Bats versus wind turbines
Posted October 22, 2009 at 7:21 am 
Filed in: Don’t miss today’s WaPo front page piece on how a retired bat-lover is holding up a wind energy project in poor, rural — and windy – West Virginia. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/21/AR2009102101282.html?hpid=moreheadlines). The piece – entitled “Tiny bat pits green against green: Wind farm could cut carbon, but could it also kill endangered species?” — is emblematic of what’s wrong with today’s confluence of environmental law and energy security needs.
On the one hand, as the article quotes the lawyer for the wind farm: is a “$300 million, environmentally friendly, clean, renewable energy project waiting to serve 50,000 households.” This is in an economically-depressed area “already scarred by mountaintop mining.”
On the other side is a 72-year old retiree and long-time “caving fanatic” who says, “”I think if the turbines kill one Indiana bat, that ought to end it . . . . that ought to shut it down.” So in steps the judicial system, ready to interpret the federal Endangered Species Act — enacted in an era before real concern about “clean energy” when the development that it could halt was usually thought of as bad old roads or dams.
Of course it’s also instructive that the “project has twice survived challenges in the West Virginia Supreme Court, including complaints that it would mar the picturesque view.” Wait a minute, I thought the area was already “scarred by mountaintop mining”? Guess those mandatory restoration requirements really do work. In any event, it’s clear that, just like their wealthier neighbors in Cape Cod, some folks just don’t want wind turbines anywhere they can see them.
There is a real issue here, however. Proponents of legislative action to combat climate change — in which the building of wind farms will play a key role — like to cite the grim potential consequences of global inaction: floods, storms, disease, waves of refugees, and, yes, widespread species extinction.
But the Endangered Species Act isn’t really set up well to weigh the competing values of incremental action to mitigate future global climate change that could contribute to preserving endangered species somewhere on the planet against an individual project that might imperil a specific set of creatures in a specific place. And environmentalists are then confronted with the fact that there are very few, if any, totally “clean” energy systems. Creating useful energy for humans does seem to have consequences for the environment, no matter what the source.
Under current law, the case may be a tough one. Bats truly don’t fare well in their encounters with wind turbines. But as the piece points out, these bats are endangered because of “pollution and human disturbance of their caves” and “partly because females have only one baby each year.” As it stands now, a judge is going to have to figure all this out. There must be a better way.
As the deployment of clean energy systems spurred by climate change concerns continues to run up against 1970s era environmental laws like the ESA and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), policy-makers need to take a hard look at amending those statutes to deal with this new reality.
Previous Post
August 5, 2010
August 2, 2010
July 23, 2010
