The Sinister Truth About Bird-Killing Wind ‘Farms’
The Tory party’s move to fall back in love with wind energy, despite its manifest disadvantages of cost, unreliability, and inefficient use of land, is a death wish.
They will soon rediscover just how unpopular wind “farms” (who thought up that euphemism for these open-air power stations, incidentally?) are with voters in rural constituencies.
Opinion polls now persuade them that years of pro-wind propaganda have changed the public’s mind. I would not bet on it: these things may be popular in north London, but not in northern England.
Northumberland, where I live, thinly populated and windy, is especially blighted, being a big net exporter of electricity on windy days.
A passionate, cross-party coalition of politicians from the county formed in the House of Lords – including a bishop – to object to the expansive vistas of the Cheviots and Bamburgh Castle being ruined by squadrons of spinning fans. I’ve rarely been involved in something so popular.
The objections are not just Nimbyism.
The BBC, in one of its poorly named “comedy” slots, last week mocked people who complain that wind factories kill birds. They claim cats kill more birds than wind turbines.
Er, when was the last time your cat came home with a golden eagle, a bearded vulture, or a red-throated diver? Wind turbines, unlike cats, single out large, soaring rare birds.
A rare lammergeier or bearded vulture released in Spain as part of a conservation project recently strayed to the Netherlands and met its end at a wind factory.
All over the world, the largest and rarest eagles and vultures are dying in significant numbers as a result of turbines: in Australia, wedge-tailed eagles; in South Africa, Verreaux’s eagles; in Norway, sea eagles; in California, golden eagles.
One study found that at a single windy spot in California, Altamont Pass, wind turbines were killing over 1,000 birds of prey per year, including more than 60 golden eagles.
These are probably underestimated: there is no obligation on wind firms to count the birds they kill and they avoid doing so. It is left to volunteer conservationists to try to find the evidence.
Given that large birds of prey live at low densities, these deaths are vastly more significant to the bird populations in question than cat kills are to chaffinches and robins.
A single wind power station in Spain, with just 32 turbines, has killed a vulture every three days since it began operating two years ago. The total Spanish population of griffon, cinereous, bearded, and Egyptian vultures is in the low thousands.
Earlier this year, in a rare exception to a blanket exemption from prosecution granted by the Obama administration, a wind energy company in America wasconvicted by the federal government of breaking the law by killing at least 136 golden and bald eagles.
On the Norwegian island of Smola, the number of sea eagle territories fell from 13 to five after the construction of a 68-turbine wind power station.
Local extinction is a real possibility for these species. In India, the impact of wind turbines on birds of prey is so big that it reduced predatory attacks on ordinary birds by three-quarters.
Even if eagles don’t die, they may be affected. Satellite tags attached to golden eagles released in the Monadhliath mountains in Scotland show the birds carefully avoiding the areas around wind factories. So they have less habitat and smaller populations.
This appears to be true of other birds, too: golden plovers have been shown to avoid nesting near wind turbines, probably for the same reason they avoid nesting near trees, which can harbor predators.
It’s similar at sea. Red-throated divers avoid offshore wind factories in the North Sea.
Then there is the impact on bats. North American studies estimate up to a million bats a year are killed by turbines. A German study concluded that each turbine kills an astonishing 70 bats in two months. You or I would be prosecuted for this.
The silence of most conservation charities on this topic is deafening: the fact that wind firms subsidize such charities is presumably just a coincidence.
Organizations that make a huge fuss if a farmer or a gamekeeper is even suspected of shooting a hawk shrug at the wind industry’s vastly greater slaughter.
The RSPB’s former conservation director, Martin Harper, says the evidence shows “appropriately located wind farms have negligible impacts” on bird populations.
True, it’s possible to site wind turbines away from migration routes, and even to stop them spinning when tagged eagles approach, or during nights when bats are likely to be active.
But this would lower the output of electricity, making them even less economic.
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Tom
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Maybe more birds are dying from 5G radiation.
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Eric the Red
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I don’t give a flying you-know-what about birds. Here’s the real problem…
Green energy is a delusional narrative that pretends it can suspend the laws of thermodynamics.
As soon as people stop gushing about secondary aspects including cost, birds, noise, whatever, and shift their attention to comprehensive thermodynamic analyses, then and only then will valid arguments be made against green energy.
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John Thomas Bakkila
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That’s an excellent point, Eric.
I think, however, that a huge percentage of people pining for wind energy have never even heard of the laws of thermodynamics, and though I have, I am a simple layman with the most basic understanding of said laws…despite my keen interest in them,
I always try to express the simple fact that not even the smallest component of a wind turbine can be manufactured without fossil fuel.
Take the tiniest little screw holding a circuit board to a frame, for instance; which is, most likely, found in any wind turbine… the metal for that screw must be refined with fossil fuel. I can’t say this is a fact, but it is my contention that metal ore can’t be melted with wind or solar power. Nor can metal ore even be mined efficiently without fossil-fueled power.
The “Green-Energy” components are entirely dependent on crude oil and/or coal…I don’t see a way around this; which makes the green energy farce totally redundant. or…superfluous.
I wonder why all who hate crude oil, i.e. fossil fuel…simply won’t stop using it. If every little bit helps, that is.
People are free to buy and use a windmill and/or solar panels if they wish, but this publicly funded “wind farm” ridiculousness isn’t birds hitting the fan…so to speak.
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Eric the Red
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Thank you for your response. It would be great if there were more people such as yourself, who would investigate just the ideas behind thermodynamics. Math is not even required, just basic verbal descriptions.
From your example with the screw, you have exactly the right approach, you understand the ramifications. It’s the key to actually stopping this green energy madness. Everything else such as costs, birds, etc. are just secondary effects, that can be argued back and forth endlessly. But I guess most other people want an excuse to be ignorant about things (thermodynamics, virology, immunology, etc), to the detriment of all of us and future generations.
Again, thanks for your thoughtful response.
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Tom O
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I really could give a flying you know what about your particular points. When we – in this case you – stop caring about the world around you, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Your points may be valid, but your attitude towards people that give a damn about the world is pathetic. Your type are the enemy, not the savior.
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Eric the Red
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Sure thing, chuck-0, because over the last twenty years, people like you have made such a huge impact on stopping the green energy tyrants. NOT. Maybe it’s time for people like you to wake up, take an empirical approach to their own actions, and realize their concerns for the poor widdle birdies is not really helping much.
Attitudes? You’re just another member of the damn tone police. People like you are like the mule in the old story…
A farmer needed a mule to plow his land. He went to his neighbor to see if he had a mule to sell. The farmer asked if the mule had any problems he should be aware of. The neighbor said that the mule would do anything he asked.
So the farmer took the mule home and the next day took him out to the field to plow. The farmer said, “Git up!” But the mule did nothing. Nice words, bad words, the mule still did nothing. So the farmer called his neighbor to come over right away.
After the farmer explained the problem, the neighbor went over and picked up a two-by-four. He hit the mule over the head and whispered in the mule’s ear. The mule then proceeded to plow the field. The farmer said to the neighbor, “Why did you hit him with the two-by-four?”
“Well,” said the neighbor. “First you have to get his attention.”
Absolutely everybody today, including YOU, is like the proverbial farmer’s mule. Every last one of them is stubbornly hypnotized to some preexisting belief system of one kind or another. Before they will listen to you, first you have to get their attention by hitting them over the head with a two-by-four. You have to wake them up by insulting them and making them angry. The goodness and niceness approach, the laissez-faire disseminate information approach, is just a fairytale to give everyone a warm and fuzzy feeling of moral sanctimony, while they walk away and still don’t understand each other.
So get off your self-righteous rear end, and stop pretending you can telepathically know what people’s emotions are (ooooh, all those :”haters” out there). It’s just a transparent excuse for censorship.
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Hans
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Eric I see Red, the Greens do not care about valid argument nor thermodynamic
thesis, only their dogma and ideology. I do care about my fine feather friends as
it is just another reason to reject bird shredders
“comprehensive thermodynamic analyses” This will surely capture the imagination
and support of American adults, rather than common sense reasoning, which is used
on a daily basis.
The Greens are just another nutty death cult. Everything the leftest tough, turns to
poo. This not a hypnotist butt a fact.
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K Kaiser
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@ JT Bakkila:
Birds, especially the larger ones (like cranes, eagles, hawks, owls, vultures, and so on) have not an “easy life.” Moving fast between trees in the forests, they are already prone to hitting a branch and breaking a wing, a major reason for their limited life-span in the wild.
Any additional danger, like from fast (100+ km/h) moving blades of “windmills” is something that does not allow them to “learn from experience.” Any such “experience” will lead to their quick demise.
Think about it in this way: How would you like to stand in the middle of a much highway and learn “to jump over a car” that’s coming your way at 100 km/h ?
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Dale Horst
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Wind farms are a kind of embryonic stage in our development towards clean energy. Sort of like flightless dodo birds.
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