WINDMILLS BRUTAL TO BATS

Australia has unusually large bats -- which we refer to as "flying foxes", though in the body they are in fact smaller than most cats. I grew up in tropical Australia seeing huge black flocks of them flying overhead at nightfall from their "camps" towards the fruit trees. So I have some affection for the remarkable little mammals that provided such a notable display every evening

"Jessica Kerns thought her survey of new power-generating wind turbines on a mountaintop in West Virginia would yield the standard result: a smattering of dead birds that were whacked by the whirring blades. But the University of Maryland doctoral student turned up something unexpected amid the trees and rolling ridges of Backbone Mountain: hundreds of bat carcasses, some with battered wings and bloodied faces. "It was really a shock," Kerns said.

Thousands of bats have died at Backbone and on another nearby wind farm in Meyersdale, Pa. -- more per turbine than at any other wind facility in the world, according to researchers' estimates. The deaths are raising concerns about the impact of hundreds more turbines planned in the East, including some in western Maryland, as the wind industry steps up expansion beyond its traditional areas in the West and Great Plains. The bat deaths, which have baffled researchers, pose a problem for an industry that sells itself as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional power plants. Wind proponents already have had to battle complaints about bird deaths from the blades and about unsightly turbines marring pristine views.

The white turbines in Appalachia rise more than 340 feet above the ground -- well above the tree canopy -- and are lined up close to one another to catch the wind as it blows over the mountains and ridges.

The bat problem could worsen, conservationists fear, as wind developers rush to erect new turbines following the recent renewal of a federal tax break for a year. The wind industry, which had been virtually dormant since the last tax break expired a year ago, projects more wind turbines to be built around the country this year than in any previous year. In the areas near where bats have been killed in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, activists said, roughly 700 new turbines have been proposed or approved. "Take the most conservative estimates of mortality and multiply them out by the number of turbines planned and you get very large, probably unsustainable kill rates," said Merlin D. Tuttle, president and founder of Bat Conservation International, whose Austin-based group is leading the research effort in Appalachia. "One year from now we could have a gigantic problem."

Bats serve an important role in nature, and their populations are believed to be in decline, scientists said. The bats getting killed in Appalachia devour insects that pose grave threats to crops such as corn and cotton. They also feast on pests that can spread disease, such as mosquitoes."

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THE "LOVE CANAL" SCARE DEBUNKED AGAIN:

But the tactics never die

As 2004 came to an end, there was an Associated Press story about a study that had stretched into seven years and cost at least $3 million. What the study found was that, in an area of Niagara Falls, NY called Love Canal, the "preliminary findings indicate no spikes in cancer or death rates and, minimal, if any, effects on births."

In the late 1970s, Love Canal had become synonymous with corporate evil and a threat to the lives of some 900 families. President Carter declared a federal emergency that led to the evacuation of those families and the bulldozing of an elementary school and two streets on the Canal over or adjacent to which they had been built. Years before, Hooker Chemicals & Plastics Corporation had used the abandoned Canal, with the full knowledge of Niagara Falls city leaders, to dump 21,800 tons of chemical byproducts. Despite that, in 1957 the city had punched a sewer line through the Canal walls, thus allowing wastes from the dump to seep throughout the neighborhood sewer system. The city's Board of Education, which bought the site in1953, was aware of the hazards that lay beneath the subsurface construction, but deliberately ignored the problem to build a school.

Niagara Falls, despite its fame as a destination for newlyweds and other tourists, was actually more dependent for its local economy on the chemical industry and, in the 1950s, if you flew over, you could actually see the smog that covered it with a gray-brown cloud. "Chemical Row" along Buffalo Avenue, skirting the southern edge of the city, was the area's larger employer and evoked a great deal of civic pride. Hooker Chemical had chosen the segment of the abandoned Love Canal because its soil was a form of impermeable clay and the area was sparsely populated. That was before the baby boom that followed World War II began to demand more housing and more schools.

On October 16, 1952, Hooker donated the land to the Board of Education for $1.00 after unsuccessfully trying to get the property restricted for use only as a park. Failing to get agreement, Hooker insisted on a deed restriction that would warn all future property owners of the presence of dangerous chemicals. All kinds of construction, including the sanitary sewer noted above would follow. In 1968, the New York State Department of Transportation disturbed still more of the buried chemicals during the construction of an expressway.

By 1978, a series of articles by Michael Brown, a reporter for the Niagara Gazette, set events in motion that led to Love Canal's becoming the symbol, not of the failure of city fathers to act responsibly, but of Hooker Chemical & Plastic Corporation's alleged bad faith. Environmentalists had a field day with the story and it became an element in any number of similar scare campaigns to frighten Americans about chemical storage dumps, radon, and asbestos.

The media was-and continues to be-complicit in all of the hysteria. The $3 million study, however, has found no relationship between cancer or any other malady and having had a home in the Love Canal area or of having attended school there, despite the fact that by the 1960s and 1970s contaminated groundwater was leaching into back yards and the school grounds. As the State Health Department reported in 2001, there was no greater incidence of cancer among the people who formerly lived in Love Canal than for any other comparable group of upstate New Yorkers. Love Canal, the famed pit of environmental pestilence, was remarkably benign.

One would hope the public would get a bit more savvy about these scare campaigns, whether they are leveled against the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry or any other industry said to exist solely for the purpose of killing all its customers. The fact that people today still think of Love Canal as a place that caused widespread disease and death is a travesty. Love Canal, the symbol of corporate evil, was and is a lie. It began with the failure of the city fathers and the Board of Education to act responsibly. It escalated thanks to the hysteria drummed up by local environmentalists.

It is comparable to all the lies you hear and read daily, perpetrated by environmentalists who thrive on scare campaigns. Remember that the next time someone glibly refers to Love Canal or global warming. You are being duped. Again.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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