The Migratory Bird Treaty Act
Trump and Co want to ditch a law that protects birds. Yeah, who needs birds anyway?
The bird protection law—known officially as the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—is more important now than ever. It protects more than 1,000 species of birds by making it illegal to kill or harm any birds not covered by permits.
Stripping the nation’s longest-standing bird conservation law of its authority to protect birds contradicts decades of bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats. If the law is decapitated by the Interior Department and by legislative proposals authored by Wyoming GOP Representative Liz Cheney, millions of our most iconic and beloved birds will be at huge risk.
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The penalties under the bird protection law are critical incentives for companies to take common sense precautions to help reduce bird kills, such as covering oil pits with nets and marking transmission lines so they are more visible to migrating birds. The penalties create just enough of an incentive that companies have to think twice about where and how they work.
They’re not onerous; they’ve proven to be a helpful incentive to remind companies to do the right thing for wildlife.
The law is good for both birds and industry innovation. A number of good actors— a coalition of power and utility companies —have come together to identify best practices for preventing bird deaths. That has led to the increased use of bird-safe, money-saving technologies.
Wind projects in the west are using video technology to scan the sky and identify eagles as they approach a wind turbine. If the eagle flies too close, the system temporarily shuts off only the turbines in the collision path. And for communications towers, low-tech solutions already in use can be as simple as changing lights on communications towers from steady red lights to flashing lights.
With so many solutions and partnerships between utilities and conservation groups already underway, it is a mystery why just days before Christmas—in the hopes that no one would notice—the Department of the Interior announced it would no longer hold industry responsible for bird deaths.
It’s even more curious that many of the same industries that have been working on these common-sense solutions for protecting birds were encouraging the department’s decision.
The Interior Department announcement followed Cheney’s legislative amendment in November that would eliminate all responsibility from companies for bird deaths.
The bill with her amendment is awaiting a floor vote in the House.
So long, birds.
Why? Other than sheer bloody minded spite by all parties involved, why?
That’s it. Let’s just kill everything, at least everything not named Trump. Then we’ll be done. The world will be perfect. It will be Trump.
Sorry if I’m being sarcastic, but I was just reading Screechy’s thread on the school shootings. It’s all about death, all about killing, all about (other people) dying. Guns, corporate profits, and prayer. What else does anyone need? Compassion? Bah. Humanity? Meh. Birds? Hell, no.
Have I said lately how much I hate these people?
Rob,
I’m assuming “it pisses off the liberals.” Which is perhaps what you meant by “bloody minded spite.”
This is an international treaty Canada signed with the United States in 1916.
Similarly, Trump’s wall (whatever form it takes) at the Mexican border is indifferent to ecological consequences (multiple Google hits from “Trump wall ecology”).
John Wasson, Ecology is the last thing on the minds of the Trump voters. I’ve been arguing that ecology thing for years now (the current fence, etc) and it’s just shrug. They do not care. None of them care. There are people who actually WANT every living thing that is not human (and every living human that is not conservative) to be removed from the face of the earth. Oh, except for livestock and corn (okay, I live in corn country; there are some places that might want grapes or wheat or rice or poppies to survive).
That’s what we all have to understand: They do not care. Any argument we can make about messing up the biosphere, the ecosystem, the ecology of an area just delights them, because we do care, and they can make us mad. It never occurs to them that the ecological stability of the earth is important to the continuation of human life. They see the only things important to human life as being livestock, agriculture, mining, and drilling. Beyond that, it’s all a bunch of liberals who had their hiking weekend messed up, boohooohooo.
Rob,
I was going to make exactly the same comment. I can remember a remark by a green activist here in Oz, in reference to conservative politicians. ‘People have no idea of how much they hate us and our work’
Greenies are the enemies of profit, an unpardonable offence.
Yes the why I assume is because it costs corporations a little money to come up with these fixes, money they could be spending on a condo in a Trump Tower somewhere or a membership at a Trump golf course or a complete set of Trump brand neckties.
Think I’m kidding about the ties? Not kidding.
Screechy @ 3, yup, that’s what I meant.
RJW, the remarkable thing of course is that for many businesses (all of those that I consult to), being more environmentally friendly, safer and more energy efficient has actually saved them money and made them more profitable. Why? Because it enforces operational and planning discipline and reduces waste and down time.
One of my clients was able to significantly expand their plant and avoid building a 14MW coal boiler, by going over the rest of the plant and making a few dozen separate energy saving measures. The capital saving were in the tens of millions, the operational savings in the few million per year. More profit, no increase in carbon dioxide or the dumping of coal ash.
Despite this, there is a class of conservative who just wants to tear down environmental and safety legislation ‘because’.
What’s going on here? I thought Liz Cheney liked birds more than blokes!
Rob,
Agreed, however that doesn’t always apply to all corporations. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution capitalists have attempted to transfer the cost of ‘externalities’ to the taxpayer. For example pollution caused by farming in Australia and NZ and the enormous environmental damage caused by open cut mining. it’s far more rational for corporations to subvert the environmental assessment process by buying politicians. There are numerous moronic voters who worship ‘development’, they can be relied on to vote ‘correctly’.
There are long abandoned mines in Tasmania that are leaching toxic chemicals into the rivers. The shareholders in the mines have taken their profits and disappeared long ago.
Ophelia,
The Donald J. Trump shirts and ties used to be sold at Macy’s; I believe they discontinued that relationship very early in the 2016 campaign, after he referred to Mexicans as rapists and criminals (and some ok people) — the store near me tried desperately to get rid of its inventory, and hasn’t carried any of it since.
I’m sure you can still find that shit somewhere, though.
“That’s what we all have to understand: They do not care. Any argument we can make about messing up the biosphere, the ecosystem, the ecology of an area just delights them, because we do care, and they can make us mad.”
The flip side of Not In My Back Yard is Put It In Someone Else’s Back Yard. Dump the waste into the laps of the poor and powerless but mess with their own neighbourhood and they’re ready to join the NIMBY brigade. I’ve noted before Rex Tillerson’s opposition to fracking near HIS ranch. Just like Trump publicly derides climate change as a hoax while quietly planning to protect his precious golf courses fro sea level rise generated by – you guessed it- climate change. Like the water air and land they crave can somehow be kept safe, clean and exclusively for their use when the rest of the world goes to hell.
We had a prime example of that in Nebraska recently. People who were opposed vehemently to the Keystone pipeline quietly dropped out of the protest once they rerouted it to go under another part of the state.
Well, it allows the Trump boys to bag a few endangered species without having to travel to shithole countries.
Trump is working to alleviate poverty by making it legal for the poor to kill and eat seagulls. /s
I’m not in the US so I don’t know much about the laws there (I only know about the Migratory Birds Treaty Act because my country is also in the treaty), but wouldn’t it still be illegal to kill endangered species without the treaty?