These objections for the birds
The Trentonian, www.trentonian.com 10 March 2012
Stick-in-the-mud opponents of President Obama’s clean-energy, jobs-producing green utopia have gone absolutely batty. No, not House Republicans. Worrywart environmentalists.
Exactly the ones you’d expect to be out front cheering on the president’s renewable-energy initiatives. But no, they’re filing petitions and lawsuits against wind turbines. These energy-generating monster windmills are killing off innocent winged creatures, goes the complaint – 10,000 bats annually in Pennsylvania alone.
The American Bird Conservancy, Audubon Society, Endangered Species Coalition, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and scores of other windmill-tilting allies of Mother Nature are demanding an end to the wanton slaughter.
The ruckus couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for the president’s efforts to save the planet from the destructive consequences of fossil fuels and the despoiling greed of Big Oil. Many other green enterprises in which Obama has invested billions of OPM (Other People’s Money, i.e., tax dollars) are listing precariously, foundering or have already gone to the bottom.
Solyndra, the solar panel outfit in which an Obama fundraiser had a financial stake, sank despite $500-million of federal financing and took the money down with it. The slow-selling $40,000 Volt, toward which the government offers buyer tax credits, has cut back production, idling 1,300 GM workers. A123 Systems, manufacturer of green-car batteries, laid off 125 workers last fall despite hundreds of millions of dollars in government assistance.
An now the president’s wind turbine vision – also subsidized by substantial government “investments” – is encountering hard times as well not only in the form of grief from the tree-hugger community but from economic realities. Some turbines have had to be unplugged from the grid because they were feeding too much electricity into it. That’s a problem? Yep, because wind-turbine energy, despite heavy government subsidies, is way more expensive than the gooey, icky regular kind Obama doesn’t like.
California litigants led by now-Gov. Jerry “Moonbean” Brown spearheaded the pro-bird, anti-windmill movement by pressuring a wind-turbine enterprise into forking over a $2.5-million bird kill settlement.
But no more Mr. Nice Guy on the part of the big lobby for the feathered friends – over 70 organizations in all. It’s petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a crackdown on wind turbines. There are various laws that can be brought to bear, they point out – the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Eagle Protection Act and many more.
Outcries from this Obama environmentalist base are demanding that the president stop pussyfooting and smack the wind turbine bird killers with some fines and even prison terms. Fines up to $250,000 and prison terms of up to two years are available, they say. To appease them, Obama may have to single somebody out as an example. Any Republicans own wind turbines?
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/03/10/these-objections-for-the-birds/