[tasty_freeze]

I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"

Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

[triceratops]

True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.

[tzs]

> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.

Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.

Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.

Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.

This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.

[tdb7893]

Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).

Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s

Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him

[harmmonica]

Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.

As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.

[tasty_freeze]

Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do.

Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.

Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.

[harmmonica]

Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.

[hedora]

Per-windmill bird fatalities are much, much lower for new windmills. They made some cosmetic changes that scare the birds off.

Also, it turns out that bird flight patterns are very stable from year to year, so they study flight patterns, and place the windmills out of the way.

[harmmonica]

Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.

[foobarbecue]

And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...

and the noise causes cancer