Tundra Swans surrounded on three sides by wind turbines
This year, starting in mid-March, thousands of migrating Tundra Swans stopped at the Thedford Bog (a designated Important Bird Area) near Grand Bend, Ontario on Lake Huron and stayed for 13 days. This was some ten days short of their average stay of 23 days over the last 13 years, according to the Lambton Heritage Museum’s statistics (click on “Swan Migration/Discover More”). The Thedford Bog is an important staging area on their annual 6000 km round trip migration to the western Arctic from the eastern USA.
Migrating Tundra Swans flying over their Thedford Bog staging area
The reasons for their shorter stay could be manifold, but the question has to be asked: does some of it have to do with the fact that the resting and feeding swans are now effectively surrounded by industrial wind turbines on three sides, disturbing their rest and search for food?
Tundra Swans resting on the Thedford Bog close to dangerous industrial wind turbines
NextEra’s Goshen industrial wind turbines are thankfully not located directly on the swans’ resting spots, but are close enough and could pose problems for the birds as they fly to the corn stubble fields in the wider area to feed. We know that the lethal blades of wind turbines butcher millions of birds and bats annually worldwide (insects too). But if NextEra’s wind turbines slaughter Tundra Swans or Bald Eagles, the company and all Ontario wind facilities get a free pass, even for endangered species. Under Ontario law, the wind industry suffers no consequences if it “kills, harms or harasses a member of a species that is listed on the Species at Risk in Ontario List as an endangered or threatened species, or damages or destroys the habitat of such a species…”
Tundra Swans at the Thedford Bog flying close to the slicing blades of industrial wind turbines, scouting for food and rest
It is dispiriting driving on the Bluewater Highway (King’s Highway 21), which runs through one picturesque coastal community after another, along most of the entire length of the eastern shoreline of Lake Huron, for roughly 192 km from the Lambton Shores in the south to Southampton in the north until it turns east and inland to cross the Bruce Peninsula. Almost the entire way along the lake, drivers face a bristling phalanx of industrial wind turbine installations, kilometre after kilometre, despoiling the beautiful pastoral and shoreline landscape.
It hurts all the more when you know that industrial wind turbines have absolutely no redeeming value except for their subsidy-dependent, usually foreign, owners. They are dangerous, useless, ungreen, and both economically and environmentally destructive. The only saving grace is that the wind turbines along Lake Huron have not been situated between the highway and the lake. But that makes no difference when you look east or, for example, gaze northwest from the wonderful beaches at Grand Bend from where they ruin the view. Coastal beauty vistas, with huge tourist potential, ruthlessly despoiled for the fake planetary emergency of manmade climate change, the rationale for so-called green energy schemes such as the monstrously ineffectual industrial wind turbines.
Beach near Grand Bend looking northwest at long line of industrial wind turbines – not the vista you want to see on sunny, beachy days, or at any time
How did this happen? The scourge of industrial wind turbines has been inflicted on Ontario, including the breathtaking Lake Huron shoreline, because of the massive UN-led deliberate scientific deception that the carbon dioxide produced by man’s use of fossil fuels is a demon gas that will overheat the earth and kill us all. Actually, carbon dioxide, i.e. CO2, is a non-polluting trace gas that you cannot smell or see, without which there would be no life on earth. The manmade global warming/manmade climate change $1.5 trillion industrial complex is driven by a pernicious anti-human political ideology, with not one whit of care for the environment or the scientific method.
Tundra Swans resting on the Thedford Bog and flying about not far from the lethal-for-birds wind turbines
The UN’s malign objective behind this deception is a bid for unelected, unaccountable global governance, the abrogation of national sovereignty, of democratic freedoms, and of property rights, and anti-human plans for de-industrialization and wealth re-distribution (as detailed in the UN’s Agenda 21, the Millennium Project, Agenda 2030). Many of Canada’s governments at various levels, including the current “climate action”-obsessed federal Trudeau regime, have fallen in line and imposed economically-ruinous “green” policies and taxation schemes in order to obey the UN’s diktats.
It is beyond tragic.
Tundra Swans at sundown heading out over Pinery Provincial Park to cross Lake Huron on the next stage of their 6000 km round trip migration to the western Arctic from their US wintering grounds
Bloody wind turbine carnage: an emotional report from Germany
In the Märkische Allgemeine, March 12, 2018, as tweeted by Linda Rogers:
Wind turbine slays sea eagle
A sea eagle was slain by a wind turbine near Wernikow on the weekend. Workers at the wildlife sanctuary in Struck found the dead raptor. Whether it had a brood to take care of is unclear. In the state of Brandenburg 48 protected birds have already been killed by wind turbines.
Wernikow. A sea eagle was slain by a wind turbine near Wernikow on Saturday afternoon. The bird lay dead on the field when Uwe and Angie Löblich from the wildlife sanctuary in Struck (Prignitz) found it. They were actually looking for suitable spots to release swans. But they determined that the water was still frozen, thus deemed the area unsuitable.
Instead they found the sea eagle. The wind turbine had obviously hit its wing. It was broken, the blood still fresh. Had the eagle lain there any longer, scavengers would have eaten it.
Uwe and Angie Löblich from the wildlife sanctuary in Struck with the eagle found near Wernikow. Source: Björn Wagener
Ornithologist Jürgen Kaatz: Dangerous turbulence from the blades
Wind turbines always spell doom for raptors and storks. “They perceive the blades to be a veil,” says ornithologist Jürgen Kaatz. They cannot judge the speed of the blades at the tips. But the vortices are also dangerous – air turbulence behind the turning blades.
According to Kaatz, the donor card for the wildlife sanctuary of the state of Brandenburg points out that currently 144 sea eagles have been killed by wind turbines (as at January 11, 2018). Brandenburg claims the inglorious top position with 48 dead sea eagles. To compare: in Mecklenburg Vorpommern there are 39; in Schleswig Holstein 37. “These are only the official numbers. One can assume unreported cases,” says ornithologist Jürgen Kaatz.
The Löblichs confirm this: Every year they discover one or two wind turbine bird fatalities. How many birds are found and not reported or dragged off by scavengers no-one knows.
The brood would starve
It’s possible the slain sea eagle near Wernikow already had a brood to provide for. That cannot be determined with certainty. The male bird was not banded, but judged to be about four years old – just on the cusp of breeding maturity. Kaatz hopes that the bird had no young to feed, because in that case they would starve. Sea eagles breed as of mid-February.
According to Kaatz, Altkreis Wittstock is home to four known sea eagles. There could actually be six or seven. Eagles take a very long time to find a new partner, should something have happened to theirs.
Uwe Löblich: “You feel the animal’s pain”
Uwe and Angie Löblich know only too well the suffering that is behind the statistics. “I held it. And you feel the animal’s pain. It gets into your bones,” relates Uwe Löblich, when he had a stork in his arms whose beak was for the most part sliced off. Other birds were dismembered or had their wings torn off or their legs cut off. Some were dead, others half dead, report the Löblichs. Some injured birds drag themselves to the road, hoping to be found. “People should imagine that it was their kids involved. Maybe then they would wake up,” says Uwe Löblich. But as long the politicians do nothing, protected birds will continue to meet their death by the rotating blades.
Björn Wagener
Translated by FauxGreen
Voices from the Thedford Bog (Part 3): “It’s just shocking! The Liberal government is destroying Ontario!”
I can’t see it not affecting tourism. It’s going to affect the residents, it’s going to affect the businesses. I know I don’t want to be in this community anymore, and I just dread what it’s going to look like.
Most people in Ontario’s urban centres, or even those living in small towns, or rural settings where there are no industrial wind turbines, probably have no idea. They may never have heard the stories of rural residents who are having to cope, through no choice of their own, with life in the midst of an industrial wind plant forced on their community, one that has ruined their rural way of life, that has disrupted their communities, livelihoods, health, wildlife, and their environment.
The suffering and sacrifice might at least mean something if there were any common good to be found in the Ontario Liberal government’s deployment of industrial wind turbines invading the landscape, but such is demonstrably not the case, in fact, quite the opposite. The industrial wind turbines are utterly useless, and extremely destructive. The people, communities, wildlife, the environment and the economy are being severely damaged, and yet the government is tone deaf, dumb and wilfully blind. It continues to use the punishing Green Energy Act, and the toothless Environmental Review Tribunal to ram its fatally-flawed, fake-green alternative energy program down the throats of the people of Ontario.
*Most of the mainstream media are blinded by the UN’s IPCC/Al Gore/David Suzuki-driven fake-green, phoney-planetary-emergency-of-climate change agenda (the rationale for industrial wind turbines), or even shamelessly act as chief propagandists for it, our national broadcaster CBC included. In Ontario, they are missing the unfolding real, big-picture tragedy, of which the gas plant scandal is just one part of a much more massive and costlier catastrophe.
The Ontario Liberals have handed out lucrative permits giving wind companies unprecedented rights to industrialize vast swaths of the Ontario countryside in the absence of any cost benefit analysis or human health studies, and with environmental assessments and turbine-caused bird and bat death monitoring conducted by the wind companies themselves. Ontario now has the most expensive electricity costs in North America, while it is at the same time giving away or selling excess power at a loss.
How much longer are Ontarians going to endure this utterly insane, socially and financially ruinous situation?
Muriel Blair lives in the area of Middlesex-Lambton counties and joined industrial wind turbine protesters at the Thedford Bog near Grand Bend, Lake Huron, on Sunday, April 6, 2014:
I’m concerned about the health issues with the cumulative effect of the hundreds of wind turbines. It is going to be pretty substantial for the residents of my community. We’re going to be surrounded by a NextEra project, a couple of Suncor projects, and a couple more NextEra projects going towards the lake. So this whole community is going to be one huge wind turbine, industrial area.
And I’m also concerned about the wildlife. Currently there is an eagle’s nest that is active in the Bornish wind project. It is now a little over 800 metres from the substation that they’ve built, and the MInistry of the Environment has been monitoring it and they have confirmed that the eagles have nested in it. But what they’re planning on doing is running transmission lines into the protected area of the eagle. So that is definitely going to affect the eagle.
But I also worry…I mean, this beautiful area here, where we have this fantastic migration area for these swans…I don’t know…these swans are not going to be coming back, they are not going to be coming back. There are going to be too many wind turbines. So it’s a big concern.
And can you imagine how tourists are going to want to come and spend their money and their time here when it’s surrounded by industrial wind turbines? And even today, early April, late March, this is tourism because the people coming to see the swans are coming from all over. They come from the States, they come from Toronto. You know, they flock here. And do they spend their money here? Yes! I don’t think this is going to be here when the wind turbines are up and operating.
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO (some wind noise)
It’s just shocking, is just shocking. The Liberal government is destroying rural Ontario! Not to mention our Hydro. Our Hydro system is just going down the tubes, when residents are paying 45% more for their Hydro, thanks to the Green Energy Act. And the subsidies that are being paid to these multinational corporations that aren’t even Canadian! It’s crazy! I think that the sooner we get rid of the Liberal government, the better.
They want the residents of rural Ontario to be shipped into the cities and the farms taken over by corporations, and the corporations do the farming. Then they can put all the industry they want next to the farms and they don’t have to worry about people. And everybody is in an urban centre. I really believe that’s what their long-term goal is. Because there’s so much to offer out here and I don’t think they’re going to stop at the wind turbines. I think once they have control of that land they are going to start frakking. Because they’re already talking about natural gas prices going up and how they are running out of natural gas because we have had such a cold winter. So I really believe that is the next thing that rural Ontario is going to see.
If history is anything to judge by, mainstream media reports will overflow with misinformation written by two kinds of people: reporters relatively new to the topic who don’t have the first clue how the IPCC actually functions – or ‘environmental journalists’ who are fundamentally confused about what their job is.
A journalist’s first loyalty is supposed to be the public interest. Ensuring that the public is informed about the shortcomings and limitations of powerful organizations is what journalists are supposed to do. Instead, we’re now plagued by “environment correspondents” who think their primary purpose is saving the planet.
Those people have long parroted the IPCC’s rose-coloured view of itself. They haven’t conducted the most basic fact-checking. They haven’t asked the most rudimentary questions. As Australian writer Joanne Nova is fond of saying, the opposite of skeptical is gullible and the world now has no shortage of that kind of journalist.
Voices from the Thedford Bog (Part 2): Wind factories “destroying the fabric of our communities, a huge public safety problem”
I see a lot of people waking up to just how destructive this is to their communities and livelihood, and they’re starting to connect the dots between companies and the government and the way that we were hoodwinked into this, basically.
Protesters gathered at Thedford Bog near Grand Bend, Lake Huron, on Sunday, April 6, 2014, to decry plans to build a phalanx of industrial wind turbines in what is a designated Important Bird Area, and where every March some 10-15,000 tundra swans stop to rest and feed before continuing on their migration to the western Arctic.
Social worker Patti Kellar joined the protest and talked about the enormous social ills inflicted on the people and communities that have had industrial wind turbines forced upon them:
It’s horrendous! Communities are divided, families are divided, people aren’t speaking to one another. It’s – in terms of property and inheritance and the destruction of farmland – the complete and utter split.
Just days later, the Ontario Liberal government approved a new wind factory in nearby Lambton Shores – 92 industrial wind turbines to be added to the thousands already blighting the eastern edge of Lake Huron. More pending projects, including the one planned around the Thedford Bog, are sure to receive approval, given that the Green Energy Act, and the regulations and exemptions that go with it, are stacked heavily in favour of the wind proponents.
Tremendous social cost, unrest – really, really destroying the fabric of our community … in rural Ontario the very fabric of our communities is being destroyed. It’s quite sad.
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO
And the people who are struggling so hard to bring awareness to everyone are being targeted and bullied and threatened, and legal action is being taken against them, and it’s just heartbreaking. And they keep fighting on, we just keep going.
I see effects on everybody – friendships, family, people who have businesses in the area who have opinions but are afraid to voice them, are afraid to be boycotted. People may want more information and not feel comfortable getting it.
There’s a huge public safety problem here and we really feel strongly that, in the bigger picture, there needs to be an infrastructure in place where the police and authorities have done due diligence and have a template in place to help people deal with this sort of thing, because we are not the only community with this amount of unrest. It’s happening all over Southwestern Ontario and it’s almost criminal in nature, I’m feeling.
Voices from the Thedford Bog: Wind turbines are “a social experiment, a mess, a failure”
Protesters joined the remaining migrating tundra swans at the Thedford Bog near Grand Bend, Lake Huron, on Sunday, April 6, 2014, to condemn plans to build a bristling barrier of industrial wind turbines in what is a designated Important Bird Area. Every March some 10-15,000 tundra swans stop at the Thedford Bog and environs to rest and feed before continuing on their migration to the western Arctic.
Waterfowl scientist Dr. Scott Petrie told CBC News in 2012:
By putting the turbines in inappropriate places, it actually is tantamount to habitat loss. You wouldn’t put an office tower next to a coastal wetland, why would you put a wind turbine there?
Monte McNaughton, Progressive Conservative Member of the Provincial Parliament of Ontario (MPP) for Lambton-Kent-Middlesex, reminded the protesters that his party’s leader, Tim Hudak, has promised, if elected, to repeal the Green Energy Act, the draconian legislation that has given unprecedented rights to industrial wind turbines over people, communities and wildlife. The Green Energy Act was enacted in 2009 in part as a response to the fake planetary emergency of man-made global warming/climate change.
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO (some wind noise)
The Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne Liberal governments have allowed the Ontario landscape to be despoiled and blighted by thousands of useless industrial wind turbines. The machines, towering as high as 50-storey buildings, built on a foundation that requires 800 tons of concrete each that will remain in the ground of prime farmland forever, have been erected in the absence of any cost-benefit analysis or human health studies, and accorded special rights by the Liberal government with its elimination of environmental restrictions inconvenient to wind companies.
Premier Kathleen Wynne has promised to build thousands more of the extortionate-to-taxpayers, destructive, un-green industrial monstrosities.
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.
Three-armed bandits with special rights to attempt Toronto heist
Three-armed bandits with special rights. That’s how some Germans describe industrial wind turbines, according to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. And that label seems to be a universal truth. Wherever in the world you find wind turbines, you’ll also see misguided government legislation specially designed to remove inconvenient barriers for wind companies so they can have their way unimpeded over the democratic rights of tax- and ratepayers, the environmental protection of flora and fauna, and health and welfare of people. The invasive, financially rapacious scourge of wind turbines has continued almost completely unabated in Ontario, were it not for the Blanding’s turtle, which stopped one such industrial complex from being erected on Crown land in Prince Edward County.
To date no industrial wind factory has managed to gain a foothold in any large urban centre in Ontario, though not for lack of trying. Now, a new threat: a planned wind factory on the Leslie Street Spit, also known as Tommy Thomson Park, “Toronto’s Urban Wilderness“. The man-made park with its over 300 bird species, “wildflower meadows, cottonwood forests, coastal marshes, cobble beaches and sand dunes” is a favourite destination for nature-starved urban visitors, families on bikes and rollerblades, or hiking on foot equipped with bird watching scopes, cameras or fishing poles. The park is one of Ontario’s 70 designated Important Bird Areas, which, incredibly, have no legislated protection from industrial wind development.
Trying to create an urban-rural divide on this issue would miss the mark. Some people may be tempted to engage in wind turbine Schadenfreude, jubilating that the seemingly uncaring, Liberal-voting Toronto populace finally has its comeuppance, for once facing having to host the monster turbines themselves. Fact is that for a variety of reasons, most people, urban or not, who aren’t directly affected by the health and environmental evils of wind turbines, have been living in blissful ignorance. But once the uninformed dig deep and find out the sorry truth about the unprecedented wind energy scam that is being perpetrated by government held in thrall by foreign wind companies, they get it. When properly informed, urbanites and others are fully on board with the plight of rural wind turbine victims (the people, the communities, the birds, bats and other animals, the landscape), and enraged that government is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on this useless, destructive technology.
Informed rural residents and urbanites can stand united with the same goal, namely that there should be no further wind energy development anywhere, and that the turbines that exist should be torn down. There is no urban-rural divide. There are only the odious, venal government and wind deceivers who would claim that their green is brilliant when the truth is it’s putting us all in the red for decades to come. In the process they’re destroying people’s lives and homes, human health, property values and the beautiful, restorative natural environments prized by all Ontarians, no matter where they happen to live.
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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