A major U.S. power company has pleaded
guilty to killing eagles and other birds at two Wyoming wind farms and agreed
to pay $1 million as part of the first enforcement of environmental laws
protecting birds against wind energy facilities. Until the settlement announced
Friday with Duke Energy Corp. and its renewable energy arm, not a single wind
energy company had been prosecuted for a death of an eagle or other protected
bird — even though each death is a violation of federal law, unless a company
has a federal permit.
Not a single wind energy facility has
obtained a permit. The Charlotte, N.C.-based company pleaded guilty to killing
14 eagles and 149 other birds at its Top of the World and Campbell Hill wind
farms outside Casper, Wyo. All the deaths, which included golden eagles, hawks,
blackbirds, wrens and sparrows, occurred from 2009 to 2013. "Wind energy
is not green if it is killing hundreds of thousands of birds," said George
Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy, which supports properly
sited wind farms. "The unfortunate reality is that the flagrant violations
of the law seen in this case are widespread."
Ethanol Mandate: Little More Than Soviet-style
Production Quota - By Barbara
Hollingsworth
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA)
decision last week to reduce the amount of ethanol in the nation’s fuel supply
for the first time is a welcome acknowledgment that the regulation was little
more than a “Soviet-style production quota,” according to Marlo Lewis, senior
fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).“Like all central planning
schemes, there comes a point where even the commissar has to admit that it’s
just not working,” Lewis said in a statement. On Nov. 15, EPA announced that it
“is proposing a cellulosic biofuel volume for 2014 that is below the applicable
volume specified in the [2007 Energy Independence and Security] Act,” due in
part to the fact that only 20,000 gallons of cellulosic biofuels were produced
last year, “in lower volumes than foreseen by statutory targets,” according to
the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
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