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The downside of wind power
Credit: Flathead Beacon | Feb 20, 2016 | flatheadbeacon.com ~~
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Translate: FROM English | TO English
In reading the letter to the Flathead Beacon editor from Tom Darin, American Wind Energy Association (Feb. 10 Beacon: “U.S. Global Leader in Wind Production”), I have no doubt of his organization’s prowess at establishing cheap energy and high paying jobs using wind energy. But, his article leaves out much that needs to be said.
I have been a very outspoken critic of using fossil fuels that put greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere and cause global warming. Shutting down the very concept of the Keystone XL pipeline promoting the use of Canadian tar sands oil, as well as the mining of Montana “dirty” coal in the name of creating a few jobs while wrecking the planet we live on, are topics I often write about. So, you would assume I would be all for wind power and solar power as viable alternatives to power derived from coal, oil, and natural gas. However, there is much more to this topic.
I have been doing battle with the American Wind Energy Association over their concealment of the large (impossible to count all on private property) numbers of deaths of eagles from being sucked into the huge, very fast spinning, wind turbine blades on wind farms and being killed. I have no way of obtaining actual numbers as this is not an environmental group but a capitalistic organization seeking business profits for its members. The result of my efforts have seen them angrily cut me off their e-mail list “advertising” and deny me making contact with them anymore. Birds continue to die.
Furthermore, the results of solar energy arrays of photovoltaic cells is the destruction of insects necessary to the bird ecology from the rising, extremely intensive, heat waves emanating from them. Very small birds also perish.
I don’t know what the answer is to this dilemma of business competition of energy resources. I do know that always favoring an energy policy that caters only to business profit is a disaster in the making for wildlife ecosystems. Business and politics should not be making these decisions. Science should.
Bill Baum
Badrock Canyon
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