The Biden administration spent years greenlighting wind turbine projects that killed bald eagles and whales — issuing official permits authorizing the slaughter — while the same environmental activists now screaming about Endangered Species Act reforms stayed silent.
President Trump announced his administration had returned the ESA “to how it was intended to be,” invoking the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s reading of the statute. Regulators had turned the 1973 law into an automatic roadblock to human activity rather than a targeted shield for threatened species, the administration argued.
Scalia called regulators’ expansion of the statute from protecting animals to protecting every inch of habitat “a terrible interpretation” of congressional intent in 2012. He rejected the notion that every ecosystem modification should automatically count as prohibited harm.
Activists erupted. The Center for Biological Diversity claimed the move “guts protections for threatened wildlife.” Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles called it “un-American.”
But where was this outrage when Biden’s Interior Department permitted the killing of bald eagles and whales to erect politically favored wind turbines?
“This broad attack on endangered wildlife is un-American.” — Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles on Trump’s ESA reforms
Permission Slips for Slaughter
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issues incidental take permits that authorize wind operators to injure or kill eagles as a cost of turbine operation. A 2024 Biden rule went further — streamlined general permits let qualifying projects register for coverage rather than face case-by-case review.
Biologists have warned that eagle mortality at wind facilities is widespread and badly undercounted. California regulators are now scrambling to protect golden eagles from the very machines the state subsidized into existence.
The press largely averted its eyes. Legacy outlets grant turbines a free pass on bird kills that would trigger front-page fury if a refinery caused them.
The carnage extends well beyond eagles. Studies document how wildlife pays the bill for so-called clean power across three continents. In India, transmission lines and turbine arrays are pushing the Great Indian Bustard toward extinction.
Whales Nobody Mourns
Move offshore and it gets worse. Federal regulators granted harassment authorizations that permit developers to disturb and even kill whales during seismic surveying and pile driving for offshore wind projects along the Atlantic seaboard.
Research has raised concerns that acoustic disturbance may be directly related to whale injuries and deaths. When the Trump administration ordered a review of federal leasing and permitting practices for offshore wind, the same activists weeping about the ESA revision called the pause an assault on the planet.
North Atlantic right whales’ numbers have dwindled to the low hundreds. Dead humpbacks washed ashore in New Jersey and New York through the survey years. The groups that would have filed emergency legal motions over a single oil spill explained why nothing was connected to anything.
The same biased pattern extends onto land through utility-scale solar. Large solar installations require vast tracts of open space. Those projects often proceed with enthusiastic backing because they satisfy political agendas.
Residents across New York are resisting 18 planned solar developments that would carpet protected and agricultural land, kill wildlife, and deliver modest electricity in return. These are farmers and hunters who traffic in the habitat themselves. Career environmentalists sided with solar.
The Tell
A movement that meant what it said would have fought hardest where the killing was authorized, measured, and ongoing. It would have demanded that every turbine or solar panel face the scrutiny natural gas compressors do.
Instead, the activists chose sides by fuel. Wildlife deaths caused by hydrocarbons were a moral travesty. Identical deaths caused by subsidized wind and solar became an acceptable trade — a transition cost, a footnote to saving the world.
That is a political program wearing conservation as a costume.
