Submit your comment to the federal register to save our national bird

Bald eagles are our national bird. Golden eagles are just as majestic. They have just returned from the verge of extinction, after years of being shot and poisoned. Obama’s Department of the Interior and the Fish & Wildlife Service are on the verge of granting industrial wind turbine companies a “programmatic” or blanket license to kill potentially hundreds of eagles every year, for years on end.

This is unconscionable. You can help save the eagles by following the instructions below. The Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed a “rule” that would allow wind turbine operators to “take” (bureaucratic speak for “kill”) bald eagles and golden eagles. It would make these magnificent birds extinct in many parts of the country – especially if wind turbines are allowed to proliferate near eagle habitats.

It would be a national and ecological disaster. CFACT has submitted a detailed comment opposing the rule. How can you help?

Click here to submit a comment opposing the proposed rule.

Before federal agencies make a new rule official, they must publish it in the federal register and accept comments from the public on the proposed regulations. The comment period closes Thursday, July 12, so your immediate action is necessary.

You can write your own comment or select from the following talking points:

  • I oppose granting any take permits to industrial wind turbine operators. The wind industry should be obligated to abide by the very same rules that apply to everyone else in America. If its facilities are likely to disturb, maim or kill eagles – or cause eagles not to nest in many areas – turbines should be prohibited, and permits to erect wind turbine facilities should be denied. (Or else no one should be subjected to FWS rules and fines for harming eagles.) The proposal is harmful, hypocritical and completely unjustifiable. It should not be promulgated in any form.
  • I oppose the proposed rule because it covers up the true extent of eagle fatalities on wind farms. Under the proposed rule we would never know how many eagles are slaughtered by wind turbines because the wind industry controls its facility sites and thus its secretive and self-serving mortality studies are flawed. It prevents independent study teams from investigating bird injuries and deaths. Its personnel pick up and bury bird carcasses. (Its motto seems to be “Slice, shovel and shut up.”)  Coyotes, foxes, wolves, vultures and other scavengers cart away other evidence. Neither currently nor under the proposed rule does the FWS require that available information be made public, or that turbine operators allow independent studies.
  • I oppose the proposed rule because it is not just eagles that would be mangled and destroyed. It is also California condors, hawks, falcons, snow geese, bats and other majestic flying creatures, many of which are on the threatened and endangered list – or soon will be because of wind turbines. The proposed regulation is a wholesale sellout to Big Wind and would prevent the actual impacts on eagle populations from ever being known. If this rule is allowed to take force, any existing populations will be driven below replacement levels before anyone realizes what is happening. And eagles (and other important species) will be decimated or prevented from establishing habitats and new populations in numerous areas around the country.
  • I oppose the FWS rule because it is harmful, hypocritical and completely unjustifiable. The FWS has threatened, fined and jailed people for pursuing, injuring, molesting and disturbing eagles and eagle nests – even when the harm was unintentional. It even punishes the mere possession of an eagle feather, even if the feather was taken from an eagle that was killed by a car or wind turbine. The FWS has even threatened a town with thousands of dollars in fines if the town held a Fourth of July fireworks display and an eaglet was startled enough to leave its nest. For the proposed rule to then give industrial wind farms what amounts to a “007 License to Kill” and maim as many bald eagles and golden eagles as they like is the height of hypocrisy and absurdity.
  • I oppose the FWS rule because there is no benefit — local or national, economic or ecological — to allowing the wind industry to kill our magnificent bald and golden eagles. The wind energy system requires massive subsidies, has never generated actual black ink revenue, and requires vast amounts of land and enormous amounts of raw materials to generate expensive, subsidized, and unreliable electricity that raises costs for families, factories, farms, small businesses, internet companies, hospitals, churches, schools and every other entity in the United States.

Please join with CFACT in opposing this absurd rule. Click here to submit your comments immediately. Time is of the essence, for the comment period will close on Thursday, July 12. To read the technical details of the rule, click here to see it on the website of the Federal Register.

For more information about why industrial wind farms are bad energy policy, bad for the economy, and bad for the environment, see these articles by CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen:

“Time to terminate Big Wind subsidies” and

“Charles Manson energy”