In recent years, there's been an undue amount of crocodile tears coming from Right-wingers about birds flying into wind turbines. It's strange, since they otherwise aren't inclined to show any tender concern for God's creatures. Not a peep from them when Dick Cheney went bird shooting and littered a field with their little corpses. He didn't take any of them to eat, which would have been the only justification. No, he wasted them all, and just did it for the sheer love of killing. (And for good measure, he shot his friend in the face.)
But now I hear them clucking about birds who get killed by wind turbines. Can their concern be sincere? Not when you know that many, many more birds die from flying into tall buildings. They don't denounce those. Or from being sucked into jet airliner engines. They don't call for them to be grounded. Or even more from being killed by cats whose idiot owners think should be allowed to run loose. They don't mind that, either. But the relatively fewer numbers killed by wind turbines? Now that's a problem!
Clearly, the opposition is to the emphasis on renewable energy. And even more, to the Liberal creeps who supports it. That's why the phony concern for birds. It's immature oppositionalism.
On Wednesday, May 18th, "Pat" Robertson doubled down. He claimed that 54,000 not merely birds, but our National Symbol, the Bad Eagle, are set to be slaughtered annually for the sake of wind power. A completely ludicrous total, especially since the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that there are only 9,789 nesting pairs in this country. I suspect that the old fool took an estimate of all the little birds who might die from wind turbines and made them all Bald Eagles, the better to heap opprobrium on wind farming. His concern for the Bald Eagle is likewise phony, since he's previously parroted the revisionist twaddle that banning DDT was a dread mistake. Here the phonies, motivated by anti-environmentalism (or rather, hatred of environmentalists-- the lousy hippies) cried crocodile tears about more children getting malaria. When they also oppose foreign aid that could provide mosquito netting and alternative insecticides. (Or even food for the kids who'd starve, even those without malaria.) This is the same DDT that was making the Bald Eagle go extinct, down to less than 500 nesting pairs when it was banned. No one on the Right cared about the Eagle then, so this feigned concern is a farce. And it has the whiff of some nasty petrochemicals about it.
Stephen Van Eck
Rushville, PA 18828-7715