http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/03/08/minnesota-wind-farm-seeks-permit-kill-bald-eagles To quote Dr. Leonard McCoy...."you can't get a permit to do a damned illegal thing!" Or so I thought, but I am sure in the name of eco-ness the Obama admin will find a way to OK this....likely they gave this wind farm taxpayer money anyway......
It's amusing how killing endangered species, and toxic mercury in the landfills, becomes okay when it's done in the name of some other environmental goal. The green lobby seems to have double standards. They cry bloody murder over something, but then try to minimize and defend it when the same thing becomes caused by other policies they themselves are pushing. It's all a bunch of hypocrisy. Any rational economist would clearly be able to point out how poorly thought out these conflicting green policies are. Different environmental aims are just working against eachother. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. I bet more pollution is being caused just from all the effort being put into various environmental projects. Central planning is notoriously bad and keeping track of the cost-benefit analysis. We can look at the Soviet economy, for example, and see all sorts of unintended consequences resulting from rigid rules and quotas. The greenies say how wonderful solar panels are, how much energy they save, for example. (they even make up deceptive figures that assume it is bright and sunny 100% of the time, and that all solar panels will be oriented at just the optimal angle on people's houses) But what they don't tell you is how much energy it took to make those solar panels in the first place. Not to mention the indirect pollution resulting from all the effort it took to have them installed. In fact, wind farms save so little energy that even just the disturbing of the soil below their construction sites can completely negate any greenhouse gas benefit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...reate-more-carbon-dioxide-say-scientists.html It's just more proof of the failures of government central planning.
This is horrible, they can't be serious. Wind farms should be abolished then, animals and birds should not be taken down just because some green energy corporation wants to make the big bucks. It this madness continues, we will lose more than we will ever gain.
In economics, it's called perverse incentives. The government creates some sort of incentive for private corporations to do something, which the government believes will help the environment. But then to achieve their goal and get the government subsidies, the corporation ends up doing something else which hurts the environment even more. The corporation knows what they are doing, but the government is only giving them money to carry out a specific task, and that's exactly what they are going to do, in whatever way it will make them the most profit. We can see this with CFLs, solar panels, and wind turbines, just about anything where the government relies on private corporations in the name of "helping the environment". For example, to reduce energy consumption in their own country, the USA seems to have no problem importing CFLs from Chinese factories which dump toxic mercury in China's rivers: http://www.politicalforum.com/envir...uffer-mercury-poisoning-cfl-bulb-factory.html
