That’s now the official policy of the U.S. Interior Department. On Friday, the agency announced that it would grant some wind-energy companies permits that will allow them to kill or injure bald and golden eagles for up to 30 years without penalty.
The move is an unprecedented gift to the wind-energy industry, which has been lobbying for the 30-year permit for several years. Shortly after the deal was announced, the wind-energy lobby issued a statement that would make George Orwell proud. An official with the American Wind Energy Association declared that this “is not a program to kill eagles.” It is, he claimed, “about conservation.”
Well then. We can now rest easy. Big Wind is saving eagles by getting permits to kill them.
Dozens of environmental groups, including the American Bird Conservancy, the Conservation Law Center, and the National Audubon Society, opposed the deal. Under the headline “Interior Dept. Rule Greenlights Eagle Slaughter at Wind Farms,” Audubon issued a statement calling it “a stunningly bad move” and quoting the group’s president and CEO, David Yarnold: “Instead of balancing the need for conservation and renewable energy, Interior wrote the wind industry a blank check.” He called it “outrageous” that “the government is sanctioning the killing of America’s symbol, the Bald Eagle.”
[…]On September 11, some of the top raptor biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a report that found that the number of documented eagle kills by wind turbines has increased dramatically over the past few years, rising from two in 2007 to 24 in 2011. In all, some 85 eagles have been killed by wind turbines since 1997. And that figure is “an absolute minimum,” Joel Pagel, the lead author of the report, recently told me. Among the carcasses: six bald eagles.
In an interview shortly after the publication of his findings in the Journal of Raptor Research, Pagel told me that he and his colleagues have since documented additional eagle kills by wind turbines in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and North Dakota. He refused to give a number but said “it’s quite a few.” There are now 14 states where the problem has been identified, he said, adding that more than half of the eagle carcasses have been found “incidentally” — that is, by people not out looking for them. And so the total of dead eagles is likely far higher than what Pagel and his colleagues are reporting.
As someone who loves birds of all kinds and who has owned different species of parrots for the last 25 years, I am outraged by the Obama administration’s war on birds. Birds are among the most intelligent animals, and many species are capable of forming bonds with humans in ways that most other animals cannot. We should not be subsidizing “green” energy projects that result in the killing of rare birds. Although global warming theory is now widely recognized as being contrary to observations, the need to protect endangered species is real.
The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.
John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his lies were a “crime of massive proportion” that were “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.
[…]Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.
In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.
To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials — including McCarthy — that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
“Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010 email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho, ho.”
In fact, Beale had no relationship with the CIA at all. Sullivan, the EPA investigator, said he confirmed Beale didn’t even have a security clearance. He spent much of the time he was purportedly working for the CIA at his Northern Virginia home riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod.
“He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”
Nor was that Beale’s only deception, according to court documents. In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam. According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.
To really eliminate this kind of fraud, waste and corruption, the best thing to do is to shrink government. If they didn’t have the money to pay people like Beale, then this wouldn’t have happened. The public sector is always spending other people’s money – taxpayer money. Never their own money. No public sector employee will be as careful about how they are spending taxpayer money as they would be if it were their own money, or their private company’s money. In the business world, if you do something like this, you go under. Fast. Because you have competitors who are happy to capitalize on your mistakes. No business can survive million dollar losses like this for long. The government can, because it just borrows more from your children.
Source: Department of Geosciences, Georgia State University
Global temperature (Source: USC.edu)
Source: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California
Now, the consensus view among skeptics of global warming has generally been that naturally-occurring solar cycles are responsible for cooling and warming trends. In the medieval era, global temperatures were higher than today, and that cannot have been caused by the emission of greenhouse gases. It makes more sense to attribute that warming period to the sun than to human behaviors. If that’s the case, then it’s possible that solar cycles could also cause us to go into a cooling period.
Here’s an article about global cooling from the Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper that is part of the National Post.
Excerpt:
In the 1960s and 1970s, a growing scientific consensus held that the Earth was entering a period of global cooling. The CIA announced that the “Western world’s leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of detrimental global climatic change” akin to the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries, “an era of drought, famine and political unrest in the western world.” President Jimmy Carter signed the National Climate Program Act to deal with the coming global cooling crisis. Newsweek magazine published a chilling article entitled “The Cooling World.”
In the decades that followed, as temperatures rose, climate skeptics mocked the global cooling hypothesis and a new theory emerged — that Earth was in fact entering a period of global warming.
Now an increasing number of scientists are swinging back to the thinking of the 1960s and 1970s. The global cooling hypothesis may have been right after all, they say. Earth may be entering a new Little Ice Age.
“Real risk of a Maunder Minimum ‘Little Ice Age,’” announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University. “Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age] from less than 10% just a few years ago to 25-30%,” explained Paul Hudson, the BBC’s climate correspondent. If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as “occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and poor summers, is, according to him, ‘more likely than not’ to happen.”
[…]Scientists at the Climate and Environmental Physics and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Berne in Switzerland back up theories that support the Sun’s importance in determining the climate on Earth. In a paper published this month by the American Meteorological Society, the authors demolish the claims by IPCC scientists that the Sun couldn’t be responsible for major shifts in climate. In a post on her website this month, Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, all-but mocked the IPCC assertions that solar variations don’t matter. Among the many studies and authorities she cited: the National Research Council’s recent report, “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate,” and NASA, former home of global warming guru James Hansen.
Earlier this year, Professor Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environmental Studies at the University of Western Australia presented a study that posited that the sun was a major controller of the climate.
“There is a very good correlation of sunspots and climate,” Ollier wrote. “Solar cycles provide a basis for prediction. Solar Cycle 24 has started and we can expect serious cooling. Many think that political decisions about climate are based on scientific predictions but what politicians get are projections based on computer models.”
Last year, Russian scientists also posited that from next year onward the world could expect the start of the another Little Ice Age.
“After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055,” wrote Habibullo Abdussamatov of the Russian Academy of Science.
The “Little Ice Age” occurred during the 1600s when winters were harsh all across Europe. The continent-wide cold weather coincided with an inactive sun, called the Maunder solar minimum.
You’re not likely to hear about the Medieval Warming Period or the Maunder minimum in public schools, but they are there in the data.
Of course, if the majority of people begin to understand that the sun is causing cycles of warming and cooling, then we don’t really need government to regulate job creators and control our consumption. What would happen then? So my suspicion is that the government-funded scientific consensus will try to get us to believe that we have always been fighting against global cooling, not global warming. That way, the massive taxation and regulation of private companies and private individuals can continue.
This reminds me of Oceania’s war with Eastasia or Eurasia in the famous distopian novel 1984: (description from leftist Wikipedia)
In 1984, there is a perpetual war among Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the super-states which emerged from the atomic global war. “The book”, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two super-states—despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, history is re-written to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces accustomed to doublethink accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in the arctic wastes and a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia). At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies combatting Eurasia in northern Africa and the Malabar Coast.
That alliance ends and Oceania allied with Eurasia fights Eastasia, a change which occurred during the Hate Week dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party’s perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from “Eurasia” to “Eastasia” without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed they tear them down—thus the origin of the idiom “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”…
I wonder if we are coming to the point when the global warming alarmists will switch their pro-socialism narrative so that the threat we face is global cooling.
The neat thing about that article is that it’s the Canadians who are among the most skeptical of global warming. Previously, officials in the Canadian government have been extremely critical of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Consider the comments of Conservative MP Joe Oliver and Conservative MP Peter Kent – they are all for developing energy resources and creating jobs. Canadians are practical on the issue of climate change – they would rather have jobs than feelings of moral superiority. But down here in Obamaland, there’s no critical thinking at all on the issue. If you doubt global warming, then you need to be called names, intimidated, fired or worse.
WINTERY KNIGHT 