FLAMING OUT: Spontaneously Combusting Birds Illustrate Environmentalists’ Hypocrisy

28,000 a year

For being so concerned about Mother Nature, environmentalists who preach the gospel of renewables, seem like they couldn’t care less about birds.  It was reported earlier this year that wind turbines were a major source of killing birds, especially among raptors.  In more disturbing news, new solar power plants are causing an estimated 28,000 birds a year to spontaneously combust and streak across the sky like a mini-fireball.  This is happening so often workers at the plant, who estimate seeing an average of one every two minutes, has nicknamed such birds as “streamers.”  As The Associated Press reports:

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. [the Peak’s emphasis]

We here at the Peak can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the non-response coming from the environmental Left on this.  If even a single bird, let alone a thousand, was bursting into flames above and oil or fracking well, all those Chicken Little Environmentalists would be running around screaming, “THE CHILDREN, THE CHILDREN, WHO WILL THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!”  President Obama is threatening to shut down a large majority of Western Slope land because a fracking well ten miles away might disrupt the mating habits of the Gunnison Sage Grouse.  Yet, 28,000 birds getting Kentucky Fried over 300,000 mirrors the size of garage doors gets a collective shrug?

Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight…

Wildlife officials who witnessed the phenomena say many of the clouds of smoke were too big to come from anything but a bird, and they add that they saw “birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently become a streamer.” [the Peak’s emphasis]

Look, we love a barbeque as much as the next person.  The issue here for us is not so much whether you like your bird crispy or extra crispy, but the hypocrisy of the Left, who will champion wildlife and all things Mother Nature when it suits their agenda, and conveniently leave such hysterics behind when it doesn’t.

Next time the Left wants to plaster photos of seagulls covered in oil, we’ll just be sure to have photos of the thousands and thousands of birds flaming out over their solar plants that they could care less about.