Well, perhaps the issue isn’t so much hating birds as loving communism more than any animals they may kill.
Beege usually has the wind farm and renewable energy disaster beat, but I have been thinking a lot about the 180 that environmentalists have taken in recent years.
Or, should I say, the apparent 180-degree turn they have taken, because it seems to me that there must be an underlying logic to the apparent reversal we have been witnessing in many things in recent years.
Giant wind farm ‘will kill thousands of seabirds a year and push puffins to the brink of extinction’, warns RSPB | Daily Mail Online
Net zero isn’t just a disaster for us humans. https://t.co/hs6rKoioq8
— Mike Gardner (@mikegardner_wb) January 15, 2026
Environmentalists have always been brilliant about using cute or sympathetic animals to promote their causes, and why not? Most of us have an instinctive reaction to seeing some animal like a Puffin, which is just so damned cute. DDT was banned mainly on the back of the Bald Eagle, which was said to be at risk of extinction due to the thinning of its eggshells or something.
Saving the whales was a major cause in my youth, and I have to admit that I was and remain very sympathetic to the conservation efforts aimed at protecting animals that appear quite intelligent and sympathetic. Environmentalists have managed to save many a questionably endangered animal by tapping into our emotions.
Wind Industry Is Killing Sea Life On East Coast, Fishermen Say
Biden administration is covering up the extent of the damage and ignoring warnings from top government biologists
by Donna Anderson
Over the last three years, we have been documenting the ecological catastrophe… pic.twitter.com/XqXbRKgA2i
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 12, 2024
Wind farms are killing off lobsters, scallops, and most troubling of all, whales.
Suddenly, environmentalists want to pave over vast swathes of land for solar panels, put up wind farms that kill millions of birds a year, support a solar power concentration plant that kills birds by the bushel, burning them up into what are colloquially called “streamers” after the smoke trail they leave behind as they fall to the ground dead.
Thermal solar in the desert gets air temps up to 900°F so birds burst into smoke and fall out of the sky.
Heat attracts insects which attracts birds.
They call em “streamers” for the smoke-stream they make as they fall out the sky.Also the $/MW here is 🤦♂️
Yay environmentalism. pic.twitter.com/jOagMdnr3e
— 🏔Adam O🏔 (@denverbitcoin) October 3, 2022
How can environmentalists have suddenly grown so callous that they are willing to sacrifice so many endangered animals and disturb delicate ecosystems in this manner? On its face, it seems bizarre that a movement that moved heaven and earth to save the snail darter and pushed to let a vast swathe of Los Angeles burn to save some weeds now is happy about killing Bald Eagles, whales, and even cute little Puffins.
But is it?
A few reasons spring to mind to explain this apparent about-face: hostility to industry, a love of technocratic, even communist control of the economy to achieve “degrowth,” and vast quantities of government money being poured into an industry that has nearly zero sensitivity to cost or efficiency.
The push for Nut Zero fills the bill for people who hate industry, want to control the economy, and have their hands out for lots of sweet government money. Damn the birds and whale, there is gold in them there hills!
The money trail is too easy to follow to spend much time on it. When there are trillions of dollars being showered on something, the gold rush for government money is on, no matter what is being subsidized or regulated. John Kerry outlined his plan for the world to spend anywhere from $2.5 to $5 trillion dollars a YEAR on climate change mitigation, and that’s a mighty big incentive for people to look away from a few Puffins dying for the cause.
It’s one thing to let Los Angeles burn—everybody knows that government money and insurance will pour billions into helping everybody make bank. But imagine what scams can be made with $5 trillion a year on the line! Even a tiny slice of that, in grants to NGOs, will run into the billions of dollars, and no doubt many of those same people will get contracts or board seats at renewable energy companies.
Then there is the technocratic control. Only COVID has provided more opportunity to bully people into compliance than the push to Net Zero. Entire economies have been turned upside down and minutely regulated to push the agenda forward. If your goal is to control the economy and implement “degrowth” and redistribute wealth, Net Zero is for you.
You get to redesign cities, move industries around, subsidize things you like, and penalize others. And it’s all for the best cause there is: Gaia! You don’t want to die, do you? Raise taxes, and we can control the weather for you!
Seen in this light, is it really a surprise that Puffins are on the chopping block, or whales allowed to wash up on shores? During the California gold rush, miners would scour entire regions with massive hoses to uncover gold, pumping water to create a slurry from which to pick out the gold. Entire regions were destroyed and took years to recover.
Renewable energy is just another version of this practice, in a way. Destroy everything you can to get at the gold, and consequences be damned.
Of course, that “gold” is your tax dollars, the increased prices for energy, the reduced choice in appliances, and the city planners making your life difficult. Every time you see a traffic lane disappear in favor of bike lanes, that is you paying a price for the benefit of the nanny staters.
There are, of course, genuine environmentalists who really DO care about people, the land, the landscape, and biodiversity. But the big money goes to the folks who hold conferences in the Amazon rain forest and mow down trees to build roads to the resort they fly their private jets to.
They simply don’t care about the secondary effects of their policies. They want your money and to control your lives. That’s it.
If that means killing some Puffins and whales, well…so what?
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