In Italy, sprawling prop-style wind turbine ‘farms' are sprouting up in ever-increasing numbers and, as they do, the death toll soars for thousands upon thousands of birds of prey. ..."Wind farm building continues unchecked and within a few years we will witness the almost total disappearance from the Apennine mountains and from Sicily of the Golden Eagle, the Bonelli`s Eagle, the Griffon Vulture, the Red Kite and many others," farmers' organization Coldiretti and national environmental organizations said in a recent report in Life In Italy.com.

The Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House by a 219-to-212 margin in late June seeks to punitively tax America's electric utilities that rely on energy sources now contributing 90% of our current electricity (or 71%, if you want to leave out nuclear). These taxes will be used to subsidize the 9% of renewable contributors (really only 3% when you leave out hydro). In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% of the total.

We have to accept that the "real time" generation of electricity from a plethora of renewable energy is a seriously flawed strategy that will not get us closer to carbon-free generation any time soon, if ever. The "energy mix" is just a pretty lame excuse for the inadequacies of these puny wind and marine devices that litter our landscapes and seabed.

Environmentalists who oppose everything except renewable energy are condemning billions to poverty. ...Such opposition demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of where our electricity comes from, how much it costs, who pays for it and what the future global energy landscape looks like.

Boone Pickens, Nacel Energy and Vestas Iberia have been issuing statements and placing print, radio and television ads, extolling the virtues of wind as an affordable, sustainable energy resource. Renewable energy reality is slowly taking hold, however.

If the nature of this debate sends one clear message, it's that wind power legislation needs to be thoroughly studied, not rushed through. The locus of the debate isn't over wind power itself, but of size, scale and most of all - location. Sen. Steve Goss of Watauga County wants farms permitted on ridge top locations in his area; Sens. Martin Nesbitt, D-Buncombe, John Snow, D-Murphy, and Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville, point to the fact that such large structures would run afoul of the mountain ridge law.

Miliband’s citing of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in support of his policy of subsidising the construction of many thousands of otherwise uneconomic wind turbines might appear grotesque, even comical; but not if you genuinely believe that Britain’s switching from coal to wind power for its electricity generation will save the lives of countless Africans. I have no idea whether Miliband truly believes that it will - but if he does, he is deluded.

To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain's entire land area, says Christopher Booker. ...Most alarming of all, however, in the desperation to reach EU "renewables" target, is the setting up of a new Infrastructure Planning Commission to force through thousands of these absurd objects over the wishes of local people and councils, who are now to be robbed of any right of appeal.

Does anyone else hear an echo of the ethanol boom from three summers ago? ...All of this makes the effort to erect two giant wind farms in Boone County, the state's second-windiest locale, worth watching. Putting in the 300-foot turbines is one thing in sparsely populated Benton County, but as Boone County's executive director of the area plan commission, Steve Niblick, said: "We are different than other counties with wind farms."

"How the hell did we let that happen?" we often ask ourselves when we look at the brutalist monstrosity tower blocks which we allowed to blight our towns in the sixties. In a few decades' time we're going to be asking exactly the same question about the 300 foot wind turbines ruining what's left of Britain's wilderness. And a bit like the perpetrators of terrible sixties architecture now, no one's going to be able to come up with a satisfactory answer because, quite simply, there isn't one: wind turbines are a bad idea in almost every way imaginable.

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines.

The General Assembly is trying to craft regulations for building electricity-generating wind turbines in North Carolina, and the legislative winds have been blowing hot and cold. ...state senators swayed back and forth on a bill setting the ground rules for getting permits to develop utility-scale wind both in the western mountains and along the coast. It's the mountain ridge-top issue, however, that's at the heart of the controversy.

The CBI today warns that giving too many incentives to wind risks deterring private investors from backing alternatives such as nuclear and clean coal, leaving the UK's energy mix dangerously skewed towards one source.

One good thing about our current economic crisis: It might bring a sense of reality to our expectations about renewable energy. The best recent evidence is the decision by T. Boone Pickens to abandon plans for his monster wind farm in Texas, billed by the oil billionaire as a step in transforming the United States from dependence on oil and coal.

Of course, politicians are not alone. It's not unusual to find an economist who succumbs to the dark side of politics, letting political preferences override sound economic reasoning. A glaring example of politics overriding economics came June 26 when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. ...In effect, politicians are willing to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy for the sake of green politics.

The focus is on renewables, the energy sources that we imagine will displace carbon-based sources in the future as, to make it so, we constrain and tax abundant oil, natural gas, and coal supplies into undeserved oblivion. Good luck to us, I suppose. But, bearing in mind the allure of the renewables, one despairs of what is non-renewable about the near shore waters we have till now enjoyed and exploited so enthusiastically.

I have spent years and resources protecting open lands and have served on The Nature Conservancy's Boston board, The Berkshire Natural Resources Council board (still there), Project Native (also still there) and am active on the Green Berkshires board which is the principal advocate for information and facts pertaining to wind . It is a betrayal of our many years of conservation work for preservation of our forest lands to litter our hilltops with turbines for the minuscule difference they can possibly make.

You knew it was going to happen at some point. All those efforts at producing electricity without creating greenhouse gases were going to backfire. ...It would be naive to think that green energy ventures were going to run perfectly. But did scientists and public officials not think this through at all?

Europe is finally cottoning on to the costs of tackling climate change, says the WSJ edit page, as economic fears lead to backsliding on the environment: "In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive." So how to fight climate change?

Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others but our myopic political leaders are clearly not interested in facts. As I wrote in a previous letter, wind turbines are grossly inefficient and not a viable solution to our energy woes. The monstrosity in Newburyport is but one glaring example of this kind of stupidity.