had it been 66 million years ago the odd sound you were hearing could have been from the flapping wings of a pterodactyl that fits nicely into the scenario of evidence left behind in geologic formations that led to the naming of Dinosaur Point.

But this is now.

And the odd sound is getting louder with each upward step.

Then you see the source.

A massive soaring cylinder with an equally massive rotating blade.

Once atop the ridge, you can see perhaps two dozen or more.

Each one is helping pump life into modern civilization.

Water may be essential for life, but energy — whether it is electricity whipped up by spinning turbines or decomposed carbon life forms such as dinosaur that are fuel — is the lifeblood of modern civilization.

The windmills are in large concentrations in the hills of the Pacheco Pass, as well as the Altamont Pass and Tehachapi Pass, plus less intense clusters elsewhere in California.

They can even be solo affairs, such as the lone windmill on the agricultural operation within the “V” where Interstate 580 converge near the San Joaquin-Stanislaus county line.

The reason the windmills are where they are is because of the wind.

But there are plenty of windy ridges near energy hogs such as major cities that have yet to be harnessed.

The reason they haven’t is simple.

Not very many people are vested in Pacheco State Pass, the rugged Tehachapi Mountains, or the Altamont Hills.

Suggest ringing East Bay Parks in the Oakland Hills with windmills and an 8.0 event on the political Richter scale would shake California.

California’s insatiable appetite for energy — after all, we need electricity hogs such as artificial intelligence and crypto currency so Amazon can more effectively target market and techies can roll the dice to get incredibly rich mining the Internet — and our desire to be 100 percent green reeks of colonialism and breeds serious disconnect from our individual actions and decisions.

It’s “colonialism” because we want someone else to bear the costs of our green self-righteousness.

And it goes way beyond “views” being ruined or our personal ideas of natural paradises being scarred.

California sits on natural gas and oil reserves that can more than power our energy needs as we shift toward being greener and the replacement of what ultimately is a finite amount of carbon based energy that can be extracted from the earth.

But we opt not to use them.

Instead, we took a course that has basically pushed to shut them down before the energy they generate can be replaced by other means within California.

That means we are making other states and nations pay the cost of us being green.

What makes that a major tragedy is you will be hard pressed to find anyplace else on earth that has as such tight regulation on carbon-based energy production than in California.

And that goes for precious metals that are the key to a wide repertoire of green energy initiatives such as electric vehicles and massive battery storage.

Lithium can be found in eastern California. A process exists to extract it from the Salton Sea in Imperial County.

Yet not one ounce of lithium is helping power EVs in California even though the Golden State has a significantly higher proportional number of electric vehicles on the road than any other state and most, if not all, nations.

The EVs are powered with materials extracted under what, by California standards, are barbaric to not just the workers and the surrounding communities but the environment as well.

Lithium, if the state were to make it possible to mine it, would be taken from the ground and processed under regulations that would substantially reduce the human and environmental toll.

But when you view yourself as the “chosen one” you shouldn’t have to desecrate your own backyard to any degree to pursue a greener life.

One can only imagine how the debate regarding artificial intelligence and even allowing the mega-energy hog that crypto currency creates would be shaped if the vast majority of Californians day in and day saw how their lifestyle was being powered.

Windmills are hard to miss.

But as those who cherish the hills will tell you, the can become part of the landscape without too many issues if done right.

It also reminds you that electricity doesn’t come out of thin air when you power up a computer although windmills arguably make that possible.

The real issue isn’t just whether to be green. Nor is just the best way to get green.

It also needs to include personal responsibility.

There are observations made all the time about our growing disconnect.

Think of asking kids where milk comes from.

Some 100 plus years ago few 5 year-olds would have been hard-pressed not to say cows. 

And it’s not because they read it in a book, googled it on line, or used artificially intelligence in the pedigree of Alexis or Siri.

It’s because there was a good chance they saw milk actually come from a cow.

One can’t hope but wonder how much wiser our individual energy consumption would be if each new technology requiring an inordinate amount of electricity to make someone rich or amuse us resulted in “x” amount more windmills being erected in our respective neighborhoods.

It might have led to the government putting its money into hydrogen research early on instead of electric cars.

It was the decision of government to subsidize EV research and development that left hydrogen in the dust.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking.

I am not a saint. None of us are.

But back in 1992, when driving to Death Valley in late November, when the extreme southern portion of the Sierra some 20 miles distant was invisible at noon as I merged from Highway 99 to eastbound Highway 178 in Bakersfield, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

It was not fog.

It was smog.

Experts could talk until they were blue in the face about the need for tougher smog checks and to increase miles driven per gallon of gas and how driving in the Bay Area and Northern San Joaquin Valley sent pollutants south to where it was trapped against the Sierra-Tehachapi-Coastal Range.

But until one actually saw the problem, it didn’t register.

It was enough for me to decide — when I was positioned to do so and the technology existed to switch to a hybrid to stretch my gas mileage.

There was no tax credit or even rebate dangled in front of me.

It was a choice made on the reality of once a year driving through what other Californians lived in daily.

There’s no argument 2,500 windmills up to 20 miles offshore are better than even one oil derrick.

But one can’t help but wonder how different we would be deploying resources to generate energy if we all had a firm grasp on what impacts it involves including those elsewhere foisted on those who live in the shadows of oil refineries in less regulated states so California

Perhaps we’d be more receptive to windmills along the Oakland Hills or in the Carquinez Strait.

Or maybe, we might be more methodical in how we use energy as individuals whether we can afford PG&E bills or not.

Those 15 minute hot showers and crypto mining add up.