BRITISH "ANIMAL ACTIVISTS" KILL THOUSANDS OF FISH

Police have warned fish farmers to increase their security after 15,000 halibut were released from their cages in an attack believed to have been carried out by animal rights activists. Thousands of dead fish are being washed up along the west coast of Scotland after the raid at Kames Marine Fish Farm, near Oban. The perpetrators are thought to have attacked last week. Detectives believe that the attack could be linked to a spate of other farm attacks throughout the country. The letters ALF (Animal Liberation Front) were spray-painted near by.

The loss is estimated to have cost the fish farm at least 500,000 pounds as boats, cranes and offices were also vandalised. The halibut died from starvation or getting caught in seaweed. They were also being eaten by herring gulls and otters.

The fish farmer, who did not wish to be identified, said: "They claim they liberated them into the sea but sadly, as we all know, farmed animals, whether they are fish or any animals, don't survive unless they are looked after. The fish farmer added: "We farm them in a sustainable way. The welfare of the fish is at the forefront of our minds. Isn't it better to have farmed fish than to be pillaging the seas where stocks are declining dramatically?" Fish farms in Scotland, Kent and the South West have been attacked in the past year.

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U.S. farmers like the payout, but critics of wind power point to costs

Corn, soybeans and electricity - that's what Jim Young's farm produces, thanks to the rich Iowa soil, regular rainfall and 13 wind turbine towers on his land. Some neighbors don't like the whirling blades, with their tips traveling more than 100 miles an hour on a typical windy day, and the turbines buzzing 350 feet above the ridge where rainfall divides between the Missouri and the Mississippi. For Young, electricity is a cash crop, $4,000 a year for each turbine. The turbines also produce local property taxes of about $13,000 a year each, too. "They're clean, and I don't think they bother anybody, really."

The turbines do bother some folks, including Glenn R. Schleede, a retired power company executive from Round Hill, Va., who said the wind power industry puts out "absolute baloney" to justify its existence. "I'm tired of subsidizing Warren Buffett companies," Schleede said, referring to federal tax subsidies that go to MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a division of Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that is headed by Buffett. Those are MidAmerican's turbines in the fields around Schaller.

Schleede's criticisms, mostly in academic-style papers he writes, concentrate on the economics of wind power and what he called "false claims about how this is good for an energy system." "In fact, these things, because they're intermittent and volatile and unpredictable, they don't really add a lot of capacity to an electric grid," he said. "When you see these things advertised, they talk about how many megawatts of capacity, the number of homes served and all that garbage. "I would maintain that they don't serve any homes."

But Schleede's objections haven't deterred wind power development in Iowa, where support is so widespread and opponents so scarce that Iowa generates more electricity from the wind than any state except California and Texas. MidAmerican is moving ahead with its fourth large wind-power plant, bringing its Iowa wind investment over the past decade to about a half-billion dollars. Last week, an Iowa Falls investment group announced plans for a separate $200 million wind project in north-central Iowa.

Environmentalists favor wind's no-pollution feature, especially now that power companies are keeping turbines from disturbing wildlife and sensitive habitats. The mono-crop fields of Iowa's factory-line farms are a perfect spot, they say, and every five-second turn of the turbine means a bit of coal unburned.

For environmentalists, a key issue is, if not coal, then what? Mark Kresowik, a Sierra Club organizer who is battling a proposed coal-fired electricity plant in Waterloo, Iowa, said, "Wind becomes a very prominent factor in that discussion." MidAmerican and the investment group, Iowa Winds LLC, are interested because federal subsidies make wind power profitable, thanks to taxpayers. Even Nebraska's public power districts are willing to use a little money from electricity customers to subsidize wind power.

"It's a little bit more expensive," said retired Holdrege farmer Bruce Gustafson, a longtime Nebraska Public Power District board member. "But it's a step in the right direction." Omaha Public Power District pays NPPD an average of $100,000 a month for wind electricity, even though most wind-generated electricity in most cases costs more than power from coal. The electricity comes from NPPD's $81 million wind generation facility near Ainsworth.

OPPD Chairman Del Weber said the publicly elected board supports wind power and makes the NPPD payment rather than building its own wind farm partly because the Omaha district doesn't have the steady, strong wind that would generate enough electricity. Despite the higher cost of wind energy, Weber said, "I think energy companies want to be on top of it. There are some very interesting kinds of developments in wind power."

As wind technology becomes more efficient, natural gas prices are rising, and pollution-control equipment adds to the costs at OPPD's new coal-fired plant at Nebraska City. Electricity from the plant costs 2.9 cents per kilowatt hour, spokesman Mike Jones said, close to the 3.4-cent per-kilowatt-hour cost at NPPD's wind-power plant. Even so, Weber said, wind power seems destined to remain only a supplemental source of electricity. "My guess is that wind power's never going to replace any kind of base power, but I think we should use it wherever we can." ...

Some objections to the wind turbines are financial. Nevada, Iowa, farmer Dale Swanson said he and his son and a woman whose land they farm turned down MidAmerican's offer to locate two or three of the turbines on the property. He objected to the 30-year, fixed $4,000-per-year payment. "As you look forward for 30 years, that's a pretty small price for the amount of things they get for it," Swanson said. The tower and the maintenance road would have cut across some of the best farmland, he said, and the company would have the right to come on the property for maintenance and repairs. He said there was no provision for removing the tower after 30 years, and the concrete base would be expensive to pull out once the contract ends.

An earlier option from MidAmerican called for an inflation adjustment after 15 years, he said, but the contract it actually offered removed that. "They came along and said this was a much better contract, but it wasn't," he said. The switch "was a pretty slick, city-boy deal." "I guess maybe you could say I didn't need the money bad enough that I would put up with that for 30 years." ....

Shane Patterson of Ames, Iowa, an Audubon Society biologist, said he has studied older wind farms in prairie areas of southwestern Minnesota. "They were utterly silent," he said. "It's not a prairie anymore because there are no prairie birds." Power companies now avoid such areas, he said. "I can't speak for every project, but it seems that the power companies are at least willing to listen," he said. "They do want information on where they shouldn't place these turbines."

Spencer banker Lee Schoenewe, who is active in the region's Audubon Society and is a trustee of the Iowa Nature Conservancy, said the groups' latest concern in Iowa is that improperly placed wind turbines cause nesting birds to avoid grassland habitats. The "scarecrow effect" seems to drive away birds that normally nest in grasslands, he said. "We're already in a position where temperate grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, especially in the central U.S. where the wind blows." Power companies have been good at avoiding such sites, he said, and the Nature Conservancy and local Audubon chapter have helped them find sites.

He also has no problem with the government subsidies. "It shouldn't be permanent but to develop alternative sources of energy. As energy gets more expensive, those subsidies certainly should be reduced. I think that's just intelligent in the long run."

But Schoenewe doesn't like the way the turbines look. "My perspective is that they can ruin a landscape, but a lot of people down in the Storm Lake area like to drive around and look at them," he said. "As a conservationist I'm very much in favor of renewable energy. "If we have to put up with losing a gorgeous sunset across a ridgeline in the distance to have this kind of thing available, I guess that's part of the bargain. I'm smart enough to know that there are other things beyond esthetics. "If we can preserve some of the pristine grasslands we have in this part of the country and put the turbines in agricultural fields, that's probably the best balance we can hope for."

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GORE'S "MODEST PROPOSAL"

Former vice president Al Gore laid out his prescription for an ailing and overheated planet Monday, urging a series of steps from freezing carbon dioxide emissions to revamping the auto industry, factories and farms. [Is that all?]

Gore proposed a Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association ("Connie Mae," to echo the familiar Fannie Mae) devoted to helping homeowners retrofit and build energy-efficient homes. He urged creation of an "electranet," which would let homeowners and business owners buy and sell surplus electricity. "This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue -- it affects the survival of human civilization," Gore said in an hour-long speech at the New York University School of Law. "Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours."

Gore was one of the first U.S. politicians to raise an alarm about the dangers of global warming. He produced a critically well-received documentary movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," that chronicles his warnings that Earth is hurtling toward a vastly warmer future. Gore's speech was in part an effort to move beyond jeremiads and put the emphasis on remedies. He took a veiled shot at the Bush administration: "The debate over solutions has been slow to begin in earnest . . . because some of our leaders still find it more convenient to deny the reality of the crisis." But he saluted a Republican, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for helping to push through sharp reductions in carbon emissions.

Gore noted that few politicians of any party are willing to step into the "no politician zone" [So Gore is not a politician???] of tough steps needed to address global warming. Gore cautioned against looking for a "silver bullet" policy reform that would address global warming, a view many scientists share. "There are things that you can do today and in the midterm, and things to tend to in the long term," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "You have to think on all the scales at once, and even that will only help you avoid the worst scenarios."

A spokeswoman for the President's Council on Environmental Quality said Monday that the Bush administration has committed $29 billion to climate research and programs and has reduced greenhouse gas intensity. That is not, however, the same matter as reducing total carbon emissions, which continue to rise.

Gore touched on nuclear power as a palliative for global warming but made it clear that this is at best a partial solution. Nuclear power inevitably raises questions of nuclear arms proliferation, he said. And he warned against thinking that the recent drop in oil prices offers much help: "Our current ridiculous dependence on oil endangers not only our national security, but also our economic security."

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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