I see that Maine Audubon has now come out in favor of industrial wind farms, saying that it’s possible to site them so as to “minimize” wildlife impacts. Or they think maybe the industry will play nice and shut the turbines down whenever a bird or bat flies past.
Maybe.
And maybe cigarettes don’t cause cancer, like other highly lucrative corporations used to argue. How many people died to make somebody rich? And how many birds will be killed before people start to remember the pitfalls of accepting any industry’s data without question?
People are so eager to have “green energy” they don’t stop to ask questions, so you get the horrific environmental and economic consequences people are finally noticing with biofuels and fracking.
Wind is no different.
It isn’t just birds. There’s landscape destruction, huge CO2 emissions from construction, roads into the wild country, high tension lines — all for turbines that last maybe 20 years.
And don’t forget the CO2 pollution from the primary source (typically coal or oil) that stays on all the time, since who knows when the wind will stop?
Green it ain’t; lucrative it certainly is — for the developers. Not for us who pay for it all.
Maine could easily solve the whole mess — for us, not for the would-be developers — by getting rid of the truly idiotic corporate welfare rule that says that hydro power doesn’t count as “green energy.” Canada has a huge amount of hydro already built that we could buy.
Sally McGuire, Carthage
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