Kafkaesque: Lawless loophole lets wind company endanger human lives
Another Kafkaesque industrial wind turbine nightmare in Ontario. A regional airport (Collingwood), with an aerodrome close by (Stayner), and eight 500’ (152 metres) air-space-invading industrial wind turbines (wpd Canada’s Fairview Wind Project) to be wedged between both airfields, posing grave danger to pilots and their passengers—and the whole thing approved by the Ontario Liberal government.
What could possibly go wrong when pilots, flying visually without instrumentation (as is the case in over 90% of the flights at these two airports), have to negotiate a safe take-off or landing through a blur of Georgian Bay fog, or lake-effects snow, and an indiscernible phalanx of gigantic 50-storey-tall white windmills?
All eight of the planned wind turbines will “penetrate” the safe arrival and departure airspace mandated by Transport Canada standards.
The Collingwood-Stayner airspace is a no-man’s-land of regulation, a lawless vacuum with respect to wind turbine installations. Ontario’s Green Energy Act deliberately has no safety provision for wind turbine setbacks near airports. All eight of the planned wind turbines will “penetrate” the safe arrival and departure airspace mandated by Transport Canada standards, as prescribed by the International Civil Aviation Organization.
If the turbines are built, and they thereby are found to create an unsafe situation, Transport Canada could shut the airports down.
However, here is the kicker. Transport Canada has no jurisdiction over where wind turbines are located with respect to the air space of registered, uncertified airports such as the Collingwood Regional Airport and the Clearview Aerodrome in Stayner. But, when the turbines are built, and they thereby are found to create an unsafe situation, Transport Canada could shut the airports down. The airports, not the wind turbines!
In this case, there is a dangerous jurisdictional vacuum. Neither Transport Canada, nor the Ontario government, nor the local governments, which the Liberals’ Green Energy Act stripped of their planning powers, have any legal say over the aeronautically-safe siting of wind turbines at registered, uncertified airports.
Wind companies—often foreign-owned—pretty well get to do whatever they want.
Such is the looney landscape of Ontario’s sickly “green” wind energy program that wind companies—often foreign-owned—pretty well get to do whatever they want, aided, abetted, enabled, financially rewarded, and legally defended by the Ontario Liberals’ Green Energy Act and their kangaroo court of (hopeless) appeal, the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT). Only two of the scores of wind turbine project appeals to the ERT have had partial success, with final outcomes still pending.
wpd Canada’s Fairview Wind Project between the Collingwood-Stayner airports is being appealed, with an ERT hearing scheduled for May 16, 2016 in Collingwood. What are the chances that the safety-minded appellants will prevail? The onus is on them to prove “serious harm” to human health. You’d think that this would be a no-brainer, logical, obvious. But the narrow terms of reference by which the ERT operates and the unfair burden of proof heaped on the appellants usually spell defeat.
For a mind-blowing overview of this particular Kafkaesque situation involving wind turbine approvals and appeals, watch the 30-minute media event held at Queen’s Park on April 21, 2016 (starting at 3:09). At the press conference, Simcoe-Grey MPP Jim Wilson, Kevin Elwood (the pilot owner of the Clearview Aerodrome), and Charles Magwood, area property owner, outlined chilling facts about the lawless loophole that could endanger the lives of pilots and their passengers, and potentially close down an economically vital airport and aerodrome for good.
The trio also discuss possible graft and corruption in this case: wpd Canada’s payments made to the Liberal party, followed immediately by government approvals for wpd Canada’s project, and wpd Canada’s creation of a shell company with no assets in order to evade liability for accidents and de-commissioning of wind turbines.
In Ontario: lawless loopholes, callous, criminal disregard for human health and safety, apparent bribes for wind project approvals, calculated liability evasion, democracy-robbing legislation—all for economically useless, environmentally-destructive, subsidy-sucking industrial wind turbines, ugly symbols of a bankrupt, immoral, dishonest, fake planetary climate emergency.
September 2017:
February 2018:
The same goes for Kevin and Gail Elwood, John Wiggins, and the residents’ group Preserve Clearview, after the Environmental Review Tribunal dismissed an application for costs related to their appeal of a decision to grant WPD a renewable energy application for the Fairview Wind Project.
Kafkaesque: Opposing an industrial wind turbine project in Ontario
(Scroll down for updates)
Take a look at what happens when Ontarians try to oppose an industrial wind turbine project.
Laws, regulations, and processes seem to have eliminated every conceivable obstacle for the mad rush of the (economically useless, environmentally destructive) wind industrialization of rural Ontario. At the same time they effectively, undemocratically block wind project opponents at every turn. The Ontario Green Energy Act (GEA) and its quasi-judicial complaints department, the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) pitch opponents headlong into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
An example:
- The government gives the Proponent permission to undertake an industrial wind turbine construction project, which includes granting a special environmental permit that allows the Proponent to kill, harm, and harass a Victim or two.
- Locals launch an appeal on the grounds that the project would, amongst other troublesome consequences, cause serious and irreversible harm to the Victims.
- The appeal is heard by a Tribunal, which issues a very rare decision favouring the Victims, finding that the Proponent’s project will indeed cause serious and irreversible harm to two classes of Victims.
- The Tribunal orders a further hearing to consider the Proponent’s proposed mitigations of this serious and irreversible harm.
- In the meantime, however, the Proponent is legally entitled (and signals the intention) to go ahead and begin the project site pre-construction work, and in the process kill, harm, and harass Victims, without first having to table mitigation plans at the next Tribunal hearing (see 4 above).
- Lawyers for the Victims file a motion to have the Tribunal issue a stay of the Proponent’s pre-construction on-site activity associated with the special permit to kill, harm, and harass.
- The Tribunal dismisses the Victims’ motion, with reasons for its decision to be given at a later time.
- Lawyers for the Victims then appeal to a Divisional Court with a motion for a stay.
- The Divisional Court also dismisses the appeal because the Victims’ lawyers, through no fault of their own, are unable to establish specific grounds for said appeal, given that they are in the dark about the reasons for the Tribunal’s dismissal of the motion (see 7 above).
- The Victims’ lawyers are entitled to renew their Divisional Court motion (see 8 above), if and when they ever receive the reasons for the Tribunal’s dismissal decision (see 7 above).
- Meanwhile, the circle is complete, with the Proponent apparently free to go ahead and kill, harm, and harass the Victims, even though there is to be a future Tribunal hearing (see 4 above) at which the Proponent is supposed to make proposals for mitigating the killing, harming, and harassing that probably will already have taken place by then.
That is the saga thus far with respect to the battle between the Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County and the wind energy company wpd Canada Corporation.
The ERT appears to be nothing more than a Kafkaesque-Potemkin-kangaroo-emperor-with-no-clothes court.
The GEA and its companion, the ERT have allowed wind energy companies, eager to cash in on the Ontario Liberal government’s 20-year-guaranteed, above-market returns, to ride roughshod over democratic rights of people and municipalities. The kleptocratic subsidy scheme is footed by the taxpayers, and consumers’ electricity charges triple as a result.
Wind project opponents are spending inordinate amounts of time and money to fight a losing battle, the contest rigged from the start. For wind project opponents, the ERT appears to be nothing more than a Kafkaesque-Potemkin-kangaroo-emperor-with-no-clothes court.
The ERT gives people the illusion of offering democratic equality and justice before the law. In reality, it forces them to accept the industrialization of rural Ontario against their will, while depleting their wallets and spirit.
What’s at play here is just one aspect of the insidious implementation of the UN’s one-world-government Agenda 21, a blueprint for an anti-prosperity, anti-democratic sustainable development and wealth transfer movement. It uses the cudgel of the massive scientific deception of manmade climate change to clobber and guilt people into phony-green-energy submission. It has them running in circles, looking in vain for democracy and laws to protect their rights.
UPDATES
APRIL 4, 2016 – Wind developer wpd Canada Corporation indeed started clearing trees in preparation for wind turbine construction, despite the fact that the entire project was under appeal.
This work began in areas known to be habitat for the endangered Blandings Turtle; the power developer is continuing even though there are reports that milder weather has resulted in the turtles emerging early from their winter hibernation, and are at great risk.
Vegetation cleared in Prince Edward County Blanding’s Turtle wetland area, while the White Pines project was and still is under appeal. [Photo: APPEC]
…Sylvia Davis, lawyer for the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, cited a ruling from over fifty years ago that only a panel of three judges could hear an appeal of this nature.
It became clear at that point that the motion would not be heard until after the legal matter of whether this was properly before the court had been dealt with, with a potentially unfavourable decision.
Rather than spend considerable time and money on legal wrangling the decision was made to withdraw our motion for a stay on all physical activity at the White Pines project site. The motion was withdrawn on consent of all parties and without costs.
We will immediately be going to the Tribunal to once again request a stay.
APRIL 8, 2016 – And then, mirabile dictu, the ERT granted a temporary stay!
Late this afternoon the Environmental Review Tribunal granted a temporary stay of WPD’s Renewable Energy Approval (REA). As a result of the stay all construction work at the project site has been brought to a halt. The Tribunal will schedule a written hearing at a later date to decide on the merits of a more permanent stay.
Dirty secrets of the Ontario Liberals’ wind power scam: What you need to know from DownWind, the Sun News documentary
THE ONTARIO LIBERALS’ GREEN ENERGY ACT HAS DONE SERIOUS AND IRREVERSIBLE HARM TO PEOPLE, WILDLIFE, THE ENVIRONMENT
- Rural people in Ontario living in the midst of 50-storey-high industrial wind turbines have been badly hurt, even seriously and irreversibly harmed, with respect to mental and physical health and safety, property values (loss of 10-48% or even 100%), livelihood, way of life, community harmony. Some families have had to leave their homes on the advice of doctors.
- Farmers have noticed that wind turbines drive out earthworms due to electrical surge charges and vibrations. This reduces the quality of the soil. “Food production will go down.”
- The wind turbines’ 800-ton concrete bases, of which some of the material is toxic, go 50 feet down, far enough to hit aquifers.
- Livestock productivity, such as that of dairy cattle, is adversely affected.
- Birds are slaughtered by wind turbines.
THE LIBERALS HAVE PRESIDED OVER ABROGATION OF DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS AND BULLYING BY WIND COMPANIES
- “The provincial government wants these things and they’re going to come no matter what we do.”
- “(As high as) 140-50 storey buildings – you don’t even have that in Toronto. We’re talking 1,800 turbines up and down the shoreline (of Lake Huron), on some of the most productive farmland in all of Ontario. My God, what are you people thinking? Don’t tell us from your condo that the green thing is so great that we’re going to force it on you.”
- The Liberals’ Green Energy Act supersedes/overrides 21 pieces of legislation including the Clean Water Act, acts that protect the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine, the Heritage Act.
- All Ontario government ministries have turned a deaf ear to complaints and concerns communicated to “every arm of the Ontario government when they asked for help. The wind companies do whatever they want.”
- The Liberals’ Green Energy Act strips municipalities of their planning powers. More than 80 communities have declared themselves to be unwilling hosts.
THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED AGAINST WIND TURBINE VICTIMS
- Wind turbines “are imposed on people and they are getting no choice. That begs the question of whether it’s Charter-compliant, whether it complies with constitutional principles to put these people through these things without being assured of a certain level of safety. No one should be subjected to a reasonable risk of harm.”
- There have been more than 20 Environmental Review Tribunal hearings of appeals and all of them were dismissed. One was allowed but appealed in Ontario Divisional Court where the wind developer prevailed. “The process they’ve created is so imbalanced and so weighted in favour of the wind turbine companies it’s as if they wrote the legislation. It’s embarrassing.”
LIBERALS GOT IN BED WITH GREEN NGOS, WIND INDUSTRY, BAY STREET LAWYERS TO WRITE THE GREEN ENERGY ACT
- “They all sat down and worked up the language they wanted in the legislation and built a campaign around it. You got the complete package: the PR side, the legislation drafting, the program to re-educate the public service, the whole momentum going, the Toronto Star editorial page cranking out a regular drumbeat – coal bad, wind good.”
WIND POWER IS FAR FROM CLEAN
- “When they talk about displacing coal-fire power plants in Ontario with wind, that’s not actually what happens. As they add wind capacity to the system, they are displacing nuclear and hydro and those are non-emitting sources. And you have to remember that whenever you see a wind turbine, there is a gas-fire power plant running in the background to balance out the load fluctuations. So it’s always a wind and gas combination. They’re replacing emissions-free hydro and nuclear with a combination of wind and gas and we’ll actually end up with higher emissions of pollution …”
- “So you’re paying for a wind turbine to turn, and you’re paying for a gas plant to idle. You’re paying double most of the time. It’s asinine.”
THE LIBERALS HAVE USED JUNK SCIENCE TO MISLEAD THE PUBLIC
- Air pollution levels in Ontario have declined steadily since 1974, but the Liberals claimed in 2009 when the Green Energy Act came into force that there was a rising air pollution crisis. “But they knew perfectly well that air pollution had been trending downward right across the board.”
- Most particulate matter emissions come not from coal power generation, as the Liberals claimed, but from construction, industry, agriculture, and most of all from dust from unpaved roads.
- “There’s no question that there’s been an effort to demonize coal.”
BILLIONS OF YOUR DOLLARS WASTED ON LIBERAL BOONDOGGLES
- Ontario electricity costs are the highest in North America as a result of the Liberals’ Green Energy Act.
- “Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies.”
- They replace power that costs 3-5 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh) with wind power that costs 13.5 cents per kwh to generate.
- “Nobody was building wind turbines in Ontario until the government started throwing money at it. It’s not cost effective. Wind turbines can’t compete on a wholesale market without a lot of government support.”
- Wind companies get 20-year contracts to sell wind power at far above market rates.
- “The system has to buy power whenever wind companies produce it” whereas standard power producers (nuclear, hydro) have to compete on the wholesale market.
- Ontario lost $1 billion selling excess power in 2013 to neighbouring jurisdictions – “How stupid is that?”
- The cost of the Green Energy Act to date is $4-5 billion, or 70 times the cost of retrofits recommended in 2005, to get equivalent environmental benefits. (Some estimates say the Green Energy Act costs so far are closer to $8 billion.)
- Before the Green Energy Act, Ontario had a few large power plants with the grid optimized to source the power. Now we have “tiny, little unreliable” wind facilities that required a new grid, putting an “extra cost to get something we already had – it increased the costs of having what you had before.”
- “There were far smarter ways of creating energy. If we had done nothing except put the most advanced scrubbers on our coal plants we would actually have had as clean air as we do today.”
THE LIBERALS FAILED TO PERFORM DUE DILIGENCE, OR UPHOLD THEIR FIDUCIARY DUTY
- The Liberal government has to date done no cost benefit analysis, and no health study.
- The much-anticipated Health Canada two-year, $2 million research study of the adverse health effects of wind turbines is due in December of this year. However, it will apparently not establish causation or have conclusive results.
- The 550-metre set-back for siting industrial wind turbines from homes, established by the Ontario government, is arbitrary and was not based on any research.
HYPOCRISY, DISHONESTY
- In her current election campaign ads, Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne says she believes “government should be a force for good in people’s lives.” In her campaign she claims “I believe there is only one good reason to enter politics, and that is to help people,” yet the documentary showed her not to have had the basic decency to stop to listen when she was approached by industrial wind turbine victim Norma Schmidt.
FLAGRANT CONFLICT OF INTEREST – LIBERAL FRIENDS CASHING IN
- Mike Crawley, erstwhile president of the Ontario Liberal party, a former senior aide to former premier Dalton McGuinty, was at the same time CEO of a major wind developer that was proposing four or five projects in Ontario. In 2004 he was awarded a contract worth $475 million, in addition to others.
FEAR AND COWARDICE – INDUSTRY INSIDERS ARE AFRAID TO SPEAK OUT
- People in the system have not dared to speak out.
- “There were people in the power generation sector who understood that the government numbers were not correct and did not add up, but they were effectively muzzled. The people that work in the power sector know that this is a crazy system. These wind farms are displacing hydro-electricity, which is just a waste on every level. The hydro-electricity plants don’t generate any air pollution emissions. They give us reliable, predictable base load power and now we let (them) sit idle.”
- “So people who work in the sector, they can see what is going on and they know that this is a waste but for understandable reasons they are not about to make a big noise about it because they could lose their jobs if they do.”
- “Our electricity system, to the people that run it, has become a joke, and they dare not raise a finger to oppose it.”
- “The electricity industry professionals will see the wasted generation … and their response is ‘so long as we have a blank cheque to keep the lights on, it’s all good.’ “
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There is much, much more to learn and be alarmed and outraged about in this documentary film, which runs 1 hour, 36 minutes and may be purchased for $9.99 and downloaded.
UPDATE: The full documentary Down Wind is now available on YouTube. Click here.
THE LIBERALS “HAVE GOT TOO MUCH INVESTED TO ADMIT THE ERROR”
In the upcoming Ontario election on June 12, any vote for the Liberals would appear to be one in favour of propping up a government that has proven itself to be working to enrich its cronies with the province’s treasure, not one that is interested in the welfare of the people it is mandated to serve, or in nurturing the economic health of the province.
Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak has promised to repeal the Green Energy Act if elected.
There will be blood on the ground: permission to kill and do serious, irreversible harm
An Ontario Divisional Court overturned last year’s decision by the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal that stopped the construction of nine industrial wind turbines that would despoil the environmentally sensitive Ostrander Point, situated on provincially-owned Crown land in Prince Edward County. Last year, the Tribunal had revoked the approval, given by the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) in December 2012, on the basis that the Blanding’s turtle would suffer serious and irreversible harm if the development went ahead.
The MOE joined the project proponent, Gilead Power, in an appeal of the Tribunal’s ruling to the Ontario Divisional Court. “Three lawyers from the Ministry of Environment and the Attorney General’s office argued that their own MOE-appointed panel had erred,” said the Wellington Times.
With the Divisional Court’s decision on February 20, 2014, Gilead Power Corporation is presumably once again entitled, according to the permit it was originally granted on July 23, 2012 by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) under the Endangered Species Act, 2007 (ESA), “to ‘damage and destroy the habitat of Eastern Whip-poor-will’, as well as to ‘kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport’ both Blanding‟s turtle and Whip-poor-will, resulting from the development and operation of the Project” (from the Tribunal’s ruling, see Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County v. July 3, 2013).
Permits to kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport a species at risk or to damage and destroy its habitat are no longer issued to industrial wind turbine developers, but not for the reasons you may think.
Seven months ago the Ontario government almost completely undid its leash on the marauding weasels of wind. It gave up its power to monitor and regulate what the industrial wind turbine developers do to wildlife and the environment, making it even easier for the wind companies to do their dirty work, and harder than ever for concerned citizens and communities to assert their rights. New regulations granting more special rights to wind companies state in part:
Under the amended regulation, eligible proponents are automatically given an exemption provided they follow the prescribed rules. MNR has given up its power to say “no” to any project, regardless of the ecological importance of the area or the possibility there will be damaging cumulative impacts on the species at risk or its habitat.
Although proponents are generally required to document the measures they will take to minimize “adverse effects” on species, proponents almost never have to submit the documentation to MNR. MNR will therefore have no ability to know whether the permit-by-rule system is actually protecting species at risk.
The government’s own Environmental Commissioner has stated:
“By eliminating the permit process, the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) has shed its ability to say ‘no’ to a proposed activity, no matter how harmful it may be to an imperilled species,” says Commissioner Miller. “And since proponents don’t have to file any monitoring reports with the ministry, MNR will be blind to the effectiveness of its new rules.”
The Ontario Liberal government is wilfully enabling the destruction of the environment (not to mention people’s health, communities, property values, quality of life) for a fake-green technology that has proven to be useless and has already wasted billions of dollars. It’s enough to make you scream at the insanity, the government’s dereliction of fiduciary duty to the people, and the perversion of democracy in Ontario.
Victims of a massive global warming fraud
So the Blanding’s Turtle must once again prove that it is in sufficient danger to warrant protection against industrial wind turbines from bestriding and destroying its unique, fragile habitat at Ostrander Point in Prince Edward County. Not only that, the proponents of the proposed wind factory, (Gilead Power) claim in their appeal of the recent decision of the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) protecting the turtle, that the reptile’s advocates, Prince Edward County Field Naturalists (PECFN), must “prove that the project would cause serious and irreversible harm to the turtle population province wide.” (Our emphasis.)
This is an interesting tack to take considering that the original decision of the ERT rejected such extrapolations, insisting on case-by-case assessment, when it came to previous Tribunal findings about the harmful effects of industrial wind turbine operations on human health!
But Gilead, and the Ministry of the Environment (MOE), which is also appealing the ERT decision, know they have the upper hand. Laws and rules, specially written so that all kinds of inconvenient obstacles have been swept aside to facilitate the wind industry’s free rein, are heavily weighted in favour of allowing industrial wind factories to be built practically anywhere, over the objections of unwilling hosts, damn the consequences. Two things worth considering here:
1. Let’s stop calling industrial wind factories ‘farms’ or ‘parks’ or ‘projects’ as if they complement a rural setting, as if they are benign, productive or beneficial. Make no mistake: these are sprawling industrial factories, useless ones, plonked ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly into the middle of working farms, and right beside homes, schools, and airports, and in pastoral landscapes and environmentally sensitive natural beauty.
Anyone who doubts this characterization of what’s going on should take a drive through Melanchton Township or the Chatham-Kent area, or any one of the locations marked on this map, and spend some time looking at and contemplating the uglification and utter ruination of the scenic countryside. The sight is unnerving. At times you’re surrounded 360˚ by the un-green white and grey monsters. You know that you’re in a vast industrial area that was once bucolic countryside. The eye tries in vain to focus on the fields, the trees, the sky, the clouds, but the constant, dizzying motion of the industrial behemoths engenders a disorienting, nervous tension. Your anxiety mounts as you see herons, raptors, the August flocks of gathering starlings flying perilously close to the turbines. You just want to get out of there. You flee even though you haven’t experienced the noise, the vibrations, the infrasound, the light flicker and other deleterious side effects of turbine operations relentlessly torturing rural residents whose homes are under seige by the monster machines.
2. How did we arrive at this crazy, insane situation where different ministries and arms of the Ontario government are fighting each other, reversing or trying to reverse each other’s decisions, each side’s lawyers and experts funded out of the same taxpayer purse? Where the Ministry of the Environment belies its name and grants permits for wind factories to be placed at designated Important Bird Areas, when the MOE knows they slice and dice birds and bats? Where Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health sticks her head in the sand and pretends that rural residents’ complaints of ill health caused by turbines are all in their heads? Where, despite overwhelming evidence that wind turbines are an environmental and billions-of-your-dollars economic disaster, the current Wynne government recklessly, heedlessly perpetuates the so-called ‘green‘ energy policies of her discredited, cowardly-slunk-away McGuinty predecessor? Where wind companies get a guaranteed, free-ride sinecure for a mind-boggling 20 years, paid for by you and your children, and in the process are free to blight the landscape, trample on property rights, and rob us of our democratic heritage, as allowed by the pernicious Green Energy Act?
Who and what is behind the forced imposition of useless industrial wind turbines on the people and their land, made possible by an unprecedented, legislated abrogation of democratic rights, resulting in the callous ruination of quality of life, homes, and property, wasting billions of our dollars, and hobbling the economy with sky-rocketing electricity costs and job losses?
.…one of the greatest scientific scandals in the history of the world on which billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money…squandered. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
The shocking answer is that the Liberal government of Ontario is hell-bent on sacrificing the province’s people, land, wildlife, treasure, democracy and economic future on the altar of a false global warming god, brought to you courtesy of the United Nations (UN), the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s Agenda 21, the UN’s International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), propagandists like carbon trader Al Gore and name-caller David Suzuki, and many other dishonest, even disgraced-but-still-influential players in the ‘green’ and environmental movement – Climategate scientists, lobbyists, politicians, NGOs, charities, and not-for-profit organizations.
Man-made global warming has to this day not been scientifically proven, notwithstanding what the mass media take as a given, and what proselytizers and profiteers like Al Gore and David Suzuki and many others of their ilk want you to believe.
‘Climate change’…It’s not a genuine problem to be solved, but a handy excuse – with a fashionable green patina – to advance a particular social and political agenda under the cloak of ecological righteousness and scientific authority. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
The UN’s ICLEI, for example, has probably infiltrated and signed up your community and provided your leaders with its cookie cutter blueprint for eroding your property rights, most likely without your knowledge or your vote. The UN’s Agenda 21, a master plan for a world government to control every aspect of your life under the guise of ‘saving the planet’, has been implemented under our noses for the last 21 years and has influenced, even bound our governments and nibbled away at our sovereignty. Scary stuff, and most of us are completely unaware of what is really going on. The fix is in, Big Money is being made and spent, a good part of it coming out of your pocket. The Blanding’s Turtle is not the only one in danger.
Increasingly when you read what is said and done by our governments in the name of ‘combatting climate change’, you have to pinch yourself in disbelief…wishful thinking and economically suicidal lunacy has managed to worm its way into twenty-first-century representative democracy. (James Delingpole, Watermelons)
Follow the links in this post, but also do your own research. Find out exactly how it has come to pass that Ontario has been invaded by useless, dangerous wind turbines that have wreaked economic, environmental and social disaster, and why the Wynne government is wilfully blind to the carnage, promising more of the same. If you want to trace the dots from the costly, destructive industrial wind turbines in your backyard back to the workings of a UN-led sinister, international web of global warming fraud and the malevolent, venal grab for money and domination, start with the very readable Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future, by James Delingpole.
Serious and irreversible harm
We know that wind energy is economically ruinous, a faux-green shell game that has no benefit whatsoever, except for the wind companies and their political enablers. And yet the only thing that was able to stop nine useless industrial wind turbines from invading an environmental and tourist treasure in Ontario was—a little reptile.
Thanks to evidence that “serious and irreversible harm” would befall Blanding’s turtle, a globally endangered species that is threatened in Ontario, on July 3, 2013 the Environmental Review Tribunal revoked the approval for a wind factory at Ostrander Point in Prince Edward County that had been issued by the Ministry of the Environment in December 2012.
It was the danger to the turtle and its habitat alone, not the distinct prospect of turbine-slaughter of other animals such as birds and bats, not the likelihood of turbine-construction related destruction of plant life, not the probability of turbine-syndrome harm to human health, not the insult of a useless project allowed to squat on the people’s Crown land (it is “the policy of the Ontario government to promote the use of Crown land for renewable energy projects”), not the shock of turbines licensed to impale a designated Important Bird Area (explicitly permitted by the government) that swayed the Tribunal in this case. Only the turtle’s predicament met the very rigorous legal test of “serious and irreversible harm”, and thus the threatened reptile managed to protect all the other potential wind turbine victims as well.
The Ostrander Point outcome is welcome news for “anti-wind” warriors, but not every appeal to the Tribunal will have a handy endangered or threatened turtle to help out. The harsh reality is that it is very difficult to meet “the statutory onus” of proof of harm. But the damage is all too real and proven for the scientists who study the adverse effects of wind turbines on birds, bats and the environment and for the people who have had to move out of their homes because nearby wind turbines have made them too ill to stay.
The Tribunal’s decision (see Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County, 03 Jul 2013) is recommended reading for anyone interested in how tortuous a path anti-wind turbine advocates must tread, even when the Ontario government’s wind power scheme has been thoroughly discredited as a scam and very costly sham.
FAUXGREEN 
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