“This decision not only protects the Blanding’s turtle but also the staging area for millions of migrating birds and bats and the Monarch butterflies.” – Cheryl Anderson, PECFN
In an unprecedented decision, Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) ruled against the nine-turbine Ostrander Point project sited for a prime sensitive and environmentally rich area. Cheryl Anderson, the lead appellant on behalf of Prince Edward County’s Field Naturalists (PECFN), stated:
… Continue ReadingThe Tribunal in the Ostrander Point ERT hearing has found that “the remedies proposed by Ostrander [Gilead] and the Director are not appropriate in the unique circumstances of this case. The Tribunal finds that the appropriate remedy under s.145.2.1 (4) is to revoke (emphasis, Ms. Anderson) the Director’s decision to issue the REA [Renewable energy Approval]”.
The Tribunal decision says that no matter how important renewable energy is to our future it does not automatically override the public interest in protecting against other environmental harm such as the habitat of species at risk.
“Understanding government failure in the quest to address market failure could result in an optimal government policy of doing nothing in the face of a postulated negative externality from business-as-usual. But an activist policy expanding economic freedom in order to improve adaptation to climate change, natural or anthropogenic, qualifies as climate policy change too.”
Richard Mueller of the University of California at Berkeley is an important voice in the polarized climate-change debate. At the Huffington Post in mid-April, the physicist and philosopher posted “The Classifications of Climate Change Thinkers” with six categories (schools?) of thought.
His useful categories shortchange the political economy side where the scientist or citizen or politician must assess government failure along side market failure before deciding that the government should “do something,” as in pricing carbon dioxide or enacting a slew of surrogate regulation.…
Continue Reading“Bald and golden eagles are protected by state and federal laws. Slaughtering eagles is illegal, and nothing is ‘incidental’ or ‘unavoidable’ when it comes to enormous wind turbines.”
“Creating a vast imaginary population of eagles, avoiding true scientific research, falsely calculating an enormous, supposedly “sustainable” yearly harvest rate, and deliberately ignoring the huge eagle slaughter taking place around the wind farms really is fraud. The perpetrators should be prosecuted.”
[Editor note: This post completes Part I and Part II from last week.]
The word harvest connotes the reaping of editable crops to sustain humanity. As used by the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), “harvesting” is the killing of one of our most iconic species, one of our most magnificent raptors, by the “grim reaper” wind turbines.
Turbines supply some of our most expensive, unreliable, and heavily subsidized electricity, under blanket exemptions from the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws that are applied with unflinching severity to virtually every other industry. …
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