“Last Thursday, I stood at the Wyoming State Capitol with about 150 ranchers, farmers, conservation advocates, and plain fed-up citizens – and it was one of the best crowds I’ve been in front of in a long time.
Our “Save the Eagles, Stop Wind” rally exposed the so-called Wyoming Wind Wall – a 200-mile industrial corridor of wind turbines being rubber-stamped, across the heart of some of the most iconic landscape in America.
Nobody in Cheyenne or Washington, D.C. is looking at the cumulative picture. Project after project sails through permitting while the combined footprint – on migration routes, breeding grounds, golden eagle populations – goes completely unexamined.
Environmentalism? Please. It’s recklessness dressed up in green rhetoric.
Wyoming is home to the largest breeding population of golden eagles in the lower 48 states. A full quarter of the western U.S. breeding population lives and nests there.
But Golden eagle numbers in Wyoming have already dropped nearly a third over the past 20 years – and wind development is a major reason why.
Kim Monson, Host of The Kim Monson Show, put it perfectly from the podium: these turbines have become “a Cuisinart for golden eagles, birds, and bats.”
These are the same people who weaponized the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for decades – shutting down farms, blocking pipelines, strangling timber harvests – all in the name of “protecting wildlife.”
They turned the spotted owl into a four-decade cudgel against the logging industry. They’ve used the ESA to litigate practically every infrastructure project in the western United States.
But golden eagles? Suddenly the greens can’t be bothered.
And why would they? When there’s no pipeline to kill, no farm to shut down, no development they actually oppose on the other end of the complaint?
The Endangered Species Act was never really about the animals. It was about controlling land, blocking projects, and handing lawyers and activists a veto over anything they didn’t like.
When wind turbines started shredding raptors by the thousands, the silence was deafening – because this time, the developers writing the checks are their developers. The subsidies flow to their allies. The sweetheart permitting deals line their pockets.
The eagles were always expendable. They just didn’t advertise that part.
CFACT was there because this is exactly what we do. We don’t just write white papers about it.
We show up – at the Wyoming Capitol, at the UN climate conferences, at the EPA, at the shareholder meetings of the banks funding this mess – and we make noise until someone has to answer for it.
We’re demanding a full Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement before another blade starts turning in Wyoming.
A real review. An honest one.
The kind of subsidy-chasing wind developers have been hoping nobody would ever ask for.
The fight isn’t just in Wyoming. The green lobby is pushing this same playbook in states across the country – quietly, project by project, hoping nobody adds it all up” [or sees what is going on.
This piece originally appeared at CFact.org and has been republished here with permission.
