Can we get rid of Wind Power while we are getting rid of ETHANOL?

I have NEVER EVER thought wind power made any sense. I think it's a waste of time, money, takes up land, screws up the environment visually and in every way makes no sense whatsoever. IF they had to create wind farms on a free market basis there would be NONE which would be the exactly correct number.

Let's cut it out. Birds by the thousands are ground to death by these behemoths. It's time to stop the insanity. Defund all of these stupid schemes. Oh, that goes double for Hybrid Cars. Another big scam.

From The Heartland Institute

Bird Brains

Wind farms produce only a fraction of the energy of conventional power plants while requiring hundreds of times the acreage. Two of the biggest wind farms in Europe have 159 turbines and cover thousands of acres between them, but together take a year to produce less than four days' output from a single conventional power station. Similarly, a proposed wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts would require 130 towers and more than 24 square miles of ocean.

Anti-wind farm activists also object to the harm done to migratory birds and bats. Wind farms must be located where the wind blows fairly constantly, areas also favored by migratory birds, including protected species like bald and golden eagles. Ironically, wind farms act as both bait and executioner--prey animals taking shelter at the base of turbines multiply with the protection from raptors, while in turn their greater numbers attract more raptors to be killed by the turbines. "Windmills are taking a horrendous toll on bird populations unaware that the spinning blades will slice them in midflight," said Jay Lehr, science director for the Heartland Institute. "Windmill advocates claim that wind power is environmentally friendly power, but such assertions ignore the significant dark side of wind power," Lehr added.

--H. Sterling Burnett, National Center for Policy Analysis, for the Heartland Institute
Blame Game

From Steve Forbes Comments Column this week

Windbags

Politicians these days, especially Senators Obama and Clinton, routinely bash the oil companies and call for more efforts to come up with cleaner alternative fuels. But it turns out that, as with most political rhetoric, this is easier said than done.

One favorite energy alternative loved by greenies is windmills. The problem is that these things kill birds by the thousands. One notorious example is a wind farm in Altamont Pass, Calif. In their 27-year lifetime these wind turbines have dealt a grizzly end to upward of 130,000 birds. And these aren't just plain, everyday birds. For example, between 75 and 116 golden eagles are sliced to death each year. H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, points out a basic conflict: Wind farms have to be places the winds blow steadily, which often also happen to be areas favored by raptors and migratory birds.

Problems with the use of corn ethanol, another energy- alternative favorite, are also becoming more widely recognized. The energy needed to produce a gallon of corn-based ethanol can exceed the energy generated by the ethanol itself. Last year U.S. farmers planted more corn and fewer soybeans. To take up the slack, Brazilian farmers are clearing more of the Amazonian rain forest to plant soybeans. Those global-warming worriers are acknowledging that many biofuels ultimately result in more carbon dioxide wafting into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, many environmentalists fiercely resist any moves to ease arbitrary, prohibitive barriers to the construction of the best non-carbon-dioxide-producing energy source of all: nuclear power plants.

Can we just STOP - PLEASE?