President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that his administration had returned the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “to how it was intended to be,” invoking the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s reading of the statute and initiating the crocodile tears of anti-development activists. [some emphasis, links added]
The administration’s view is that regulators committed to regulatory expansion had turned the 1973 law into an automatic impediment to human activity rather than a targeted protection of threatened species.
In 2012, Justice Scalia called regulators’ broadening of the statute from guarding against injuring animals to protecting habitat “a terrible interpretation” of congressional intent. He rejected the notion that every form of ecosystem modification should automatically count as prohibited “harm.”
To no one’s surprise, activists’ reactions have been extreme.
The administration action “guts protections for threatened wildlife,” the Center for Biological Diversity announced. Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles said, “This broad attack on endangered wildlife is un-American.”
But where was this outrage when the Biden administration permitted the killing of bald eagles and whales to erect its politically favored wind turbines?
Many of the same voices have spent years promoting large “green” energy projects that harmed birds, bats, marine mammals, and sensitive habitats.
Permission Slips for Slaughter
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issues incidental take permits that authorize operators to injure or kill eagles as a cost of turbine operation.
A 2024 rule went further, creating streamlined general permits so that qualifying projects could register for coverage rather than endure case-by-case review.
Biologists have warned that eagle mortality at wind facilities is widespread and severely undercounted. California regulators are scrambling to protect golden eagles from the very machines the state subsidized into existence.
The press has largely averted its eyes. Legacy outlets grant turbines a free pass on bird kills that would trigger front-page fury if a refinery caused them. The carnage extends well beyond eagles.
Studies document how wildlife pays the bill for so-called clean power across three continents. In my own country of India, transmission lines and turbine arrays are pushing the Great Indian Bustard toward oblivion.
Whales Nobody Mourns
Move offshore, and it gets worse. Federal regulators have granted harassment authorizations that permit developers to disturb and even kill whales during seismic surveying and pile driving for offshore wind projects along the Atlantic seaboard.
Research has raised concerns that this acoustic disturbance may be directly related to whale injuries and deaths.
When the administration ordered a review of federal leasing and permitting practices for offshore wind, the same activists weeping about the ESA revision called the pause an assault on the planet.
North Atlantic right whales’ numbers have dwindled to the low hundreds. Dead humpbacks washed ashore in New Jersey and New York through the survey years, and the groups that would have filed emergency legal motions over a single oil spill explained why nothing was connected to anything.
You do not have to oppose offshore wind energy to acknowledge that marine wildlife deserves the same level of concern, regardless of the energy source.
The same biased pattern extends onto land through utility-scale solar as well. Large solar installations require vast tracts of open space. Those projects often proceed with enthusiastic backing because they satisfy political agendas.
Residents across New York are resisting 18 planned solar developments that would carpet protected and agricultural land, kill wildlife, and deliver modest electricity in return. These are farmers and hunters who traffic in the habitat themselves. Career environmentalists sided with solar.
The Tell
A movement that meant what it said would have fought hardest where the killing was authorized, measured, and ongoing. It would have demanded that every turbine or solar panel face the scrutiny natural gas compressors do. It would have treated a 30-year eagle take permit as the scandal it plainly is.
Instead, activists chose sides by fuel type. Wildlife deaths caused by hydrocarbons were a moral travesty. Identical deaths caused by subsidized wind and solar were an acceptable trade, a transition cost, a footnote to “saving the world.”
That’s a political program masquerading in a conservation costume.
Read more at CO2 Coalition
