Critters Crushed, Forests Trashed: Welcome To Your (Occasionally) Wind Powered Future
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The wind and solar ‘industries’ profit from two tier environmental regulation. Where a gas or coal project gets knocked out of the park over a speckled banjo frog or a sea snake, the deliberate slaughter of rare and iconic creatures to make way for wind turbines or solar panels rarely raises an eyebrow with those pushing the grand wind and solar transition. Hypocrisy doesn’t really cover it. It’s way worse than that.
Across Australia’s Great Dividing Range – which runs like a spine down the east coast of the country, from Far North Queensland, across NSW and into Victoria – bulldozers, chainsaws and woodchippers are making short work of once pristine natural environments. Environments that, up to now, have been safe refuge for fluffy icons like the koala and a whole range of rare and endangered creatures.
In Australia, the largely foreign owned wind industry treats the koala as yet another expendable critter – just like whales, dolphins, eagles, hawks, bats and more.
Smashing up eucalypts with bulldozers as they clear a path for hundreds of these things across hills and mountain ranges, not only leaves koalas homeless, plenty get killed or maimed in the process.
Those that don’t die instantly are simply being clubbed to death by those in charge of building Australia’s wind-powered future, and are doing so with the full support of Australia’s Federal Government.
Its Labor Minister for ‘Destroying the Environment to Help Her Mates Profiting from the Wind and Solar Scam’, Tanya Plibersek has taken the cult’s hypocrisy to unprecedented levels, by ‘green’ lighting another environmental outrage, as Nick Cater details below.
Conservation groups fall silent as renewable chimera wreaks havoc
The Australian
Nick Cater
22 September 2024
The greater glider is in pole position to win the Marsupial of the Year contest. Australia’s largest gliding possum has pushed the much-fancied koala into second place in the latest rankings. Fittingly, the winner of the battle, between creatures struggling for survival, will be announced next week on Channel 10’s The Project, a show that has been hovering on the brink of extinction for some time.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has been drumming up support for the panda-eyed eucalypt munchers with their teddy bear ears. “If smooth gliding, extra fluffy fur and smelly conversations are your thing, vote for the greater glider!” it urges on its website. It claims the greater glider population has halved in the past two decades because of bushfires and logging.
This makes it odd, to say the least, that the ACF is not raising a stink about Lotus Creek, where 310 hectares of old-growth forest are about to be bulldozed to make room for wind turbines. The Lotus Creek Wind Farm is 100 per cent funded by the Queensland government and is supported by the commonwealth. The environmental cost of the project in the Connors Range, adjacent to the Glencoe State Forest, is well documented.
Researchers counted 138 greater gliders during their environmental assessment. The old-growth trees provide hollow dens for the creatures to rest during the day. The area offers a rich habitat for koalas and squatter pigeons and is a refuge for the powerful owl and white-throated needletail, all classified as vulnerable.
