AUSTRALIA IN TURMOIL OVER WINDFARMS.
COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT MOVES AGAINST UNPOPULAR WINDFARMS.
We learn that two more eagles were killed by an Australian windfarm, in the island of Tasmania this time. The windfarm controversy rises to new heights as the federal Minister of the Environment stopped 2 projects that had been approved by state governments. A concern for endangered species, and a desire to protect local communities against the diktats of state politicians, are motivating the commonwealth minister, Senator Campbell.
- More comments at the end, after the newspaper article.
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Archives (Mark Duchamp): Australian wedge-tailed eagle maimed by a wind turbine at Starfish Hill windfarm, South Australia - courtesy of Andrew Chapman.
This is the article that brought us the news:
THE AUSTRALIAN, April 28, 2006
copyrights: NEWS Limited
The Nation
MINISTER EYES VETO ON WIND FARMS - written by Ewin Hannan.
Environment Minister Ian Campbell´s campaign against unpopular wind farms will include a national code giving him new powers to veto any project facing community opposition.
As Senator Campbell used the death of an endangered wedge-tail eagle to support claims that wind farms threatened birds, he vowed to defy threats of a constitutional challenge from Labor states to forge ahead with plans for the code. It would give him new powers to block any wind farm based on community opposition, not just on environmental grounds.
Senator Campbell said he was close to securing a national agreement with the states, with the exception of Victoria and Western Australia. If he could not win their backing, he warned last night he would unilaterally extend federal powers as a "last resort".
Senator Campbell last month infuriated the Victorian Government by stopping the Bald Hills wind farm project in Gippsland to "save" the endangered orange-bellied parrot.
This week, he froze funding for a similar wind farm project on the south coast of Western Australia, which won state government approval but faced opposition from members of the local community.
His hardline position came as it emerged yesterday that the rare wedge-tail eagle died after colliding with wind turbines at the Woolnorth Wind Farm in Tasmania´s northwest in wind gusts of 140km/h.
According to a report, it appears the eagle´s wings were severed and the bird was decapitated by the turbines.
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Archives (Mark Duchamp): golden eagle decapitated by a wind turbine in Spain - courtesy of www.sekano.org
Senator Campbell said the death sent a message to "those who sneer about me making a decision based on killing birds".
"Wind farms kill birds very regularly," he said.
"I think all those who snigger about environment ministers trying to protect threatened species - hopefully, this will be a bit of a wake-up call."
The eagle´s death, the second at the Tasmanian site since 2002, came as the Bracks Government launched legal action to try to overturn Senator Campbel´s recent decision against the proposed Victorian wind farm.
Planning Minister Rob Hulls said the state Government would launch federal court action on Monday to try to force a review of Senator Campbell´s decision.
Senator Campbell vetoed the wind farm on the basis of a perceived threat to the orange-bellied parrot. Mr Hulls said Victoria would argue that Senator Campbell exercised his powers improperly by using his concern for the parrot as a "pretext for a political decision".
But Senator Campbell rejected the action as a political stunt, saying he was close to securing the agreement with other states that would prevent wind farms being built unless they had the strong support of locals.
"If I have got all of the states bar Victoria and Western Australia, that sends a message to the people of those states that their governments are playing politics and are not interested in community empowerment or the environment," he said.
Senator Campbell said there needed to be discussions between the commonwealth and states about how governments defined "the wishes of the local community".
But the rebel states last night threatened to launch a constitutional challenge to any extension of federal powers, warning it should "send a chill up the spine of the business community" because it would allow the Environment Minister to potentially kill any infrastructure project - not just wind farms - on social grounds alone.
Victoria said the move was a "farcical abuse" of the federal environmental laws and Western Australia vowed to fight what it called a "massive expansion of federal powers".
Greenpeace also revealed it had obtained legal advice that Senator Campbell´s proposal was unconstitutional.
Author: Ewin Hannan...........................April 28, 2006
Aknowledgement to copyright owners News Limited, Sydney, for their kind authorization to reproduce the article.
COMMENTS on the article, by Mark Duchamp:
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Archives (Mark Duchamp): One of Tasmania´s windfarms, spoiling a wild and beautiful landscape. Just imagine you wanted to walk these hills to cleanse your soul, or to share the wonderful views with someone dear to your heart: you´d have to walk under these noisy, threatening, potentially dangerous machines... Wasting such a remarkably wild and beautiful place for a trickle of electricity, this is what I call State-vandalism. It is not unlike the destruction of the Buddha´s statues by the Talibans, in Afghanistan.
No doubt the wind lobby will be busy trying to mend fences in Canberra. But let´s hope the governement will stick to its guns, and save that great country and its wildlife from greedy local politicians. Senator Campbell is to be commended for daring to stand up against such madness, and against such a coalition of vested interests. He belongs himself to an endangered species: the Modern Hero.
Is it not ironical that Greenpeace, who rose to fame in a campaign to save the whale and our natural environment, is now hell-bent on covering the planet with machines that kill birds and spoil our best landscapes. Their excuse, man-made global warming, becomes shakier by the day as independent scientists join forces to denounce cimate-modelling fiction and politically-convenient alarmism. - See:
ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING IN DOUBT (http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/EOLICA/GLOBAL_WARMING/60_scientists_blast_global_warming.doc)
The position of Greenpeace is further debilitated by the examples of Denmark, Spain and Germany, where massive windfarm programmes failed to have a measurable impact on C02 emissions.
For years I have been denouncing this fraud, and the catastrophic consequences for people and for wildlife, in a series of articles available here:
The negative effects of windfarms: links to papers published by Mark Duchamp
Better than words: SLIDESHOWS
(to enlarge the pictures, click Slideshow, then Full View - To move to the next show, click the title above the pictures)
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>> Autor: Mark Duchamp (29/04/2006)
>> Fuente: Mark Duchamp, commenting an article by Ewin Hannan published in the Australian
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