Coal River Mountain Watch released a report yesterday that shows that wind development is a better economic land use option than mountaintop removal coal mining, not only for Coal River Mountain, but potentially for all areas in southern West Virginia that exhibit good wind potential.
If you haven’t heard, T. Boone Pickens has waded into the clean energy debate. He’s leading the charge for wind energy production in Texas and the Midwest as a solution to our foreign oil dependence. It’s a good effort from the conservative movement to get into clean energy, but from a climate standpoint, it’s just where the new line has been drawn.
Among the many colossal falsehoods routinely espoused by the media and misguided activists about wind power is the canard about how wind farms threaten bird populations. People how make this claim, who say birds are at risk in Appalachia from existing and proposed wind farms, have zero — ZERO — data to back up their claims.
On the other hand, there’s now an enormous body of scientific evidence, backed up by radar studies, showing the opposite: that bird populations are in no way threatened by wind power development in our region.
Please see below and here an essay I posted on the CCAN website in March 2006. This is thoroughly documented stuff, not hot-headed rhetoric. Here’s the truth: global warming is the single biggest threat to all the planet’s bird and bat populations. And wind power can and already is a safe and responsible part of the solution to global warming.