Bird and bat bloodbath sanctioned by the Ontario Liberals
The Ontario McGuinty/Wynne Liberal governments created special legislation and regulations for industrial wind turbine owners, granting them permits to slaughter species at risk without consequences. They have license not only to kill, harm or harass a member of a species that is listed on the Species at Risk in Ontario List, but also to situate the bird-killing machines in designated Important Bird Areas—and they take full advantage.
Ontario Regulation 242/08: General under the Endangered Species Act, 2007. S.O. 2007, c.6 states in section 23.20 that
Clause 9 (1) (a) and subsection 10 (1) of the Act do not apply to a person who is engaged in the operation of a wind facility and who, in the course of the operation of the wind facility, 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…
Fauna not at risk are fair game, no permit required.
The federal Liberal minister of the environment, Catherine McKenna, doesn’t see anything wrong with this. McKenna’s straw-woman response to Sen. Bob Runciman’s request to assess the cumulative effect the killing machines have on birds and bats is that “wind turbines kill relatively few birds when compared to cats, windows on buildings, vehicles and transmission lines.”
Bird Studies Canada, claiming to be “Canada’s leading science-based bird conservation organization,” and others of its ilk don’t seem to care about the wind industry’s bloody bird and bat massacres. In Bird Studies Canada’s Top 6 Ways You Can Help Birds web page, there is not a single word about it. Instead we are fed greenie kumbaya pap such as: “Reducing overall consumption, and making ‘greener’ choices generally, reduces your environmental footprint and benefits all wildlife over time.”
The save-the-planet environmentalist-pretenders sure don’t care. As Oxford biologist Clive Hambler pointed out in 2013 (emphasis added):
Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that … renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.
Over in the UK, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds (RSPB), as James Delingpole derisively called it in 2014, has also lost its way:
A wind farm in Scotland, which the RSPB was instrumental in easing through the planning process ten years ago has successfully destroyed all but one of the forty breeding pairs of golden plover in the region.
… birds are what the RSPB – originally known as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – was established to protect.
… it appears to have decided that the “birds” in its name no longer have much relevance to its campaigning causes. In fact it appears increasingly to view their destruction with equanimity.
… the RSPB … made up its mind … that climate change was such an important issue that supporting renewable energy was more important than stopping birds being sliced and diced by gigantic eco-crucifixes … despite copious evidence from around the world of the millions of birds (and bats) killed by turbines each year.
As usual, it’s a case of follow-the-money. As James Delingpole reported, the RSPB “is making hundreds of thousands of pounds from the wind power industry.” Bird-protection mandate and charity status obligations be damned.
The wind industry worldwide is very good at hiding mortality rates, and governments and the mainstream media don’t care for the truth—it would ruin their save-the-planet-from-burning-up-with-green-technology narrative. Wildlife expert Jim Wiegand and other analysts estimated in 2013 that in the United States, the industrial wind turbines annually kill up to 39 million birds and bats, but the wind industry will never admit it.
The wind industry is hiding over 90% of the bird and bat mortality caused by their turbines. This statement is supported by the industry’s own data and reasonable adjustments for its manipulations.
The wind industry is … producing faulty, misleading and even fraudulent documents to hide the serious and growing mortality. This situation has continued for years but has been shielded by state and federal agencies and other supporters of wind power.
As the bird and bat mortality reports are slowly uncovered, the numbers just seem to get worse and worse. I never imagined it could get this low, but then again nobody was releasing this info to the public, so how were we to know?
As she implies, real news like this is hardly ever published in the mainstream media and certainly not advertised by bird protection organizations such as Bird Studies Canada. Not surprising when you consider that Bird Studies Canada partners with the Canadian Wind Energy Association, Environment Canada and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to maintain the Wind Energy Bird & Bat Monitoring Database and produce the Wind Energy Bird and Bat Monitoring Database Summary of the Findings from Post-construction Monitoring Reports, dated July 2016.
Of course, the Canadian Wind Energy Association, Environment Canada and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources all have a vested interest in NOT broadcasting how many birds and bats the wind industry kills every year. That would be bad for the subsidy-sucking, taxpayer-gouging wind business, and really bad for public acceptance of government greenie, ”sustainable,” “alternative energy,“ “tackling climate change,” “decarbonizing,” “reducing carbon pollution,” “changing behaviour,” “economy and environment go together,” “saving the planet” policies.
It is therefore astonishing and laudable that the Wind Energy Bird and Bat Monitoring Database Summary concludes that there are serious problems with respect to the scientific validity of the bird and bat mortality estimates:
The mortality estimates presented here potentially underestimate true mortality as they are based solely on carcasses that fell within 50 m of the turbine base.
…the proportion of carcasses expected to fall outside of 50 m [estimated] to be up to 51.8% of birds, based on 4 studies that searched a radius up to 85 m.
For 80 m turbines, carcasses were expected to fall to a maximum distance of 156 m. These findings indicate that the mortality estimates presented here may underestimate true mortality…
The numbers in the FOI reports that Esther obtained, while shocking, are probably just the tip of the iceberg. And just imagine the numbers world-wide!
And for what are millions of birds and bats being sacrificed, with hardly a peep of protest to be heard from the many (co-opted) bird protection organizations around the world? It would be bad enough if their deaths were collateral damage for a greater good, but the terrible fact is that they are being slaughtered for nothing except a morally corrupt ideology—the massive scientific deception of manmade climate change, where the industrial wind abominations supposedly are a remedy for what is actually a non-existent problem.
The killer wind machines, these fake-green, bird-and-bat-slaughtering, taxpayer-robbing, corporate-welfare, crony-capitalist monstrosities, will never meet our energy needs, will never have any redeeming value whatsoever—not for the environment, not for the economy, not for our quality of life.
Industrial wind turbines: the scourge of Ontario’s economy, farmland, and people
People living in the Ontario’s large urban centres may not realize to what extent the Liberals, by means of undemocratic fiat, have imposed massive, invasive industrialization on rural Ontario. In many cases it has happened against the will of communities and people.
The Liberals’ Green Energy Act and its companion, the Environmental Review Tribunal—a toothless kangaroo court for any person or organization NOT a wind energy proponent—rob municipalities and property owners of their rights and any fair chance to prevent wind companies, mostly foreign-owned, from riding roughshod over their land and property values, wildlife and environmental protections, and human and livestock health concerns, never mind from visually polluting and despoiling the natural beauty of the Ontario landscape.
To make matters worse, none of the Liberals’ totalitarian-like “green” “renewable” energy push has made any economic sense, as was again confirmed by the Auditor General of Ontario Annual Report 2015, and in fact would appear to be willful appropriation and squandering of taxpayer money and the deliberate imposition of astronomical electricity costs to consumers and business:
Expensive wind and solar energy—We calculate that electricity consumers have had to pay $9.2 billion…more for renewables over the 20-year contract terms under the Ministry’s current guaranteed-price renewable program than they would have paid under the previous program…We found that the prices under Ontario’s guaranteed-price renewable program were…double the market price for wind and three and a half times the market price for solar energy in 2014.
Watch this video—industrial wind turbines in southwestern Ontario, near Shelburne—and weep.
Bitter, cold (Part 2): Predatory pilfering, plundering, and axing an eagle’s nest
The protesters, predominately rural residents of Ontario, who gathered in front of the Ontario Legislative Building at Queen’s Park on a bitterly cold February 24 to protest against the massive proliferation of useless industrial wind factories in the countryside, were cheered by the words of a number of speakers.
Sherri Lange, CEO, NA-PAW, North American Platform Against Wind Power, gave a brief overview of the failure of and waning support for wind power internationally, and commented on the Liberal government’s willful continuation of the billion dollar wind boondoggle here in Ontario:
It amounts to pilfering and plunder in a predatory manner, because they know what they are doing. And this is terrible, when you have a government that knows what it’s doing. Have you not all supplied them with information, about the problems with wind power? Yes, we have supplied them with that information, repeatedly, thousands, if not millions of times. And they persist. They have plans for 4,900 more of these… I don’t think so!
In the video below, a 13-year-old girl spoke with great passion and conviction about “the appalling actions of our provincial government” when it allowed NextEra Energy to cut down an active bald eagle’s nest last year in order to make way for an access road for an industrial wind turbine project:
I cannot believe this happened! This was a cowardly act by our provincial government, the MNR and the members of this huge business – NextEra Energy. They say that this is green energy? How, I ask you, is this green energy? Cutting down an active bald eagle nest? Might I add, on an old cottonwood tree, hundreds of years old and a very important part of our natural history? I don’t buy it! Our voices must be heard and they will be heard! The members of the Liberal government must know that wind energy is a fantasy, at best!
CLICK ON PICTURE TO WATCH VIDEO
Continue to Part 3 for text and video of more speakers.
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.
FAUXGREEN 
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