Enough with the ducks already

I don't know what irks me more, the fact that this has been in the news lately or the fact that I lost 3 minutes of my life the other day to hear this in the news and there is likely to be plenty more if it to come..

For anyone that has no idea what the heck I am talking about, I am referring to the story that is worldwide news right now about a few hundred ducks that died after landing in a tailings pond at Syncrude in Ft. McMurray. That's right, dead ducks are making headline news right now. More press will probably be given to the ducks than to the 20,000 plus people that just died in the Myanmar cyclone.

In any case we've got all the freaks at Greenpeace and all the left wing, nutbar politicians and tree huggers making a federal case over this. These people are actually calling for a public inquiry over this. If these nut jobs actually gave a damn about the ducks, I might be able to give them a shred of credibility, but this has never been and never will be about the ducks.

The unfortunate events are being used by these people as a tool to try and score political points and paint themselves as the answers to every environmental problem, while painting every right leaning government and oil company as the Anti-Christ of the environment. The way these people are talking you would swear that someone saw Stephen Harper himself out there at the tailings ponds with his duck decoys tooting on his Mallard call to try and entice the flock to land there.

Since these people obviously care so much about the ducks, when are we to expect that campaigns against windows, vehicles, roads, power lines and wind turbines will begin? Combined, all of these things kill literally millions of birds every year. See the below excerpt from a post at "Treehugger.com" that was used to give perspective on how many birds were killed by wind turbines anually versus other things like windows and cars.

"In the United States, cars and trucks wipe out millions of birds each year, while 100 million to 1 billion birds collide with windows. According to the 2001 National Wind Coordinating Committee study, “Avian Collisions with Wind Turbines: A Summary of Existing Studies and Comparisons to Other Sources of Avian Collision Mortality in the United States," these non-wind mortalities compare with 2.19 bird deaths per turbine per year. That's a long way from the sum mortality caused by the other sources."

Even at a measly 2.19 bird deaths per turbine, I'm sure that adds up to a big stack of dead ducks at the end of the year - yet no one at Greenpeace seems to give a shit about those ducks. You won't see any cooky left wing politicians looking for photo-ops at the base of a wind turbine screaming "stop the insanity". Maybe it's because in their twisted minds ducks that die by getting swatted out of the air by a wind turbine are martyrs, whereas ducks that die in tailings ponds are the real victims.

Puhlease. Perspective people. It's all about perspective. Why can't anyone in politics or the media figure that out?