SHAME, SHAME!

The following is a Letter to the Editor of my St. Paul Pioneer Press concerning an article published as a feature Op-ed on the 4 November, 8B editorial page. It was titled "Wind power has threats of its own" by Michael Fry, and was written for the Los Angeles Times. JB
By Jim Beers
Shame on Michael Fry (director of conservation advocacy for the American Bird Conservancy) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all their duplicitous cohorts for the hidden agenda sold so smoothly in the recent Op-ed piece, "Wind power has threats of its own". The crocodile tears they shed for "sage grouse" and "prairie chickens" unable "to engage in cacophonous courtship" "each spring" due to wind turbines are disgusting.
So, "bird collisions (with swirling turbine blades) are mounting" while "Environmentalists and the wind industry have been discussing for several years how to protect birds" (like "Eagles, hawks, and falcons")? So "pressure from conservation groups" and the US Fish and Wildlife Service "Wind Advisory Committee" have agreed to "early consultations" with wind developers? So all these worthies hope to develop "recommendations" "to be released next year" and that may be "voluntary"?
The dirty little secret here is that ever since modern wind turbines began cropping up all over (Russia in 1931; UK in 1954; and the American Wind Energy Association in Washington, DC in 1974) they have killed billions of birds. They are "scientifically and exactly" located where wind (and coincidentally bird movement and migration routes) is most prevalent. Local predators and scavengers soon learn to clean up the evidence during the periodic abundance of dead birds apparently "falling from the sky".
Dismissing the assertion that such devices can ever replace oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power - where was the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all these "concerned environmentalists" and their lobby groups for the past four decades? If those "turbines" were oil pumps or derricks or radio towers killing birds, they would have been quickly forbidden in a flurry of righteous indignation and donations by incensed activists to their lobbyists complete with "payments" by the "bird-killing" oil folks or others to beg public forgiveness. The same goes for similar myriad federal private property "takings" without compensation under auspices such as the Endangered Species based on similarly specious claims of harm to birds as near Austin, Texas and elsewhere. If these groups were truly "concerned" they would develop management practices to keep bird abundance as we advance American society, instead they use these inevitable clashes of man and an ever-adapting environment as excuses to dismantle American society.
What this 11th hour conversion by federal bureaucrats and their environmental partners-in-crime is all about is a thinly veiled but audacious attempt to get what they have been trying to otherwise get for decades with unproven "science" and bureaucratic maneuverings on federal lands. That is, stealing State jurisdiction over sage grouse and prairie chickens. State bureaucrats are AWOL here because they have come to rely on federal grants like drug users on their pusher. These radical federal bureaucrats and lobby groups intend to manipulate such federal authority (ostensibly cloaked as "saving" these widely occurring birds) to depress and eliminate rural community improvements, grazing, energy development, hunting, road building, ranch operations, animal control, rural land values, etc. all over the Upper Plains and Northern Rocky Mountain states.
Shame, shame on them; and shame on you for publishing this two-faced propaganda. Why shame on you Pioneer Press? Shame on you for publishing this energy development and energy production killing tripe right after your front page trumpets how the "cap-and-trade" political chicanery by these same perpetrators and their political enablers was responsible for the recent death of the Big Stone II, a large energy production facility vital to future Minnesota and Upper Midwest power needs.
We used to pray to be saved from communism or the Russians or the Chinese: today we should pray to be saved from ourselves.
Jim Beers 4 November 2009