Vox clamantis in deserto
Brown U. tries to fend off expansionist Partners HealthCare
Part of the Warren Alpert Medical School, aka the Brown Medical School, in Providence.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:
Brown University’s plan to join with for-profit Prospect Medical Holdings to buy Care New England to fend off Partners HealthCare’s bid for CNE is motivated by a very reasonable fear. Partners is joined at the hip with the Harvard Medical School. Letting the Partners behemoth into Rhode Island would result in many patients and clinicians who might otherwise stay in Rhode Island going to Partners’ famous Harvard-affiliated hospitals in Greater Boston, perhaps ravaging the small Brown Medical School in the process.
Indeed, Partners would suck a lot of oxygen out of the Ocean State’s health-care sector. But the takeover looks full-steam ahead. Partners’ Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital may well already be planning to welcome many new patients from Little Rhody.
Swap state nicknames?
"Ocean State IV'' a wintry-looking oil on canvas), by Sean Thomas, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass. Rhode Island's nickname is "The Ocean State,'' while Massachusetts is called "The Bay State.'' A cursory look at a map would suggest that they should swamp nicknames.
The latest marriage of two great dictatorships
Stalin and Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop shaking hands after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact on Aug. 23, 1939. The two tyrannies then proceeded to carve up Poland between themselves.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
Divisions in the West worsened in part by Trump’s nationalist pseudo-populism are making it easier for Russia and China to solidify what has effectively become in recent years an alliance. (Think of a milder version of the Nazi-Soviet relationship of 1939-early 1941.)
Not only are the Russians and Chinese cooperating on many military and other security matters aimed against the West, they are also coordinating their economic expansionism. They’re doing this, in part, through connections between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (aimed at keeping former Soviet Central Asian “republics’’ under heavy Kremlin influence) and China’s Belt and Road infrastructure and economic development and trade project, aimed at expanding China’s global economic, security and cultural power across Eurasia.
With the decline of American leadership of the Western Alliance as the latter seeks to better defend itself from the two great expansionist dictatorships, Western liberal democracy seems more fragile than it has been for a long, long time. While I admire French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May for pushing back against, especially, Russian aggression, the U.S., because of its size and power should take the lead. But the Trump administration doesn’t seem very interested.
To read a thoughtful piece on this – “The Geopolitics of the Beijing-Moscow consensus,’’ please hit this link.
Llewellyn King: Solar industry will adjust to Trump's tariffs
Solar panels in a Boston suburb.
In announcing import tariffs on solar panels of 30 percent, President Trump appears, as often, to be taking a hammer to fix a watch: If it doesn’t break, it might start running again. In the case of the solar industry he won’t break it, but he might cause it to miss a beat or two.
Solar is one of the great success stories. It is a fast-growing industry, which is adding more jobs — mostly in installation — than any other economic sector. It is, as they say, on a roll.
The big mission for solar is carbon-free electricity on rooftops, at electric utilities and in the facilities of companies like Google, Apple and Walmart, which want to be colored green. Other uses include autonomous generators for remote locations.
The idea of using the sun’s energy in various things is not new. In Botswana, for example, a few black pipes placed on a roof have provided hot water probably since the 1920s. I first saw them there in the 1960s.
After the 1973 oil crisis, solar was examined seriously in the United States as a power source. Various ideas were afoot. The favored one was to create “farms” of mirrors aimed at a central tower with a boiler. One such installation was at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.; a larger demonstration plant was built in Barstow, Calif.
But it was science that made the difference, much of it done in the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. The solar cell, pioneered at Bell Laboratories and used for space exploration, was the ticket. The direct conversion of sunlight into electricity opened the floodgates of possibility. Whoosh!
Early in the solar story, the technology was regarded as fanciful by the electric industry, which favored coal and nuclear. But as prices have fallen, enthusiasm has risen and now solar and wind are hot tickets in the electricity stakes. Germany has more deployed solar than any other country, but deployment is aflame worldwide. When better batteries or other storage devices come on the market, solar will get a second boost.
Like many technologies pioneered in the United States, solar cell and panel manufacturing has moved to Asia. China is playing a dominant manufacturing role with factories on the mainland and other countries, including Taiwan and Vietnam.
Industry calculates that the immediate effect of Trump’s tariffs will be to cut the rate of deployment and cost jobs. The Solar Energy Industries Association calculates 23,000 jobs will go this year.
But solar will begin to adjust, probably with more Chinese factories being established in the United States. This is how the Japanese car manufacturers dealt with tariffs.
Interestingly, the two companies that filed complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, resulting in the Trump tariff hike, are both foreign-owned. Atlanta-based Suniva is mostly Chinese-owned and Hillsboro, Ore.-based SolarWorld is German-owned.
More interesting is the Department of Energy’s decision announced by secretary Rick Perry to offer a prize of $3 million for innovation in domestic chip manufacturing. The government, in my experience, does best when it is pulling an industry to achieve a goal and far less well when it is pushing it.
A prize is classic pulling. Aviation prizes offered by newspapers and boosters were early incentives for flight, first across the English Channel and later the Atlantic.
The government saying, “We are going to the moon. You help us get there” works far better than giving aerospace contractors a bunch of money in the 1960s and saying, “Try to get to the moon.”
With its solar actions of a tariff and a prize-incentive, the Trump administration is both pushing and pulling.
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.
On Twitter: @llewellynking
The long view
"Column Woman'' (bronze), by Penelope Jencks, in the show "The Hans Hoffman Legacy,: Creative Diversity,'' at the Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Mass., through March 11.
Chris Powell: Bringing back highway tolls won't help Conn.'s overall condition
On Route 95 in Stamford, Conn. Route 95 in the state used to be known as the Connecticut Turnpike, which had lots of toll booths. Those were removed in 1985.
Restoring tolls to Connecticut's highways is being presented by high-minded people as the responsible solution to the neglect of the state's transportation system and the draining of its dedicated fund.
Most candidates for the Democratic nomination for governor support or seem sympathetic to tolls, Ned Lamont being the most enthusiastic. Independent candidate Oz Griebel seems enthusiastic, too. The candidates were happy to say so the other day at a forum of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, whose members expect to be paid most of the revenue raised.
But restoring tolls is a bad idea -- not because Connecticut's transportation system doesn't need work but because any new source of revenue will mainly just relieve the political pressure to economize throughout state government.
That is, tolls will solidify state government's most recent contract with the state employee unions, which prohibits layoffs and reform of the state pension system. Tolls will protect collective bargaining for state and municipal employees and binding arbitration of their contracts, the mechanisms by which the unions control the government.
Tolls will delay auditing the state's primary education system, in which social promotion produces illiterates at ever-increasing expense, and delay auditing of the state's welfare system, which subsidizes childbearing outside marriage and thereby perpetuates poverty.
Tolls will distract from University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst's million-dollar salary and the labor policies that reinstated a UConn employee to his job after he operated a university vehicle while smoking dope, policies that destroy standards.
Tolls will ratify the current state administration's foolish transportation priorities, like the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain and the commuter railroad between Springfield and New Haven, even as the country's busiest commuter railroad, the Metro-North line between New Haven and Manhattan, needs expensive renovation.
Tolls will also ratify Hartford's spending $80 million on a minor-league baseball stadium despite the city's insolvency, as well as the Malloy administration's reimbursing half that money in a special grant to dissuade the city from filing for the bankruptcy it needs.
No state government that was trying to economize rather than just gratify special interests would maintain any of these policies.
The Malloy administration and its predecessors have often raided the transportation fund because deferring maintenance of infrastructure is the easy and traditional way of deceiving the public, shifting the financial burden to future elected officials who will have to raise even more revenue. But giving state government more revenue will only hasten Connecticut's decline. The state cannot begin to recover until government's burden on the people is reduced.
There are many other state government accounts to raid -- funds that should be raided so accountability in government can be restored. Let the money in those accounts be diverted to transportation for a change while the rest of state government is cleaned up.
Contrary to the advocates of tolls, the creakiness of its transportation system isn't what is discouraging economic growth in Connecticut. No, economic growth in the state is being discouraged by the incompetence, corruption, mistaken priorities, and spectacular unfunded liabilities of state government itself. Modern trains and smooth pavements won't lure anyone here while state government can offer newcomers only decades of new taxes and fees to sustain the mistakes that it desperately refuses to acknowledge.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
It's the drive, not the destination
Chace Mill on the Winooski Falls, in Vermont.
"Years ago, I was asked to come up to do a store signing in Vermont. The short version is the two younger guys who own the store pick me up at the airport and start driving me around Vermont, showing me the sights and the {mostly closed} textile mills and the restaurants, and the punchline is there's no store. There is no store!''
-- Mark Wald, an author
'How changed from the fair scene'
"When winter winds are piercing chill,
And through the hawthorn blows the gale,
With solemn feet I tread the hill,
That overbrows the lonely vale.
O'er the bare upland, and away
Through the long reach of desert woods,
The embracing sunbeams chastely play,
And gladden these deep solitudes.
Where, twisted round the barren oak,
The summer vine in beauty clung,
And summer winds the stillness broke,
The crystal icicle is hung.
Where, from their frozen urns, mute springs
Pour out the river's gradual tide,
Shrilly the skater's iron rings,
And voices fill the woodland side.
Alas! how changed from the fair scene,
When birds sang out their mellow lay,
And winds were soft, and woods were green,
And the song ceased not with the day!
But still wild music is abroad,
Pale, desert woods! within your crowd;
And gathering winds, in hoarse accord,
Amid the vocal reeds pipe loud.
Chill airs and wintry winds! my ear
Has grown familiar with your song;
I hear it in the opening year,
I listen, and it cheers me long.''
-- "Woods in Winter ,'' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Belonging and alienation; Boston's vibrant Chinatown
Sketch of "Daly City, February 1981," by Bren Bataclan, in his show "Kulap,'' at the Pao Arts Center, in the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, through April 28.
Mr. Bataclan is a Cambridge-based Filipino American artist who grew up in the San Francisco area. He has a diverse background in art and design. The gallery says the exhibition is "inspired by his family's immigration to California in 1981 and explores the conflicted feelings that came with it. Bataclan's minimalist works are enjoyable for people of all ages while encompassing such themes as belonging, alienation and confusion. His compositions address big questions and strong themes while inviting viewers to consider what it means to be an immigrant and a citizen.''
The Paifang Gate, the semi-official entrance to Boston's Chinatown.
Boston's Chinatown, in the Hub's downtown, is the only surviving large historic ethnic Chinese enclave in New England since the demise of the Chinatowns in Providence and Portland after the 1950s. The vibrant Boston Chinatown has many Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, many other small business and a large art community, too. But big financial-services companies are expanding from the nearby Financial District centered on State, Federal and Devonshire streets and biotech and other tech firms are also raising their flags there.
Chinatown's proximity to the big MBTA rail/bus and Amtrak center in and around South Station is a big draw.
A grand tour of great New England houses and gardens and the stories behind them
From Melissa Wuske's piece for Foreword Reviews:
"Guidebook to Historic Houses and Gardens in New England: 71 Sites from the Hudson Valley East by Willit Mason gives travelers practical and historical knowledge about the birthplace of America.
"New England, one of the earliest settled parts of the United States, arguably has some of its deepest history. That history is beautifully preserved in its many breathtaking homes, many well over a century old, crafted of ageless stone, and many surrounded by natural, well-manicured splendor. Mason provides a well-thought-out guide that traverses the region and the decades, showing the deep history beneath the present-day grandeur. The book catalogues the region thoroughly without being overwhelmingly exhaustive.''
Ski bum turned filmmaker helped create an industry
Video and text: Warren Miller, a ski bum turned fillmmaker, helped create an industry. Hit this link.
Rebuilding the Puerto Rican grid
A road in the Roseau area of Puerto Rico littered with structural debris, damaged vegetation and downed power poles and lines after Maria blows through.
Project Notice from New England Diary contributor Llewellyn King:
I am soliciting interested companies and organizations to provide funding for me and a small television crew to travel to Puerto Rico and report on the power situation and the role of mainland utilities in rebuilding the electric grid.
This is one of American industrial history's great rebuilding stories. My plan is to tell it from the point of view of the engineers and lineworkers.
If you are interested in funding a series (three half-hour episodes) of my weekly news and public affairs program, "White House Chronicle" on PBS, please contact me. As an independent producer, I do not receive any funding from PBS.
This series would air nationwide on 200 PBS and public, educational and governmental access stations, and the commercial AMG TV network. It would air worldwide on Voice of America Television and Radio. And the audio would air three times on SiriusXM Radio's P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), Channel 124.
Contact me, too, if you are interested in funding just my reporting on this effort for InsideSources, the syndicate which distributes my weekly column to 500 newspapers.
This is U.S. electricity history and it should be recorded. I hope to hear from you.
Allbest,
Llewellyn King
llewellynking1@gmail.com
Executive Producer and Host,
"White House Chronicle" on PBS;
Contributor, HuffPost;
Columnist, InsideSources Syndicate;
Commentator, SiriusXM Radio
Web Site: whchronicle.com
Wistful in winter
Fresh Pond, in Cambridge, Mass.
"I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice
Told of how the beauty of your spirit, flesh,
And smile had made day break at night and spring
Burst beauty in the wasting winter's place.
You did not answer when I spoke, but stood
As if that wistful part of you, your sorrow,
Were blown about in fitful winds below;
Your eyes replied your worn heart wished it could
Again be white and silent as the snow. ''
-- From "Two Seasons,'' by the late Galway Kinnell, the famed Sheffield, Vt.-based poet.
Don Pesci: Of Anita Hill and Ben Shapiro at UConn
At the headquarters of the BBC, in London. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the words "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”, words from Orwell's proposed preface to Animal Farm.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges ...”
-- Anatole France.
Of course, we all know that the rich do not sleep under bridges, and so the law, which in this case enforces the same rules of behavior for rich and poor, is not at all majestic, or merciful, or just. Justice, Aristotle says, treats equal things equally and unequal things unequally.
Let’s begin with an obvious observation: a university talk by Ben Shapiro and Anita Hill are in no sense equal. And we know from bitter experience that opposition to such talks are radically (pun intended) unequal. Susan Herbst, the president of the University of Connecticut, would be hard pressed to cite a case in which a political sermonette by a noted liberal was cut short by audience thugs. But in the case of conservatives invited to speak at colleges, address-interruptus, sometimes violent, always ill mannered, is as common as applause. It would appear then that conservative speakers are in no sense equal to liberal/progressive/socialist/communist speakers; their messages are different, and reception to their messages is different.
Anita Hill was permitted to speak at UConn without enduring the kind of interruptions that have become common when conservatives exercise their First Amendment rights at public universities such as Berkley, where protesters set fires, broke windows, taunted cops and speakers, and engaged in mob behavior reminiscent of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. In California, a progressive poverty catch-basin that has more homeless people on its streets than Alabama,
Antifa, aligned with other groups that would not protest a college address given by Hill, was successful in closing down an address given by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former senior editor of Breitbart News, a “cultural libertarian,” a gay provocateur in full scale rebellion against the baneful excesses of third wave feminism, radical Islam, political correctness, academic intolerance and weepy students searching for safe places in edenic universities.
Some weeks ago, audience thugs at UConn successfully shut down an address given by Lucian Wintrich , the White House correspondent for the Gateway Pundit, provocatively titled “It’s OK To Be White.” Arrested by UConn police, perhaps in order to protect him from the lynch mob in the audience determined to shut him down, charges against Wintrich were quickly dropped. A prosecutor soon brought charges against one of his tormentors, student adviser at Quinebaug Valley Community College Catherine Gregory, who had created a ruckus by stealing notes from the speaker’s speech. Her charges were later reduced.
That incident produced an administrative policy at the university that, in its majestic equality, forbids both conservative and progressives to attend college addresses at UConn, unless the attendees are UConn students. The university’s precautions censor the audience rather than the text, which is just as objectionable as pre-censoring printed material. Both are forms of prior restraint.
Obvious observation number two: Ben Shapiro is not Yiannapolis – not that there’s anything wrong with being Milo. Neither is he Wintrich or Anita Hill, best remembered in connection with her opposition to the nomination to the Supreme Court of now Justice Clarence Thomas, an African-American associate justice married to a white woman who presumably is non-racist. Nor is Shapiro an alt-righter, as he has been labeled in recent news reports issuing from Connecticut’s inattentive media. In fact, Shapiro is an adamant non-alt-righter.
Listening to Shapiro is a bit like listening to a Gatling gun that speaks English in full sentences. And the dialogues he conducts at the end of his addresses with articulate students who think they disagree with his message, remarkably free of overt and intended provocations, is Socratic in structure and mildly subversive, because Shapiro is entertaining, rational and persuasive, not only to the conservative/libertarian choir that comes to hear him sing, but also to students making an honest and arduous journey between progressivism and conservatism in an age in which conservatives are treated in academia much the way witches were in Cotton Mather’s Boston.
In remarks preceding his address, “White Privilege Microaggressions and Other Leftist Myths,” Shapiro lamented that the beefed-up security was necessary, remarked “that the left is so afraid of open conversation that they scheduled an event at the exact same time,” and regretted that more left-leaning students were not in attendance. He “prefers speaking to people with whom I disagree,” Shapiro said, “ because discussions are useful.” A month prior to his appearance, college administrators circulated a notice to the insulted and injured at UConn that Shapiro would be making an appearance at the university; but not to worry, because empaths at UConn would provide counseling for aggrieved students – signs of the times that show just how far universities have come since Cardinal Newman published his “The Idea of a University,” which should be required reading for all administrators at UConn.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.
Basav Sen: Ruthless coal baron helps set Trump energy and environment policuy
Removing the top of a mountain to mine for coal in Appalachia.
Via OtherWords.org
It’s common knowledge that our political system is awash with money. And that money, despite some flimsy legal barriers, comes with strings attached.
One coal baron’s efforts to set an entire administration’s energy agenda are the perfect case study.
His name is Robert Murray, and he heads Murray Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the United States. Murray contributed $300,000 to President Trump’s inauguration — and clearly wants a return on his investment.
The details are laid out in some memos Murray wrote to Vice President Mike Pence and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, which were reported on by The New York Times and In These Times magazine.
The memos recommend a detailed (and horrifying) energy agenda. And the administration is following it almost to a T.
Murray recommended that the administration get rid of greenhouse gas regulation. Status? Check. The White House is trying to get rid of the Clean Power Plan, the prior administration’s most significant effort to regulate greenhouse gases.
Murray recommended that ozone regulation be gutted. While the administration hasn’t succeeded in doing that yet, it’s not for lack of trying. The Trump EPA tried to delay the rule by a year, and it took the threat of a lawsuit by 15 states to compel the administration to reverse its decision.
Murray recommended that the EPA’s staff be cut by more than half. They’re well on their way, thanks to a combination of buyouts, retirements, and resignations that have brought the agency down to 1989 staffing levels.
Meanwhile, to reinforce the message to EPA employees that they aren’t wanted, the agency has censored their work and spied on them.
There’s more. Murray also recommended a convoluted idea for more regulation of energy markets — and higher costs for utility ratepayers. To justify them, he cited made-up concerns about the reliability of an electric grid that relies increasingly on renewables.
Cutting though the jargon, Murray wants you and me to pay higher energy bills to bail out the coal industry.
Career experts at the Energy Department concluded that the alleged threat to the electric grid from solar and wind was “fake news.” But under Perry’s leadership, the department still tried to get the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to approve a scheme very much like the one Murray proposed.
Thankfully, FERC, which is an independent agency, overruled the idea unanimously.
So while Murray’s agenda has hit a roadblock, it’s not because the Trump administration hasn’t tried to implement it. (Indeed, one Energy Department staffer said he was fired after leaking a photo of Perry literally giving Murray a big hug.)
When a wealthy person gives a politician a large sum of money, and a detailed policy agenda that benefits his business interests, and the politician goes about implementing this policy agenda almost to the letter, the logical thing to call it is bribery.
Our politicized courts think that it’s “free speech.”
What’s a good way to describe a country where the formal structures of democracy don’t make the government accountable to the public interest? And instead, where a small wealthy oligarchy bribes politicians to do their bidding?
The old term for that was a banana republic. But perhaps a more “presidential” term would be a s—hole country.
Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Where they really like quilters
"Ghost Pockets," (mixed fabrics, including denim, cotton, polyester and synthetic wool), by Mary Lee Bendolph, in her show "Piece Together: The Quilts of Mary Lee Bendolph" through May 27, at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Mass. The museum says that Bendolph has made more than 150 quilts in her lifetime, "adapting traditional African-American designs to create beautiful and functional works of art that have been featured in Hallmark cards and American postage stamps.''
There's long been a deep interest in folk crafts in Mount Holyoke's region of western Massachusetts.
Wintry scene in South Hadley.
South Hadley, in the long stretch of the Connecticut River Valley nicknamed "the Pioneer Valley'' by marketing people, hosts Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley High School, Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School and the Berkshire Hills Music Academy. Mount Holyoke College is a member of the famous Five College Consortium in the Pioneer Valley, along with Smith, Amherst and Hampshire colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
More than mystical
There really is a Mystic Pizza, in the eponymous town in Connecticut. The eatery inspired the film of the same name, a coming-of-age tale focused on three women working there are waitresses. The movie helped to make Matt Damon and Julia Roberts stars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muLvjpHGHig
And handy for congressional insider trading
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
Congress, at least in recent sessions, has not particularly cared about poor people with limited access to medical care. As Robert Pear noted in The New York Times, “They cannot agree on subsidies for low-income people under the Affordable Care Act or even how to extend funding for the broadly popular Children’s Health Insurance Program.’’ Many Republicans have often expressed a barely disguised distaste for Medicaid and the low-income people on it, while they’re leery of offending the generally higher-income and high-voting folks on Medicare, a much more expansive program.
Most members of the House and Senate are affluent and have few interactions with poor people who are uninsured and who can’t afford doctor visits or prescription drugs.
But the solons do love expanding funding for medical research, with a plan, for example to boost the funding of the National Institutes of Health by $2 billion in the next fiscal year. Mr. Pear notes, accurately in my view, that a major reason could be that legislators think that the research could create cures for ailments that they, their families and friends might have. And of course, few legislators are young; ailments increase with age.
“{T}he cynic in me says it’s because of the prevalence of selfishness. We all want to know there’s something out there that will cure us if we need it, but many of us are quite reluctant to pay for somebody else to get cured when they need it,’’ R. Alta Charo, a law and bioethics professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Times.
I think that there’s another element in Congress’s love of funding medical research and development: Legislators may see this as a way of getting in early on investments in the drug and medical-device sectors. Enjoy a bit of insider trading. For guidance on such lucrative activities, consult, for example, former Georgia Congressman and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, M.D.
To read The Times’s story, please hit this link.
Frank Carini: Fossil fuel, cell towers, windows MUCH more deadly to birds and bats than wind turbines
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
As wind power spins forward in the United States — the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm is the first offshore wind-energy facility in the country — the giant turbine blades that generate energy are often blamed for the death of birds and bats.
Turbines certainly do kill flying creatures, but how does this oft-maligned form of renewable energy stack up against other sources that are used to power our society? Plenty of research still needs to be conducted — especially concerning bat mortality caused by energy production — but most of the research already done shows fossil fuels are more lethal than spinning blades.
North American wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds annually, according to a 2013 study. Another 2013 study claimed every year 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines. A 2014 report claims turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually.
The peer-reviewed 2014 study by two federal scientists and the environmental consulting firm Western EcoSystems Technology Inc., however, found that number is small compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers. The study’s authors estimated that on an annual basis less than 0.1 percent of bird populations in North America die from collisions with turbines.
Collisions with windows, on the other hand, kill between 365 million and 988 million birds in the United States annually.
“Properly sited wind turbines are relatively bird-friendly, especially when compared to fossil fuels,” according to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC). “However, they are far from benign.”
The Virginia-based organization has noted that wind turbines and their associated infrastructure, notably power lines and towers, are among the fastest-growing threats to birds and bats in the United States and Canada. At the end of 2016, there were more than 52,000 operating, commercial-scale, land-based wind turbines in the United States, according to the ABC, producing about 66,000 megawatts of power.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it illegal to kill any bird protected by the act, even if the death is incidental, such as being struck by a spinning turbine blade, killed during a mountaintop mining explosion, or suffocated in an oil spill. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act recommends that to avoid eagle deaths companies should seriously consider where they site energy projects.
Wind-energy development, like all energy projects and infrastructure, can contribute to habitat loss, which can have significant impacts on birds, bats and other wildlife.
The ABC recommends “bird-smart” wind-energy development that ensures turbines are sited away from bird-collision risk areas; employs effective and tested mitigation to minimize bird fatalities; conducts independent, transparent, post-construction monitoring of bird and bat deaths; and calculates and provides fair compensation for the loss of ecologically important, federally protected birds.
Six decades ago hydroelectric power was celebrated as a source of renewable energy. Hydroelectric power includes both massive hydroelectric dams and the smaller mill dams that once powered the Industrial Revolution, most notably in New England. Now, many dams are being torn down because of their unintended environmental and wildlife impacts, such as changing ecosystems and impeding the path of migratory fish.
A bigger problem for birds and bats is the continued burning of fossil fuels. A 2014 National Audubon Society report noted that hundreds of bird species in the United States, such as bald eagles, are at “serious risk” because of climate change.
A 2009 study using U.S. and European data on bird deaths estimated the number of birds killed per unit of power generated by wind and fossil-fuel sources. It concluded that wind facilities are responsible for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour of electricity, while fossil-fuel power power plants are responsible for 5.2 fatalities per gigawatt-hour.
Another study, published four years later, found that wind turbines kill 0.27 birds per gigawatt-hour, nuclear plants 0.6, and fossil-fuel power plants 9.4.
Bat deaths attributed to wind turbines aren't as well documented, but limited research has shown this renewable-energy source does have an impact. In Rhode Island, for instance, turbine owners have reported dead bats at the base of their structures.
Besides the dangers spinning blades pose for the only mammals that can fly, a 2011 study found that bats can succumb to the pressures created when turbine blades pass through the air, a phenomenon known as barotrauma.
While bats normally live for a long time, they, like sharks, are slow reproducers, meaning their populations rely on high adult survival rates.
All energy production comes with costs, especially to ecosystems and wildlife. Source and siting should be about making decisions based on more than just price and profit.
Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.
Sculptured love
"Jawbreaker,'' by Jodi Colella, in the show heART, at Boston Sculptors Gallery, Jan. 31-Feb. 25. The members show is meant to show the love spectrum from end to end.
Gallery Director Almitra Stanley explained, "Matters of the heart are universal to our life experience. Featuring a wide range of sculptural interpretations-from sweetheart and heart throb, to heartburn, heartbreak, and heartless-this exhibition gives a glimpse into the collective heart of the Boston Sculptors Gallery.''