OPINION:
With the stroke of a pen, President Trump saved more than 5,000 majestic birds from annual destruction. Reckless anti-environmental activists were on the brink of erecting avian guillotines — taller than the Washington Monument — across Idaho’s Magic Valley, to the horror of residents.
The Lava River Wind Project is canceled. Nobody in the Gem State wanted it to go forward. The Legislature was unanimously opposed. The seven affected counties adopted resolutions of disapproval. Local ranchers were furious about losing access to grazing land, but President Biden’s minions didn’t care. They signed a death warrant for the bald eagles that called the proposed 57,000-acre windmill zone home.
Even humble feathered creatures like the greater sage-grouse would have suffered, consigned by Mr. Biden’s decree to 806 casualties yearly, under the cruel heading, “permitted take.”
Nature never prepared birds of prey, much less the common sagehen, to navigate a maze of 231 windmills, each sprouting three bloodstained, 300-foot-long scythes. Combined, the swept area of these sharpened edges would have presented 56 million square feet of annihilation for our airborne friends.
Humans were also at risk. Search-and-rescue aircraft would have to dodge the monstrously large propellers. As the final environmental impact study admitted: “For this analysis, we assume there would be some reduction in aerial emergency response in and near the siting corridors and that aerial emergency response that does occur may take longer because flight paths may need to be broken up or require more turns.”
Once the windmill’s useful life is over, the company envisioned sending obsolete blades to “appropriate industrial disposal sites or landfill locations” while leaving behind the massive sunken concrete pillars supporting the towering structures.
To prevent that, the Idaho congressional delegation offered the Don’t Develop Obstructive Infrastructure on our Terrain Act to prohibit federal approval of any windmill or solar panel project opposed by a state legislature.
A clever Idaho state lawmaker followed up with an even better way to discourage this blight on the landscape. Rep. Jeff Ehlers, a Republican, introduced House Bill 317 to impose a height-based excise tax on each commercial wind turbine operating in the state. The substantial fees would apply to operations on either private or federal land.
Although it didn’t come up for a vote, the measure would have cost the Wind River operators $3.5 billion annually. Even without the legislation, the project would not have been profitable anyway. Wind and solar fantasy schemes rely entirely on government subsidies to survive.
Idahoans who seek reliable power would be much better served by a compact nuclear or natural gas plant, neither of which threatens to overshadow the countryside like the towering windmill farm. Yet the electricity here wasn’t destined for Idaho; it would have been used to support California’s seriously underperforming grid.
The Golden State’s fascination with unreliable forms of electricity has created perpetual brownouts. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is desperate to have additional sources of politically correct power to make up for his ineffective infrastructure management.
Let’s not pretend any of this is “green.” Each turbine requires a steady supply of hundreds of gallons of petroleum-based lubricant for the gears and bearings to function. Each of its 100-foot-long steel components is forged by industrial processes that depend on fossil fuels. The pieces are transported in multiple stages on large, diesel-powered trucks.
President Trump is right to preserve natural beauty by ending this fraud.
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