It’s not enough that noble avian community of California is blundering into wind mills of the beautiful Coastal Range. Nope, here in the unstylish old Appalachian east, we’re building “bat Veg-a-matics”, as one state biologist puts it.

Justin Blum’s Washington Post story is full of presumably unintentional humor. One builder of these bat slicers is called Clipper Windpower, and a company spokesman defends their development on Backbone Mountain suggesting that bats or no bats, “You can’t just bring everything to a screeching halt …” It goes on to say there’s a painful split among environmentalists, with a Sierra Club officer complaining, “We’re blowing the promise of wind ?”

“There is something going on . . . that we don’t fully have our arms around,” said a power company spokesman.

You just can’t make some of this stuff up.

What is a matter of speculation, though, is the marketability of the whole concept. From the rest of the story, it’s plain that this is a nice green idea which operates in the red unless the government subsidizes the builders, mandates it on the suppliers, and in either case eventually passes it on to taxpayers and consumers. Like other earth-friendly proposals, the economics don’t seem to be a motivator for anyone in the transactional chain.

Last year, the industry said, it provided nearly 17 billion kilowatt hours, enough to serve some 1.6 million households — less than 1 percent of the country’s electricity production. Analysts said future expansion of the industry will be tied largely to whether the tax break remains on the books.

Wind power is generally more costly than generating electricity by more conventional methods — though analysts said federal and state subsidies make the alternative more attractive.

The wind industry, which had been virtually dormant since the last tax break expired a year ago, projects more wind turbines to be built around the country this year than in any previous year. In the areas near where bats have been killed in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, activists said, roughly 700 new turbines have been proposed or approved.

So does the government (i.e. governors, President Bush) get credit for renewable energy initiatives, or demerits for clobbering the wildlife? Maybe we need to find a way to generate power from the dead bats.