Big Wind Slaughter Update: Add Brazil's Big Cats to Big Wind's Endangered Victims

Big Wind Slaughter Update: Add Brazil's Big Cats to Big Wind's Endangered Victims

[Follow me on Twitter/X at @EnergyAbsurdity]

In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal has a fantastic expose’ this morning detailing the deadly impacts Brazil’s expanding wind industry is now having on the big cat populations in the Northeastern region of the country.

For the mostly destitute villagers in the region, the killing of a puma or jaguar - both endangered species in the area - carries with it a possible sentence of up to 18 months in jail. But for the developers of these Big Wind farms with their enormous land footprints of 40 to 80 acres per tower and 150-ft. long blades, no similar penalty exists.

According to the report the big cats who inhabit the area flee for other grounds as soon as the clearing of ground starts, never to return. Because the prey for these cats is extremely limited and they need to cover vast swaths of ground in their daily hunts for survival, the diminishing habitat means many cannot survive the ordeal. As a result, the authors report that, “There are now an estimated 30 jaguars and 160 pumas left in Boqueirão da Onça, or Jaguars’ Ravine, a protected area that is their main habitat in the Caatinga, according to Friends of the Jaguars. Since 2009, the number of jaguars in the Caatinga has fallen 40% while the number of pumas has dropped 20%.”

All of this carnage, all of this environmental devastation, so that virtue-signaling public officials can check off a box next to arbitrary goals to build out X GW of completely unneeded, inefficient, unpredictable, intermittent energy. Worse, the wind farms themselves are constructed hundreds of miles away from population centers, necessitating the condemnation of thousands more square miles of land that must be cleared to serve as the rights-of-way for the high capacity transmission lines needed to carry the electricity to market.

So, add the big cats of northeastern Brazil to the growing list of whales, birds, bats, insects and other species of animals and plants that are being devastated so that idiot policymakers can force us to degrade and destabilize our formerly reliable power grids in the name of the global climate alarm religion.

Big Wind is an atrocity, and we must find a way to stop this madness.