This article was
updated on 6/20/2013 with input from Paul Driessen. RK
Jessica Marszelek, federal politics reporter for
Australia’s News Limited Network, recently posted an article titled, “Australia: Wind power
'terrorising' rural communities.” Some 150 people turned up for a
three-hour rally at Canberra’s Parliament House, she reported, to express their
concern about the health effects of wind turbines.
The residents from small towns around the country
complain that the giant turbines cause “a constant rumbling and pulsing in
their heads and a feeling of oppressive anxiety,” she noted. “Everyday farmers”
are upset over growing numbers of turbines in their communities.
“Retired Naval electronics engineering officer and beef
farmer” David Mortimer receives Aus$12,000 a year to allow these avian
Cuisinarts on his land, and 17 more are planned. However, Mr. Mortimer says he
now “suffers night-time panic attacks, acute anxiety, heart palpitations,
tinnitus, earaches, headaches and angina-like pains, and his wife has dizzy
spells.”
Doctors can’t find anything wrong, but the problems
continue, and he claims that he gets “this sensation of absolute acute anxiety,
and it feels like someone is pushing an x-ray blanket over me and weighting me
down into the chair and I can’t get out. We’ve got this constant turmoil,
constant pulsing in our head, constant rumbling,” he continues, and is afraid
the added windmills will kill him and his wife.
Clean Energy Council Policy Director Russell Marsh
dismissed the claims, saying no international research has confirmed the health
impacts attributed to wind power. One rally attendee said there is “not enough
research into the effects of wind energy.”
I don’t know whether more research needs to be done –
though the dearth of such studies seems unjustifiable – or if these monsters of
the skyline really are causing any or all of the health problems these people
are suffering. However, there is a monumental lack of consistency in all of
this.
These are essentially the same kinds of complaints,
comments and anecdotal evidence that the green movement repeatedly raises over
just about every chemical on the market, and every drilling, pipeline and other
hydrocarbon development proposal they dislike. These are the same speculative,
anecdotal arguments that prompted governments all over the world to pass
anti-chemical regulations such as the European Union’s costly, burdensome and
complex regulatory system known as REACH.
In the USA, REACH has inspired the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011
( SCA), which is intended to replace the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), supposedly to
“modernize” the country’s chemical laws. In promoting the bill, the late
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said it would impose “a mandate on companies to
confirm safety before chemicals reach the market.”
In short, he wanted to impose the Precautionary Principle
(PP), which asserts two precepts.
First, all products must be proven totally safe under all
circumstances before they can be used – which is physically and scientifically impossible
(and the greens know it). It’s like demanding that spouses prove they aren’t
cheating on their mates; it can’t be done. Second, even if there is no
scientific evidence of harm, everyone should assume there is harm and forbid
the sale and use of – well, just about everything.
As one observer noted, with the Precautionary Principle,
“no evidence is needed that something is harmful or even could be harmful.” In
many cases, no amount of scientific evidence is ever enough to counter the
argument that a refinery, pipeline, nuclear power plant or other
technology is “not proven safe” beyond
all doubt – even if it is “astronomically unlikely” that a particular harm
would occur.
“The Precautionary Principle insists that no new
technology should be permitted until it can be shown that it will pose no
threat to human health or the environment,” environmental analyst Paul Driessen
adds, “even if there is no evidence that cause-and-effect dangers actually
exist.” This too is impossible.
The PP “focuses on the risks of using chemicals and technologies – but never on the risks of not using them,” Driessen notes. “It
highlights risks that a technology might cause,
but ignores the risks that the
technology would reduce or prevent.”
This brings me to the thrust of my concern. Why aren’t
these assertions of adverse health effects from wind turbines – especially from
citizens who are receiving royalties for having turbines on their property –
just as important as wildly speculative claims by green activists regarding
insecticides and other chemicals? Why
isn’t the Precautionary Principle being applied in this case?
We absolutely know these monsters are killing at least 573,000 birds
every year, including some 83,000 eagles, hawks and other raptors – in clear
violation of US laws. Other estimates put the toll at closer to 13,000,000 birds and bats
annually. Why are the “precautionary” activists stone-cold silent about
that?
Larry Katzenstein, in his chapter in the book Silent Spring at 50, credits Rachel
Carson’s work as the inspiration for the so-called “principle.” The PP can
certainly be traced to Europe, where it was first brought up in the context of
the 1969 Swedish Environmental Protection Act. That’s probably why the
“principle” is so deeply entrenched in the EU, compared to the rest of the
world, and was included in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.
As Katzenstein points out, “In the united States Silent Spring’s popularity spurred
enactment of key federal laws that embody aspects of precaution regulation: the
National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act; the
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act; the Safer Drinking Water
Act, Environmental Pesticides Control Act, Toxic Substances Control Act and Endangered
Species Act.” The PP may be a European creation, but “it was inspired by Silent Spring, as was REACH.”
Rachel Carson’s real legacy, the Precautionary Principle,
has become a potent weapon for anti-technology activists. The problem with
regard to consistency get larger as we come to realize that whatever they support is permitted; whatever
they oppose violates the precautionary principle. They support windmills;
therefore there is no violation. They oppose fracking; therefore it violates
the principle.
Moreover, as Driessen has observed, eco-activists “never
use the precautionary dictum to control regulatory excess, by insisting that
regulators refrain from implementing new regulations, policies or energy
programs, until they can prove their proposed actions will not harm people,
wildlife or the environment.” In the view of activists and regulators,
regulations exist to delay, block or destroy things they oppose. The fact that
regulatory actions may well cause prolonged energy deprivation, poverty, unemployment,
disease, malnutrition or premature death is irrelevant to them.
Returning to where we started: Why do “eco-minded”
activists, regulators and politicians fail to use the Precautionary Principle
to assess the harmful effects of wind turbines on birds and bats, and thus on
insects and other pests that these creatures control? Why do they fail to
consider the impacts that constant subsonic noise and vibrations from wind
turbines have on human health and welfare?
Because these are deliberate oversights!
The hard reality is that the green movement does not care
about facts, wildlife or humans – and logical consistency is totally alien to
them – because advancing environmentalism as the secular religion of urban
atheists is all that matters. Green elites “know” what is best for all of
humanity. The Precautionary Principle is merely another weapon to promote junk
science and Hard Green ideologies, in order to destroy every advancement
mankind has made over the last 100 years – advancements that have given us
better, longer, healthier lives than at any other time in history – and keep
others from enjoying them.
We need to understand that and stop pandering to these
misfits. Why is that so difficult to grasp?
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