From CFACT

By David Wojick

Every land based wind facility in America has a permit to kill a certain number of eagles every year. What these kill numbers add up to is a secret that should be public information. Is it hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands?

Given these numbers we can decide how to limit them. We also need better data on actual kills so it is time to lift the veil on wind power killing eagles.

First the basics. CFACT collegian Maggie Immen puts the issue well in comments on a proposed Wyoming wind facility. She writes this:

“Wind turbines are a documented threat to bird populations, particularly raptors like golden and bald eagles. Estimates suggest that wind farms kill at least 150,000 birds annually in the U.S. alone. Wyoming, a crucial migratory corridor, is especially vulnerable.

The Rail Tie Wind Project, planned for Albany County, would place turbines dangerously close to golden eagle habitats. Wildlife biologist Mike Lockhart, a Laramie resident, warns that official bird fatality counts are likely underestimated since scavengers quickly remove carcasses before they can be recorded.

Adding to these concerns, federal regulations permit a set number of eagle deaths per wind project through incidental take permits. However, experts argue that these limits rely on flawed data that underestimate real mortality rates. Since eagles reproduce slowly, even a small number of fatalities can have devastating effects on their population. Yet regulatory agencies continue approving projects like Rail Tie without adequately addressing these risks.”

See which includes great links to more data.

When it comes to eagles and onshore wind projects there is a glaring deficiency that should be corrected — the killing is unlimited. Every project gets a permit so the total number of allowed deaths just keeps going up and up as more projects come online. Surely this is wrong.

There should be a strict limit to the cumulative total number of kills allowed each year. In the regulatory world this is called a cap on killing. We see something like this sort of cap in the issuance of State hunting licenses for large game. It could be called the wind power bag limit.

The issuance of permits for new wind projects, if any, would be based on the total kills allowed under the existing permits. If this total was less than the cap then permits could be issued in the amount of the difference. These permits might be auctioned off, or allocated by lottery, or something else. The cap on killing needs to be strictly enforced. If a project kills its allotment then it has to shut down for, say, the rest of the year or however the cap is set.

In contrast the Biden Administration made it much easier to get eagle killing permits which were then not enforced. They created what is called a General Permit meaning individual projects did not have to submit lengthy project specific applications. The project basically just registered and paid a nominal processing fee. The requirement that reporting of actual kills had to be monitored by an independent third party was also dropped.

These ill conceived policy changes need to be reversed. The allowable kills need to be limited and the kill reports made accurate.

In addition to the allowable kill numbers the eagle death reports should be made public. People need to know that wind projects in their county or state are killing eagles, where and how many. They also need to know how many more kills are proposed.

Given good eagle kill information we can make informed decisions about capping and reducing these deaths. Lift the veil on wind power killing eagles.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Nick Pope
Contributor

HOUSTON — Energy Secretary Chris Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration’s restrictive energy policies during a keynote speech to energy industry leaders Monday, explaining how the Trump administration’s approach is oriented around unlocking human flourishing.

Wright made the speech to kick off the 2025 CERAWeek conference, one of the premier annual summits for the energy industry. He characterized the Biden administration’s maniacal focus on climate change as counterproductive and impoverishing for ordinary people, pledging to take a radically different approach than his predecessor by unleashing U.S. energy and private sector innovations to make life better and more affordable for Americans, announcing that he is approving a liquefied natural gas (LNG) permit during the speech to prove his point. (RELATED: Biden Admin Spells Out All The Ways It Wants To ‘Decarbonize’ American Buildings In Latest Climate Plan)

“The previous administration’s ‘climate’ policies have been impoverishing to our citizens, economically destructive to our businesses, and politically polarizing. The ‘cure’ was far more destructive than the disease,” Wright said. “There are no winners in that world, except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups. The only interest group that we are concerned with is the American people. Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad.”

Wright explained how much of the world’s population lives in poverty in large part because they do not have access to the cheap, efficient energy that powers modern life and its conveniences that only a fraction of humanity enjoys at present. The new energy secretary — who has worked with nuclear, oil, gas, solar and geothermal energy over the course of his private sector career — argued that the U.S. can and should play a leading role in proliferating prosperity with energy instead of regulating the sector too aggressively in the name of climate change.

“Recently I have been called a climate denier or climate skeptic. This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist. I have been studying and writing about climate change for over twenty years. The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is: a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” Wright said. “We have indeed raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting most of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade offs. Everything.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens. Running the math on what might have been the benefits from these policies yields perhaps only a few hundredths of a degree reduction in global temperatures in the year 2100,” Wright continued. “The Trump administration intends to be much more scientific and mathematically literate.”

While former President Joe Biden said that climate change poses a threat to humanity that exceeds that presented by nuclear war, Wright’s remarks make clear that the Trump administration will not be treating climate change as an existential threat that takes precedence over other priorities.

The vision Wright laid out in his speech represents a stark departure from the positions of the Biden administration on nearly all fronts, including on the issue of approvals for LNG export projects. The Biden administration unilaterally froze approvals in January 2024, keeping the pause in place for most of the year, in what critics characterized as an election year move to shore up support from the well-funded climate lobby.

To drive home his point that American energy is open for business with the Trump administration leading in Washington, Wright announced that he will be approving a LNG permit extension for the Delfin LNG project, a major development proposed for construction off the Louisiana coast and a victim of the Biden administration’s January 2024 freeze on approvals.

“I am honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s energy policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage. My predecessor was on this stage one year ago saying that LNG exports would soon be in the rear view mirror. Think about that for a moment,” Wright said during his speech. “Natural gas today supplies 25% of global primary energy and has been the fastest growing source of energy over the last 15 years. Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3% of global primary energy … Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down.”

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