- Trump administration finalized Endangered Species Act reforms in July, narrowing habitat protections while critics call it a rollback.
- NextEra subsidiary ESI Energy paid over $8 million and got five years probation for killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles at its wind facilities.
- Federal incidental-take permits let wind operators legally injure or kill protected eagles as a routine cost of turbine operation.
- California is now offering up to $1.5 million in grants to protect golden eagles from turbines in the Altamont Pass and Tehachapi wind areas.
- Critics argue environmental groups condemn wildlife harm from fossil fuels while staying silent on similar deaths caused by wind energy.
(Natural News)—The same environmental groups that condemned President Donald Trump’s revisions to the Endangered Species Act have remained conspicuously silent about the federally permitted killing of bald and golden eagles by wind turbines, a double standard that exposes the movement’s political priorities over genuine wildlife conservation.
The contrast came into sharp focus after NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy was ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution and serve five years of probation for killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles across 50 of its 154 wind facilities. The deaths, documented since 2012, occurred under federal incidental-take permits that allow energy operators to injure or kill protected birds as a routine cost of turbine operation.
Trump administration restores original intent of species law
The Trump administration finalized Endangered Species Act regulatory reforms on July 17, returning the law to what Trump described on Truth Social as “how it was intended to be.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed the changes as commonsense adjustments based on “gold standard science” and local input.
The reforms roll back a Biden-era blanket rule that automatically treated threatened species as endangered, requiring customized protections instead. They also allow federal officials to exclude areas from critical habitat designations when economic or national security costs outweigh the benefits, provided the exclusion doesn’t cause extinction.
Critics warned the changes would gut protections. The Center for Biological Diversity announced the action “guts protections for threatened wildlife,” while Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles called it “un-American.”
Vijay Jayaraj, a research associate at the CO2 Coalition, noted the administration invoked Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2012 reading of the statute, which rejected regulators’ expansion of “harm” to include habitat modification, calling it “a terrible interpretation” of congressional intent.
Wind energy kills eagles under federal permission
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issues incidental-take permits authorizing operators to injure or kill eagles as a foreseeable consequence of turbine operation. A 2024 rule streamlined the process, creating general permits for qualifying projects.
NextEra Energy Resources CEO Rebecca Kujawa defended her company’s record, stating in April 2022 that “building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.” Of the 150 documented deaths, 136 were “affirmatively determined” to be caused by turbine blade strikes, according to the Justice Department.
California now offers up to $1.5 million in grants to protect golden eagles in the Altamont Pass and Tehachapi wind resource areas, funded by the ESI Energy settlement. The state is funding research on collision risks and habitat usage to improve deterrents.
Biologists say golden eagle mortality at wind facilities is difficult to track and likely undercounted; an Emory University report from 2023 suggested up to three golden eagles die per year at a single wind farm. Federal law protects golden eagles under multiple statutes, yet turbines continue operating in their migration corridors.
Activists choose sides by fuel source, critics charge
Jayaraj argued the selective outrage reveals a movement that “chose sides by fuel,” treating identical wildlife deaths differently depending on whether they resulted from hydrocarbons or renewable energy. When the administration ordered a review of offshore wind leasing, the same groups that objected to the ESA revisions called the pause an assault on the planet.
The double standard extends offshore, where federal harassment authorizations allow wind developers to disturb — and potentially kill — whales during seismic surveying and pile driving. Dead humpbacks turned up on New Jersey and New York beaches during the survey period, and groups that would normally demand investigations into a single oil spill offered little explanation for the deaths. North Atlantic right whales now number in the low hundreds.
“Wildlife deaths caused by hydrocarbons were a moral travesty,” Jayaraj wrote. “Identical deaths caused by subsidized wind and solar became an acceptable trade, a transition cost, a footnote to ‘saving the world.’ That is a political program wearing conservation as a costume.”
For all their alarm over the ESA reforms, the movement has yet to explain why a turbine blade gets a pass that a pipeline never would.
Sources for this article include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
