Rep. Nick Rahall (D), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, is pushing legislation that would more strictly regulate wind energy to protect birds, bats from dying, when they fly into the giant turbines. The American Wind Energy Association said the plan could "essentially outlaw" the generation of electricity from wind power in the United States. yahoo/AP
9 Comments
this is a conspiracy by the evil hydrocarbon lobby to eliminate renewable energy!
i am higly suspicious of his real motivations too.
sometimes rookies pick a controversial issue to be heard in dc. from what i can read from his records, he has not been voiceful on animal rights or anything before...
i am not against the issue being discussed either.
really, more birds die every year flying into exxonmobiletexacoshell's HQ skyscrapers than die flying into wind turbines. they don't spin that fast, this is a pathetic attempt to make wind energy less viable, thus keeping us hooked on oil. hooray for asinine corporations and their poodle politicians eagerly lapping up at their generous offerings to f*ck the world over! repeal the electoral college! bring out a multi-party system!
also, Nick Rahall represents west virginia (um... coal, yeah no conflict of intrest there)
Yeah. If this guy is an environmentalist, he can't see the forest for the trees. Cars kill vastly more birds than any wind power plant - shall we start there?
mind you james lovelock (GAIA man, green scientist etc etc) tells us wind power is an enormous waste of resources (and ineffectual) and that we should go nuclear instead...the conflicting voices about power sources from experts and scientists makes being green a kind of crapshoot, with everyone tilting data and knowledge to favor their own agenda...
makes it hard for reglar folk to know what is real and what isn't anymore...
happened in aus too, the environment minister, who had shown no previous interest in conversation of any kind, got very concerned about a particular small rare parrot and blocked a wind farm. turns out that he had suppresed a report showing that one said parrot was likely to hit the turbines once every 100 or so years. que controversy and the wind farm is going ahead
i don't buy this for a second. sounds like the guy is just creating a distraction.
there are large turbines that spin slowly. birds would bounce off. mcdonough speaks of them in the monticello dialogues.
Consider how many birds (not to mention other creatures) are killed directly or indirectly (loss of habitat and feeding grounds, etc.) from mountain top removal coal mining. I wonder how that compares to the numbers of birds and bats killed by wind turbines, even if we tripled the number of turbines in place across the country.
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