“The Obama administration crafted the [court invalidated] rule to offer wind farms a legal path to accidentally kill eagles, as long as they agree to a suite of mitigation and monitoring requirements to ensure eagle populations remain stable. But it hit major opposition from bird advocacy groups, which argued FWS lacked the resources or know-how to ensure the permits actually benefit the nation’s official bird and its golden kin.”

– Phil Taylor, “Court Strikes Down FWS’s Eagle ‘Take’ Rule,” E&E News, August 12, 2015.

The American Bird Conservancy, [1] where I am director of public relations, issued the following press release yesterday in response to a U.S. District Court ruling that the federal government should follow federal environmental law.

(Washington, D.C., August 12, 2015) The U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, in San Jose has ruled that the Department of the Interior violated federal laws when it created a final regulation allowing wind energy and some other companies to obtain 30-year permits to kill protected Bald and Golden Eagles without prosecution by the federal government.…

“Over the past three decades, fossil fuels helped 1.3 billion people get electricity and escape debilitating energy poverty – over 830 million because of coal. However, 1.3 billion people (the population of the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe combined) still do not have electricity…. That is why climate change is a critical moral issue.“

Scientists who question the supposed “consensus” on climate change are routinely labeled “skeptics” or even “deniers,” in a not-so-subtle reference to Holocaust denial. It is an absurd charge.

All of us agree that climate change has been “real” since Earth and human history began. It is ongoing, periodically significant, sometimes sudden, sometimes destructive – and thus far always unpredictable.

Real Issues

What we do not accept is the notion of “dangerous manmade climate change,” driven solely or primarily by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases … emitted as a result of using fossil fuels that have brought countless wondrous improvements to our human condition.…

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Some of the most informative articles in this issue are:

Iberdrola Tops List of US Corporate Welfare Hogs

Let’s cut these regressive wind and solar taxes

Levelized Cost Of Electricity: Renewable Energy’s Ticking Time Bomb?

Be VERY Concerned: Carbon Fee Proposal & REMI Report

Researchers prove ‘turbine phenomenon’ is real

Our Nuclear Energy Options — An Overview

There are 2,100 new coal plants being planned worldwide

The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part VI

Less than half of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty

The Inconvenient Truth About Climate Policy

Spectacularly Poor Climate Science At NASA

Archive: How Environmentalism Turned to the Dark Side

Greed Energy Economics:

Iberdrola Tops List of US Corporate Welfare Hogs

Let’s cut these regressive wind and solar taxes

Levelized Cost Of Electricity: Renewable Energy’s Ticking Time Bomb?…

“There is evidence that experience reduced the scope and se­verity of earlier errors [with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve]–that the 1981–84 perfor­mance was superior to the 1977–79 performance. But new facets of the pro­gram have brought new problems.”

“Combined with the $5 per barrel handling and storing expense [as of 1984], the overall market value of SPR oil is billions of dollars less than its embedded average cost of over $35 per barrel.”

A sacred cow of U.S. energy policy is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The case for the reserve assumes that another energy crisis lies around the corner, the reserve will be efficiently managed during the crisis to alleviate the emergency, and private inventories and entrepreneurship alone would be inadequate. The reserve is seen by proponents as the nation’s insurance policy against the inherent instability of the world oil market.…