Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Raptor Rapture?


                                                               Bad Wind Rising

                Wind farms are killing thousands upon thousands of birds each year in the U.S., but the Obama administration is covering up that inconvenient truth. The administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles or other protected bird species, and has actually shielded the industry from liability  by helping keep the scope of the deaths secret, an Associated Press investigation found back in 2013. More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country’s wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March, 2013 in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin. Each of these deaths is a federal crime, a charge that the Obama  administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. Yet no wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.

                Moreover, when companies have voluntarily reported the bird deaths, the Obama administration has, in many cases, refused to make the information public. Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.

                Big business? Bad. Big oil?  Very bad. (Those rascally Republicans and Halliburton)!

                Big wind? Good! (Unless it doesn't blow).

                We are closing oil refineries and not building any new nuclear power plants. We are dramatically increasing the average gas-mileage requirements for our domestic auto-makers. We are ignoring our vast coal deposits and submissively letting ourselves be subject to arbitrary “United Nations” greenhouse gas emission standards, while blithely letting the Soviets- excuse me, Russia- Venezuela and other hostile nations drill for oil not far off our coasts.

               

                But let’s go ahead and throw up as many of these massive bird-dicers as we can, as fast as we can!  (At up to thirty stories tall, and in clusters of dozens to hundreds, they are damn attractive on the landscape, too. No “sight pollution” here! It is a bit ironic though, that their massive rotors are made in part out of petroleum-based material). The Obama administration, at the urging of the wind-energy industry, has proposed a rule that would allow companies to apply for 30-year permits to kill a set number of bald or golden eagles. Good thing we had the moral fortitude to ban that evil DDT years ago!

                It seems fitting, though. Decapitating America’s image and its symbols seems to be a specialty of this administration.

                And that… blows.

                                                          

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