//James, you're worried about bats and birds and therefore oppose wind energy? OK, fine, then make sure your ass is big enough to stuff up smog, ozone, sulphur dioxide, or nuclear waste - take your pick or have all of them.
James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books, including his most recent work Watermelons: How the Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future, also available in the US, and in Australia as Killing the Earth to Save It. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com.
Wind industry big lies no 3: wind turbines are eco-friendly
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: January 5th, 2013
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Of all the many lies put out by the subsidy-troughing scum-suckers of the wind industry and their greenie fellow travellers, the biggest porkie of the lot is this: that wind turbines are eco-friendly.
In order to believe this tosh, you'd first have to accept the warped view that being eco-friendly can legitimately entail wiping out millions of bats and birds. It is a measure of just how intellectually and morally corrupt Big Green has grown over the last few decades that many self-professed environmentalists actually cleave to this belief. Why else would they expend so much energy trying to defend – or distract from – the indefensible truth: that wind farms around the world are destroying rare species on an industrial scale?
If you haven't already, I'd heartily recommend the article in this week's Spectator by Oxford ecologist Clive Hambler. He doesn't pull his punches on the devastation being wrought by wind turbines.
Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’
It's not just the quantity of birds and bats being killed that worries Dr Hambler, but their rarity.
Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.
Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).
This is indeed one of the great environmental scandals of our time. So why don't we hear about it more often? Dr Hambler has his suspicions:
First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy.
Indeed. And where are our own RSPB on this? Are they doing their bit to fight the menace posed by bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes?
Au contraire. They're actively propagandising on the wind industry's behalf.
Climate change poses the single greatest long-term threat to birds and other wildlife, and the RSPB recognises the essential role of renewable energy in addressing this problem.
But wait: the RSPB's endorsement of this corrupt, mendacious, animal-killing, landscape-blighting, fuel-poverty-creating, job-destroying, health-damaging industry doesn't end there. No sirree. If there's free money out there to be snaffled, then the RSPB is going to try a grab a piece of it.
RSPB Scotland has submitted plans to Aberdeenshire Council to install a 62ft high “domestic” turbine at its Loch of Strathbeg reserve, near Crimond, in Buchan.
The reserve is home to almost 300 species of birds during the year and in winter tens of thousands of geese, including up to a quarter of the world’s population of pink-footed geese, visit the loch.
Yes, I know, I know: it reads like an April fool. So let me just repeat it, for those of you too stunned to believe it could be so -
THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS WANTS TO ERECT AN INDUSTRIAL BIRD-KILLING DEVICE ON ONE OF ITS NATURE RESERVES.
What's more, of course, if they get their way you and I will be subsidising the RSPB to destroy birds via the compulsory tariffs we play via Renewable Obligations Certificates and Feed In Tariffs.
In today's Telegraph Charles Moore rightly lamented the politicisation of the RSPCA. Oughtn't the RSPB's million members be asking similar awkward questions of their own cherished organisation?
eg if the RSPB wants to go on supporting wind farms oughtn't it consider changing its name?
The Royal Society For Killing Birds would be the obvious one.
Tags: bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes, bats, birds, carnage, Clive Hambler, hypocrites, lies, Mark Duchamp, Royal Society for Killing Birds,RSPB, Spectator, wind turbines
