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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