Environmentalists Are Anti-Goat

Miscellaneous General
1

From the BBC:

Wind farm ‘kills Taiwanese goats’

A large number of goats in Taiwan may have died of exhaustion because of noise from a wind farm.

A farmer on an outlying island told the BBC he had lost more than 400 animals after eight giant wind turbines were installed close to his grazing land.

The Ministry of Agriculture says it suspects that noise may have caused the goats’ demise through lack of sleep.

The power company, Taipower, has offered to pay for part of the costs of building a new farmhouse elsewhere.

A spokesman for the company said the cause of the goats’ deaths still needed to be investigated, but that it doubted the goats died from the noise.

Before the wind farm was built about four years ago, farmer Kuo Jing-shan had about 700 goats.

Shortly after the electricity-generating turbines were installed, the 57-year-old says his animals started to die. He now has just 250 goats left.

"The goats looked skinny and they weren’t eating. One night I went out to the farmhouse and the goats were all standing up; they weren’t sleeping.

“I didn’t know why. If I had known, I would’ve done something to stop the dying,” he told the BBC’s Cindy Sui in Taiwan.

Plausible

A local livestock inspector from the agriculture ministry said that Mr Kuo was the only farmer to have reported such large-scale deaths.

He said his claim was plausible because of all the farmers in the Penghu archipelago, his farm was closest to the wind turbines.

“Abnormal noises could affect the normal growth and feeding intake of animals and cause them to suffer sleep deprivation,” Lu Ming-tseng said.

Mr Kuo said the power company had offered to help him move but that there would be no compensation for the loss of his goats.

“It’s a pain to relocate, but what can I do. I can’t survive with the wind turbines,” he said.

Besides the fact that wind farms and other enviro wackjob ideas harm the local farmers’ livestock, think of th effect it must have on local ecosystems if animals cannot sleep. Also notice how Taipower is refusing to fully compensate the farmer for their flagrant violations of his property rights.

2

“Goat haters” has a nicer ring to it than “watermelons”.

3

something else could have killed the goats

4

That would make sense if it weren’t a well documented fact that hippies hate goats.

5

A goat murder denier!

6

That’s pretty much equivalent to denying the holocaust.

7

It’s worse, the Jews have Israel, the poor goats have nowhere.

8

Not only that, but in Mexico, the goats are used as bicycles.

9

I hate to piss on your campfire, but who says that environmentalism is to blame? Do youo seriously think that free markets would never produce electricity from wind?

10

Nice way to straw man me. Where did I say that the free market would be unable to produce electricity from wind?

What is the issue here is state sponsored invasion of property rights. Free market wind energy would have to find a way to reduce sound in order to not destroy the livelihood of nearby farmers or it would have to be built in unpopulated areas. From Rothbard:

Most of us think of homesteading unused resources in the old-fashioned sense of clearing a piece of unowned land and farming the soil. There are, however, more sophisticated and modern forms of homesteading, which should establish a property right. Suppose, for example, that an airport is established with a great deal of empty land around it. The airport exudes a noise level of, say, X decibels, with the sound waves traveling over the empty land. A housing development then buys land near the airport. Some time later, the homeowners sue the airport for excessive noise interfering with the use and quiet enjoyment of the houses.

Excessive noise can be considered a form of aggression but in this case the airport has already homesteaded X decibels worth of noise. By its prior claim, the airport now “owns the right” to emit X decibels of noise in the surrounding area. In legal terms, we can then say that the airport, through homesteading, has earned an easement right to creating X decibels of noise. This homesteaded easement is an example of the ancient legal concept of “prescription,” in which a certain activity earns a prescriptive property right to the person engaging in the action.

On the other hand, if the airport starts to increase noise levels, then the homeowners could sue or enjoin the airport from its noise aggression for the extra decibels, which had not been homesteaded. Of course if a new airport is built and begins to send out noise of X decibels onto the existing surrounding homes, the airport becomes fully liable for the noise invasion.