Look, the news that the extinct-for-the-area white-throated needletail bird had been spotted in Scotland – only to be promptly sucked into a wind turbine, accompanied by the screams of horrified amateur ornithologists – should not be surprising. Wind farms are Giant Scythes Of Swinging Doom, when it comes to birds.
- The American Bird Conservancy rather desperately wants to support wind power, which is why they’re begging wind farms to somehow stop the darn things from being on track to kill a million birds a year in the USA by 2030.
- Most of the articles that I’ve seen estimate that we’re killing about 40% to 60% of that now, with the real problem being that endangered species and raptors are disproportionately represented:
- Wind farms kill golden eagles.
- Wind farms endanger bald eagles.
- Wind farms endanger whooping cranes.
- At least one wind farm has been given preemptive forgiveness to kill a California Condor, which news came perilously close to causing actual mass aneurysms among bird conservationists.
- The Obama administration has absolutely no plans to solve the problem. No interest, either. Birds don’t make campaign contributions.
- Wind farms are killing birds in other countries, too.
Look, the bottom line is this: birds are, by and large, not the most intelligent animals on the planet*. Wind turbines are large spinning blades of metal designed to move as fast as possible without detaching, and then go spinning off into the countryside**. When the two groups struggle for the same airspace, the birds lose. Repeatedly. This might be chalked up to the old saying of Think of it as evolution in action, except for the absolute boondoggle that is wind power. Essentially, we’re paying people to make and operate inefficient power generators that kill birds.
The problem here is that expecting a Greenie to deny wind energy is like expecting a Roman Catholic to deny the Virgin Mary. And I apologize in advance to my fellow Catholics for making that particular analogy; but it really is a matter of purely religious faith among the environmentalists that wind power is somehow the miracle cure for all our power needs…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Yes, yes, you could almost trust some parrots with the franchise. Notice that they’re staying the heck away from wind turbines, yes?
**This… does not always work.