Today’s installment of “you really can’t  make it up” comes from JLF’s Jon Sanders, director of regulatory policy studies. His column about the Obama administration’s ridiculously inconsistent  regulations that govern federally protected eagles is laugh-out-loud funny. No, it’s not funny that eagles are being obliterated by those given the thumbs-up from the administration. It’s funny because the schizophrenic policy is nonsensical.

In late November, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a subsidiary of Duke Energy Corp., Duke Energy Renewables, pleaded guilty in federal court to violating laws against killing federally protected birds. Specifically, Duke’s wind turbines at two sites in Wyoming killed over 160 federally protected birds, including 14 golden eagles. Duke was fined $1 million in punishment.

In early December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a long-awaited rule (which readers of the John Locke Foundation’s “Locker Room” blog were warned about well over a year ago) that extended the federally permitted time for wind power companies to kill federally protected bald and golden eagles from five years to 30 years.

FWS employs the euphemism “taking” in describing the slaughter of eagles by the wildly inefficient, intermittent and extremely unreliable, emissions-intensive (yes — owing to wind power’s unreliability, utilities have to keep conventional power stations as backup either running all the time or cycling on and off, offsetting or eclipsing direct reductions in emissions),unsustainable, expensive “Cuisinarts in the sky” favored by environmentalists.

 

So what’s it all mean? Sanders concludes:

Once a wind turbine smashes the “federally protected” eagle into a lifeless mash of blood, bones, and feathers, it is illegal for you to pick up or otherwise possess one of those feathers. An exception is made for members of a federally recognized Indian tribe.

That exception doesn’t include Lumbees, for example. The Lumbee Tribe is a state-recognized tribe, not federal. Their highest honor involves the bestowal of an eagle feather.

It seems eagles are federally protected in the same way as was your keeping the health insurance plan and doctors you liked, period. But once the federally protected eagle is federally allowed to be smashed by federally subsidized inefficient energy sources, only federally approved tribe members may collect any unspoiled feathers from the federally protected corpse.