Bonner Cohen: Environmentalists Harm Whales, Birds and Children for Power and Profit

While attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) a few weeks ago, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen spoke with NTD-TV’s Jack Bradley about the follies of the environmental movement.

Bonner said it’s important to not give up on fossil fuels in response to strong-arming by the United Nations and others, for doing so strengthens China and limits our own ability to thrive:

The right move is not under any circumstances whatsoever to move away from fossil fuels under the guise of protecting against a purely fictional climate crisis.

What we are actually doing is making ourselves, for our energy security, dependent on the People’s Republic of China, which has a stranglehold on the raw materials that go into batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) as well as the materials that go into wind turbines and solar power. And what we know about wind turbines and solar power is they’re intermittent — which is a polite term for unreliable — and the EVs, the public does not want them.

So what are we doing? We’re making ourselves increasingly dependent on our chief geopolitical rival and we are turning our backs on our own very ample and abundant sources of energy we have in this country – oil and natural gas, specifically. Things that we need for our everyday life, and, by the way, things that we can export abroad. We are adding to the expense that ordinary Americans are going to have to pay to heat their homes or provide for their own personal transportation.

None of this is taking place as a result of market forces, but instead, this is being imposed on us by the Biden Administration, and globally by the UN and sadly a whole bunch of other governments and organizations who are doing this not to make our lives better, but to increase their power over us, and in the cases of providers of intermittent energy, to line their pockets. Because all of this stuff is subsidized by taxpayers.

Bonner explained how wind energy has shown to be destructive to whales, birds and bats, and how the development of electric vehicles involves child labor:

Offshore wind goes up in the Atlantic Ocean, precisely where you have migrating areas for — particularly along the East Coast of the U.S. — there’s something called the right whale. And if you have these turbines out there, you are interrupting the migratory patterns, and you are putting these whales at risk of becoming disoriented because of the underwater sounds that these things make. And you’re actually pushing those whales into shipping lanes, where they run the risk of collisions with large vessels.

And as for on-land or onshore wind farms, these things regularly slaughter hundreds of thousands of birds and bats every year. All of this is being done in the name of environmental protection. What we’re actually doing is we are harming the environment immensely by putting these things up.

And with respect to all the materials that go into wind turbines, solar panels and batteries for EVs, and to provide back up energy for wind farms and solar farms, all of that has to be ripped out of the earth. And it is done so — particularly in central Africa — with child labor.

Why aren’t we hearing this side of the story from environmentalist groups?

With very few exceptions, most of them are completely in the pocket of the wind and solar industry. And frankly, they’re also in the pocket of an ideology that has been imposed on them ever since many of them started going to school. They honestly believe, some of them, that they’re doing good. When, as a matter of fact, they’re doing harm.

But to be blunt about it, the whole climate crisis is about power and money, with the climate serving as a pretext for exercising power, for a relatively small sliver of the population imposing its will and making choices for us as to our personal transportation, and how we heat and cool our homes, right down to the dishwashers that we use, the refrigerators we use and those things.

The environmental movement is extremely well-funded, and they’re not funded to protect the environment, much less look out for the interests of ordinary people. On the contrary, they’re part of a larger climate cabal, and — together with providers of wind turbines and solar powers and the like — they are part of a very tiny sliver of the population which stands to benefit immensely from these policies, while the rest of us are left holding the bag.