If there's one thing the Left in general is good at, it's ignoring the unintended consequences of their policies, which are frequently disastrous. These unintended consequences run the gamut, from economic disasters to health policy disasters (see: Obamacare) to scientific disasters. It's disasters all the way down.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the climate change panic-mongering. The Left, not just in the United States but everywhere, seem to take it as an item of faith that human activities will cause the planet to catch fire at any time if we don't all start eating bugs and move in to rabbit warren "15 minute cities" and, in the process, abandon most of our modern, comfortable lifestyles. Part of that, as we have covered many times, is the insistence on giving up efficient, high-density energy sources like nuclear power, natural gas and petroleum, for windmills, solar panels, and presumably pixie dust to make it all work.
And now we have yet another example; in Australia, the Green Party pushed to have windmills installed on a ridgeline in northern Australia, in an area that was previously mostly wilderness. And now, they are looking the other way as the environmental mess caused by these monstrosities just keeps getting worse.
In August 2025, Steven Nowakowski took my husband, Bruce, and me on an incursion into a wind turbine installation on a ridge in Australia’s wild far north, to show us what they ignore.
The roads hit us first. The developer had cut 39 kilometres through the forest to carry turbine blades longer than a jumbo jet’s wingspan. Bulldozers had shoved the old growth trees aside into long rows, and crews had blasted the ridgelines flat.
Twenty-eight turbines stood over us, each 226 metres tall, 91 metres taller than the London Eye. Around their concrete footings lay dead bats and birds.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Right here in the United States, these windmills are killing birds in great numbers, including eagles, both our national symbol, the Bald Eagle, and the circumpolar Golden Eagle. Eagles are in fact dying in such numbers that the United States Fish & Wildlife Service is reluctant to talk about them.
Steven crouched beside them. “They light the turbines up at night,” he told us. “The lights pull in the insects, and the insects pull in the bats. Nobody is really even counting.”
Steven is a renowned wilderness photographer. He sells his calendars at a Sunday market for $20 each. He ran as an Australian Greens candidate in 2006 and backed the party’s push for 100% renewables until he photographed the turbines’ impact on the rainforest. He co-founded a volunteer group that defends biodiversity in court.
Now here is a standout among the greens - one who, perhaps due to his occupation as a wilderness photographer, recognized these unintended consequences when he sees them. And, we might ask, what possible purpose does lighting these things up at night serve? Most lights serving as warnings for aircraft are just blinking red lights; to pull in insects in the numbers described, one would think that a much more extensive illumination was required.
Here's the real tragedy in all this:
Australia is running an experiment no other country is attempting. The Left-wing Labor Government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has legislated a 43% emissions cut by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050, with 82% renewable electricity by 2030. Nuclear power remains banned by law, an option most major economies pursuing Net Zero – or simply affordable, reliable energy – retain.
Australia produces just over 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If our entire electricity sector fell to zero tomorrow, the change in world emissions would be too small to detect.
Australia's greens and, indeed, all of the Labor government, are literally complaining of the mote in the climate's eyes while ignoring the planks in their own. They are plowing up wild places for roads, trucking in concrete by the ton to build bases for these things, trucking in the raw materials, the towers, the blades, all the hardware and electronics to run them, and the transmission lines to take the electricity they generate somewhere. Just the amount of diesel fuel consumed probably puts out more emissions than the "carbon credits" from these windmills will ever produce in their useful lives.
What happens, by the way, when those useful lives end? Will the used blades and towers be trucked away, by more big diesel-powered trucks? Or will they just be set to the side, perhaps next to the piles of dead birds and bats?
This, like so many of these "green" energy boondoggles, was a triumph of ideology over actuality. It was never about the environment. It was never about energy sources. It was never about the science, and it sure as all get-out wasn't about the wildlife. All of this was done in service to an ideology, a far left ideology, that like in so many cases, from China's Great Leap Forward to today, has been marked by their ability to ignore reality, and to ignore unintended — or perhaps, intended — consequences.
