Shock! Horror! OMGOMGOMG!!!!!!! From the usually cautious folks at VPR News…
GMP Wants Permit To Kill Endangered Bats
Images swirl into view. Scary, unpleasant images. I see Dotty Schnure strangling bats with her bare hands. I see the GMP Board skeet-shooting freeze-dried bats. I see David Blittersdorf* eating Little Brown Bat Pie for dinner with lava beans and a nice Chianti. I see GMP staffers tossing bushels of Tasered bats into the whirling blades of a windmill. I see, in short, a wanton slaughter of the furry little creatures.
*Yeah, I know he’s not with GMP, but he’s part of the Turbine-Industrial Complex. Close enough.
But then, there’s the actual story:
The utility has asked for a state permit to kill four of the endangered creatures a year at its 21-turbine Lowell wind project.
Four.
FOUR.
Cough.
Okay, if you read further, it’s four Little Brown Bats and three more of other species, for a total of up to seven per year. But still, that seems like awfully small potatoes. Given the oft-stated concern for bird and bat kills by turbines, I’d think that a mere seven per year would be a cause for relief, not concern. It’s certainly not cause for VPR’s sensational headline.
The biggest threat to our bat populations is, of course, White Nose Syndrome, which is the reason our species are endangered. The second biggest threat is disturbance of maternal colonies, usually by development.
I don’t know where Kingdom Community Wind ranks in the list, but it’s definitely somewhere below domestic cats, who are responsible for killing millions of wild animals every year, including 230,000 bats in Britain alone, according to one study. (Somehow I don’t hear anyone demanding leash laws for cats.)
This won’t stop Vermont’s anti-wind activists from seizing on the bat issue, just as they seize on any pretext for opposing wind energy development.
And it won’t apparently stop VPR from putting its thumb on the wind-energy scale with an eye-popping headline and this howler from the body of John Dillon’s report:
Some environmentalists argue that since bat populations are already precarious, they should not face more threat from wind projects.
“Some environmentalists.” Which means “environmentalists whose primary issue is stopping wind energy.” Because otherwise, the environmental community in Vermont is unified behind wind development as part of a renewable energy strategy. But those environmentalists — the vast majority — don’t get a voice in Dillon’s piece.
This isn’t the first time John Dillon — VPR’s primary environmental reporter — has seemingly tilted the scales against wind energy. And given the fact that VPR’s editorial process is extremely thorough, perhaps excessively so, I have to wonder if the entire news operation doesn’t lean that way.
Infiltrated by WGOP, or a member of the Windy Joe club? Sneaky summer intern slipped that in while they were busying themselves with the increasingly annoying shakedowns of listeners guilting them to pay up? Eyebrow-raising to say the least.
It’s a permit that allows them to run the windmills even if up to 7 bats are killed in a year. There may be fewer.
However, if the machines kill more than 7 a year, then a bat death prevention effort must be made – such as shutting down the turbines in low wind at night, which can cut the risk to bats in half. (Note – they don’t die from hitting the blades, but from encountering the very low air pressure near the tips of the blades, which causes them to get the bat equivalent of “the bends,” resulting in lung hemorrhages.)
While the number is small, bats have a low reproduction rate, so a small impact is important to their population. With the whitenose disease killing such vast populations, it is important to minimize impact wherever possible. I hope that there will be some solid examination of the potential impact of the chosen number, and any permit granted will be designed to protect these ecologically important creatures.