Colossal Carnage: US Wind Industry Killing More Than 1,000,000 Birds & Bats Every Year

Golden Eagle loses its head during wind power ‘transition’.

 

The polished hypocrisy among those slavish worshippers of wind power is breathtaking. The wind industry is slaughtering millions of birds and bats every year and yet there’s barely a peep from these faux environmentalists.

Sure, as James Taylor points out below, there’s the usual rubbish they dish up about skyscrapers killing more birds than these things, which is hardly to the point (even if it were true, which is doubtful). In any event, apex predators like Eagles, Vultures, Hawks and Kites rarely come to grief by flying into buildings of any description. But it’s these species that are being sliced and diced with complete impunity, all around the world.

When your premise is saving the planet, it’s pretty hard to maintain any kind of ‘social licence’ in the face of the colossal carnage being meted out by the wind industry; in the US the number of bird and bat kills totals more than a million victims, every year. The fact that that death toll doesn’t trouble the wind cult, clearly, and quite rightly, troubles James Taylor. And he is not alone.

For climate extremists, animal lives are expendable
CFACT
James Taylor
4 December 2019

Earlier this month I participated in climate interview in which I mentioned peer-reviewed research finding that wind turbines kill more than 1 million birds and bats each year in the United States.

The host of the program did not seem to care much, dismissively asserting that buildings kill more birds than that. This is a common claim made by climate extremists when defending the massive animal death toll of wind turbines. It also reveals an utter lack of concern about animal deaths and other real environmental devastation caused by wind turbines. This begs the question, are climate extremists truly concerned about the environment or is their primary motivation simply to shut down conventional energy?

Wind turbines are explicitly permitted to kill without penalty. Bald eagles and other iconic, protected American birds are killed in staggering numbers. While environmental activists cry outrage every time a few birds accidentally die as a result of conventional energy production. They don’t care in the least about the million-plus birds and bats killed every year by wind and solar power. Meanwhile, bird and bat numbers are in precipitous decline, due in no small part to increasing numbers of wind turbines.

With climate extremists demanding more and more turbines every year, it seems highly unlikely that bird and bat populations will ever recover to anything approaching their prior, normal levels.

Healthy bird and bat populations are crucial to the entire ecosystem. We have a moral obligation to not callously and deliberately kill them by the millions. Even if birds flying into buildings is a significant cause of bird deaths, that doesn’t mean we should unnecessarily kill millions more by other means. And it shouldn’t give the wind power industry a free pass to kill as many birds and bats as they please.
CFACT

6 thoughts on “Colossal Carnage: US Wind Industry Killing More Than 1,000,000 Birds & Bats Every Year

  1. Also, a response to this is normally that millions of birds are killed by cars, cats, and crashing into home windows but as we know the birds being killed by wind turbine blades are mostly endangered, rare or significant raptors.

  2. You might want to change the title because the wind industry would love for the public to believe these numbers.

    Currently with this industry using mortality search areas up to 150 times too small and with wind personnel being allowed to move carcasses, the real numbers are closer to 50 times greater.

    But these horrific numbers will plummet as bird and bat populations are obliterated.

  3. Horrifically, in December, 2016, the administration of then-President Obama finalized a rule that lets wind-energy companies operate high-speed turbines for up to 30 years, even if means killing or injuring thousands of species that are protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under that rule, wind farms may acquire an eagle “take” permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that allows the site to participate in nationwide “incidental” killing of up to 4,200 bald eagles annually without compensatory mitigation. It’s shocking that wind farms can obtain legal permits from the USFWS to kill those majestic bald eagles

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