Another great moment in the history of “green energy,” brought to us by the UK Daily Mail:
There had been only eight recorded sightings of the white-throated needletail in the UK since 1846. So when one popped up again on British shores this week, twitchers were understandably excited.
A group of 40 enthusiasts dashed to the Hebrides to catch a glimpse of the brown, black and blue bird, which breeds in Asia and winters in Australasia.
But instead of being treated to a wildlife spectacle they were left with a horror show when it flew into a wind turbine and was killed.
Wind turbines kill a lot of birds. In the United States, they take out over half a million birds per year, including bald eagles. The politically-favored, ideologically-fashionable, heavily-subsidized “green energy” industry has a license to kill; the Obama Administration lets them slide on many violations of existing law, and the EPA is frantically writing new rules to make things even easier on them, as the NY Post wrote in May:
“What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK,” a former Fish and Wildlife Service official fretted to the AP. With spinning blades that can reach speeds up to 170 miles at the tips, the birds don’t have a chance.
And now the EPA is working on regulations that would give wind companies 30-year permits to run turbines and kill many eagles with impunity. Regulatory changes involving oil companies would require months or years of reviews of their environmental impact. But the EPA is fast-tracking all that for their windy friends.
Of course, there’s not really any way to run a wind farm without killing a lot of birds, so all the other principles of environmentalism must bend to tolerate these expensive green energy fetishes, which produce ridiculously overpriced energy, become huge eyesores no one wants in their backyard, consume a great deal of good old-fashioned fossil fuel power to create, and become rusty trash dumps when companies inevitably abandon them.