Unintended Consequences

The green killer: Scores of protected golden eagles dying after colliding with wind turbines

California’s attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk. Scores of the protected birds have been dying each year after colliding with the blades of about 5,000 wind turbines. Now the drive for renewable power sources, such as wind and the sun, being promoted by President Obama and state Governor Jerry Brown has raised fears that the number of newborn golden eagles may not be able to keep pace with the number of turbine fatalities.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

h/t to Dave G

About Tony Heller

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23 Responses to Unintended Consequences

  1. Latitude says:

    This is California that cut the water off for farmers because some minnow made a very bad evolutionary choice…..
    …isn’t it?

    • suyts says:

      lol, the very same, which is ironic, because they didn’t give a darn about the tortoises habitat that was destroyed by the installation of the solar panels……..

    • slp says:

      It was the federal government that shut down the water, but it is California that was too gutless to fight it.

      • Amino Acids in Meteorites says:

        California (for the most part) does not imagine itself gutless. It thinks itself brave and progressive. You have to live here to understand how backward it is.

    • Dave G says:

      Farmers went under and a lot of jobs(migrants)were lost

  2. Scarlet Pumpernickel says:

    This is worse then DDT, these 9th Century technologies were good for grinding grain and pumping water but powering cities are they insane, stop these killers who kill bats by the millions!

    • suyts says:

      Worse than that, it is a proven failed application of very old technology. Just like everyone who cared to speak told them.

      Wind generation is expensive, unreliable, and drives the cost of natural gas, copper and aluminum up. And, hilariously, reduces CO2 emissions by an almost imperceptible amount.

  3. Lance says:

    If they were ducks in an oil covered pond, Greenpeace would be all over it….perhaps if we coat those blades with oil we can get some action?

  4. The usual counter argument is that its only OLD wind farms doing this. new ones are fine.

    If you run into that argument:

    “Two years ago, an 86-turbine wind farm opened on the western half of Wolfe Island, built on leased properties. “

    “The short-eared owl, listed as a species of special concern in Canada, has all but disappeared from the west end of Wolfe Island.
    A noted Kingston-area birder says the decline has everything to do with the construction and startup of wind turbines on that part of the island two years ago.”

    “A report released by TransAlta in January showed about 22 raptors were killed by wind turbines on Wolfe Island from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010.

    The company pledged to find ways to reduce the raptor death count.

    In the same time period, an estimated 1,151 birds were killed along with 1,720 bats.

    Hennige said that from his recent observations, it appears all 10 of the resident red-tailed hawks were victims.”

    http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3121720

    • Latitude says:

      Sure does make all these green groups look like a bunch of pompous hypocrites, don’t it……………

      • Wayne Ward (truthsword) says:

        It sure shows they like money more than animals and the environment. I know they can’t walk back their logic and have doomed the real environmental movemnet. If there are real environmentalist who still love nature, animals and the environment, they should be fighting wind energy tooth and nail.

      • Mike Davis says:

        There are but the elite environmental movements call them deniers

    • Mike Davis says:

      The obvious answer to the problem is to kill off all the flying critters in the region and after that the death toll will decrease. The energy companies running those facilities are doing their best to reduce future death counts by killing of the population now.

  5. rw says:

    Another striking example of the ineluctable falseness of environmentalists and the Left. (One could generalize further. I don’t think Nietzsche would be terribly surprised by any of this.)

  6. Justa Joe says:

    For the so-called green those white monoliths are their pagan gods. The dead birds are like burnt offerings to Gaia. Of course a dead eagle is makes for a better sacrifice than some robin.

  7. Andy WeissDC says:

    A good example of the “rule of unintended consequences”. God knows how many other unintended consequences will result from misguided attempts to find the cure for “climate change”.

    • suyts says:

      Well, its difficult to discern what was unintended vs. intended, yet not stated. For instance, the farmers in Cali. I think it was intentional, because what motives many on the eco movement is Malthusian misanthropy. But, it could be that they were just so simple minded that they didn’t understand farmers need water to make their crops grow. Hard telling. Another example would be the whirlygigs and pinwheels themselves. I think they purposefully found the most expensive and unreliable form of energy generation to push…….back to the Malthusian misanthropy, but it could be that in spite of being told, they just didn’t understand how we can’t mandate the wind to blow……..(they think we control the climate for heaven’s sake, so causing the wind to blow shouldn’t be a trick in their mind.)

      • NoMoreGore says:

        exactly- It’s the Malthusian element pushing wind and solar. Together with the rent seekers who will sell them their chosen “hooch”. You wanna what? Okay, yeah, we’ve got those. It’ll take a while to ship them over from China, but we’ve got em!

  8. NikFromNYC says:

    Let’s go chain ourselves to them and refuse to eat. Oh, wait, that should be Greenpeace’s job, right?

  9. Squidly says:

    Simple solution … just sue them like environmentalists do. They stopped water flowing in California this way, they stopped oil drilling in Texas this way. Isn’t it about time that someone starts playing the environmentalists same game against them?

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