“Wind projects are known to kill eagles, and climate extremists in the Biden admin still greenlit scores of these projects. @Interior is enforcing the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities!” ( – Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, X)

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, posted a memorandum back in August calling on the agency to ensure compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities!”

This is a long overdue threat to major wind projects that have been living a lie. After all, it was the Los Angeles director of the Sierra Club who coined the term “Cuisinarts of the Air” to capture the bird-chopping nature of industrial blades to the most treasured/protected birds of prey.…

… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. They don’t know what they like. They sort of like wind, even though it kills all the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime….

You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place.

– Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, Louisiana, May 14, 2019

Back in 1997, I published a long Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’.” A section of that study, “The ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem,” addressed what President Trump recently said (above) 22 years later.…

“Out-of-control windfarm development is hurting many protected species, riding as it does on the optimistic estimates put out by hired consultants, government agencies, bird societies, the wind industry and its agents, and pro-wind activists. It is also facilitated by considerable flows of public money, in the form of subsidies, tax credits, special loans, carbon certificates, and more. These millions of dollars (billions in those countries that have thousands of wind turbines) enable private interests to remove all obstacles to their greed, and this includes overriding nature protection legislation.”

Something obviously happened between the high mortality found in the early days of wind farms (see the work of biologists such as Winkelman, Benner, Lekuona, and Everaert) and present estimates as low as one bird per turbine/year being “predicted” in Australia (see post yesterday), France, the UK, and other countries.…

 “I have no idea who Jim Wiegand is, but the Master Resource website is highly questionable….”

“Jim: My apologies. I was overreacting…. Perhaps you would be better served if you avoided that [MasterResource] crowd.”

So said Elliott Negin, Director of News & Commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists, several days ago in the comments section of his Huffington Post  piece, Wind Energy Threat to Birds Is Overblown.”

Mr. Negin is a serial user of the argumentum ad hominem. The Free Dictionary defines ad hominem as: “Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason: Debaters should avoid ad hominem arguments that question their opponents’ motives.”

In his piece, Negin takes on journalist and scholar Robert Bryce, whose exposés of politically correct renewable energy have clearly stuck a nerve with mainstream environmentalists whose embrace of industrial windpower is problematic.…