They tower over the wilderness like monstrous War of the Worlds steel insects, half the height of the World Trade Center and equally as visible. Miles and miles and miles of them, till the wilderness becomes industrial, and America’s lovely landscapes are all gone.
They kill birds and bats by the millions, far more than DDT ever did. Their developers laughingly call them “bird Cuisinarts” because they chop whole migrating flocks into piles of feathers and bloody bones.
They destroy communities and outdoor recreation, sicken families and drive them from their homes. They steal people’s money by ruining property values, set neighbors at each other’s throats, terrify wildlife and livestock, cause enormous erosion on hills and mountains, fill spawning grounds with sediment, despoil the beauty of the landscape for miles, and kill tourism.
Yet they are enthusiastically supported by the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups, and by the Obama administration. What are these insanely hideous things? They are called wind “farms”, but they produce no crop except misery, debt and destitution.
Sold to us as “green” and “renewable”, they are neither. These huge multi-billion monstrosities do not lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use because wind is so erratic that fossil fuel plants must run full-time to back them up and keep a “fixed” unvarying feed of power into the grid, to keep the grid from getting cooked or causing brownouts. In hundreds of studies across the world, not a single wind project has shown significant environmental value nor lowered greenhouse gases. In some cases they have been shown to increase CO2 generation because the backup plants have to work overtime.
But wind projects are a major cash cow for oil and energy companies that prey on the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies provided by the Obama administration, the administration’s “payback” to the energy companies which helped fund the most recent campaign. Scores of other Democrats and some Republicans have voted to do the same.
British Petroleum, those fine folks who polluted the Gulf of Mexico, owns many wind projects and uses the tax credits to avoid reducing pollution at its refineries. Other U.S. wind companies are run by leftover Enron executives who haven’t yet done jail time, or by partners of the Italian Mafia. But they give tons of money to our politicians, who vote them more and more. These billions of dollars of subsidies are added to the 1.3 Trillion Dollars added annually to the national debt, which is now nearing 20 Trillion Dollars and can probably never be repaid.
Hundreds of communities from Maine to Hawaii have erected laws and moratoriums against industrial wind projects, but with our federal government’s backing, wind projects can override total public opposition, and continue their destruction of our wild landscapes and rural areas.
The Sierra Club, recently caught with its hand in the cookie jar taking $26 million from the natural gas industry in return for not criticizing fracking, is now pushing industrial wind power all over the country. Even though they too know wind “farms” don’t lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use. But who knows how many contributions they are getting from the wind
As industrial wind developer and oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens once said, “the only thing green about wind power is the money it puts in my pocket.” Do we need to keep them. The answer to the electricity part of America’s greenhouse gas problem is rooftop solar. PV panels are becoming so inexpensive that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) says they’ll soon be cheaper than coal or gas power. And they work as well in cold climates as
As I said in my latest book, SAVING PARADISE, our government is sadly becoming “the enemy of the people”. So it’s time to take our government back. And to get rid of industrial wind power before it devastates the last of our wild places.
Best-selling novelist, environmental activist and war and human rights journalist, Mike Bond can be reached at www.MikeBondBooks.com.
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