Batty or balanced? Spelunker still in the fight against wind farm
Posted December 10, 2009 at 7:36 am 
Filed in: Time for an update on one of our favorite civil suits! Diligent readers of these postings with strong memories may recall the case brought by a 72 year-old retired spelunker against a West Virginia wind farm. At issue: whether the presence of the endangered Indiana bat in the same area as a proposed $300 million wind farm can result in the Endangered Species Act trumping our energy security and climate change concerns. Preliminary answer: maybe.
Today’s WaPo carries the story by Maria Glod (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120904106.html):
“U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus ruled that Chicago-based Invenergy can complete 40 windmills it has begun to install on an Appalachian ridge in Greenbrier County. But he said the company cannot move forward on the $300 million project — slated to have 122 turbines along a 23-mile stretch — without a special permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”
The irony is not lost on Ms. Glod, who leads by characterizing it as “a rare green vs green court case.” Well, maybe green versus brownish-gray, as the retiree/plaintiff ”said the ruling is a victory for the Indiana bat, a brownish-gray creature that weighs about as much as three pennies and, wings outstretched, measures about eight inches. A 2005 estimate concluded that there were 457,000 of them, half as many as in 1967, when they were first listed as endangered. Local populations hibernate in limestone caves within miles of the wind farm.”
One might have thought the threat from turbines occurs when the bats emerge, sleepy-sonored and disoriented, from their hibernation — but apparently the real fear arises when they are enroute to hibernate, perhaps exhausted or simply distracted by pleasant thoughts of a good winter’s rest.
The case itself is interesting reading if you’re a policy wonk or otherwise jazzed by this clash of values, particularly with the Copenhagen climate confab in full bloom. As the judge’s 74-page opinion notes, the text of the Endangered Species Act “as well as its legislative history unequivocally demonstrate that Congress intended that protection of endangered species be afforded the highest level of importance” because endangered species (and presumably not-yet endangered ones as well) “are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people.”
All true. It is equally true, as the WaPo itself reports elsewhere today (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120904229.html) that sea level rise caused by climate change (a key driver for our federal policies promoting wind farms) threatens to make the nation of the Maldives islands, containing about 400,000 people, “uninhabitable by the end of the century.”
As the judge writes in his opinion: “Like death and taxes, there is a virtual certainty that Indiana bats will be harmed, wounded, or killed imminently by the Beech Ridge Project.” Whether island nations cease to exist due to climate change is perhaps — at this stage — far less certain. But many environmental advocacy groups seem to find climate change a threat to civilization itself. And the US EPA found earlier this week (http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment.html) that “current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases . . . threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” Of course chief among those gases: the CO2 emitted by the fossil-fuel powered electricity plants we hope to wean off of in favor of wind and other clean sources.
So there you have it: build fossil-fuel plants for electricity and imperil “current and future generations” of people; build a wind farm and kill bats. You choose.
Yet hope springs eternal and the Titus opinion doesn’t close the door to clean energy in West Virginia. The judge ruled that the 40 turbines already under construction can be operated, but “that operation can only occur during the periods of time when Indiana bats are in hibernation, i.e., from November 16 to March 31.” Talk about your intermittent power sources!
And it’s also true that some of the proposed remaining turbines may still be built. The judge’s order states that “the only way in which the Court will allow” the project to continue is for the developer to seek an “incidental take permit” (ITP) from the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service. The ITP generally includes a Habitat Conservation Plan that describes the project’s impact on the species, proposes steps to minimize and mitigate the impacts, and an alternatives analysis showing why other alternatives won’t be pursued.
Near the end of his opinion, the judge states optimistically: “The two vital federal policies at issue in this case are not necessarily in conflict” — given the existence of an ITP process designed by Congress to allow projects “to proceed in harmony with the goal of avoidance of harm to endangered species.” The difficulty is that it is a fairly straightforward matter to show potential harm to individual plants and animals from the construction of energy infrastructure. It is a far more difficult showing that the construction of any particular clean energy infrastructure will prevent climate change-related harm to the species supposedly at the top of the food chain: us.
Previous Post
January 23, 2012
December 12, 2011
December 5, 2011
