The argument goes something like this:
Real environmentalist:
“We should not allow the destruction of orangutan habitat for palm oil biodiesel!”
Apologist:
“In fact by displacing fossil fuels, palm oil
biodiesel is helping orangutans, as well as everything else that is
alive on the planet! Orangutans are at serious risk due to climate
change. Some primate species are forecast to to lose more than 95% of
their current ranges!”
(1) From an
article in Treehugger about wind farm impact on birds:
…. in fact by displacing fossil fuels they are helping
birds, as well as everything else that is alive on the planet. … the
bald eagle and eight state birds …are at serious risk due to climate
change. …some species are forecast to lose more than 95% of their
current ranges.
Another real world analogy to wind farms, the Elwa river dam, was
recently removed in an attempt to restore an extinct salmon migration.
Using the reasoning presented in the Treehugger article about wind
farms, what’s the point in restoring a salmon run if climate change will
eventually destroy it? Right? The dam should be rebuilt so it can once
again produce renewable energy.
There are a few missing links in this argument’s logic chain.
Scientists recognized the sixth extinction event long before they did
climate change. Producing low carbon energy with that rebuilt dam would
immediately and directly cause the extinction of that salmon run.
Whereas, removing the dam (not producing low carbon energy at that
location) will help assure there will be salmon left to save from the
ravages of climate change, assuming humanity can avert climate change.
In other words, find another place to generate low carbon energy.
Analogously, usurping raptor hunting grounds
(2) and
intersecting major migration routs with giant blenders to produce low
carbon energy is not going to help eagles, hawks, owls, condors,
vultures, herons, waterfowl, whooping cranes or bats survive climate
change. They are going to need all the help we can give them (with or
without climate change) in addition to attempting to reduce greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions. Conservation and development of renewable energy
have to be done in parallel with priority given to conservation. The
extinction event has been accelerating even in the absence of climate
change, which of course will make it even worse.
One could argue that humanity should not be building new dams at all
in places like the Amazon basin, and that wind farms should be relegated
to offshore locations far from raptor and bat hunting grounds and major
migration routes. And why are we destroying intact dessert tortoise
habitat for solar thermal installations? We can’t find a place without
threatened tortoise habitat?
The author’s strategy is to use close-up photos of naughty kitties to
convince “bird lovers” to stop hassling utilities that own wind farms
and to instead focus their ire on …cats:
“But bird lovers need to go against the real enemies
rather than spending precious energy fighting one of the main tools that
we have to clean up our power grid and have a greener world.”
The label “bird lover” makes an easy target because it conjures up
images of retirees in their birding gear gathering into flocks of their
own to count and categorize the birds they see (Greater Peewee,
Spectacled Tyrant, Handsome Fruiteater …to name a few). In reality,
state and federal governments, environmental groups, and their attendant
armies of concerned scientists, naturalists, and conservationists
around the world are working to minimize the impacts of wind farms.
Interestingly enough, the author’s attempt to deflect attention away
from wind farms to cats appears to have worked, at least on his
Treehugger readership. Drop into the
comment field below his article to participate in the hate festival. Several comments had to be deleted. I did find one salient comment:
Wind turbines are creating mortality on birds that aren’t
at risk by cats or large buildings. The bigger birds (raptors, owls,
etc.) are long-lived and have low reproductive rates. They’re like the
grizzly bears of the bird world. They have no way to compensate for
excessive mortality.
If cats are the real problem maybe Treehugger should spend a little
more time writing about cats, a little less time trying to trivialize
the damage done by wind farms.
More from the article:
Many people have this obsession with wind turbines killing birds, probably because it’s a really great story.
Riiight. I seriously doubt that state and federal governments,
environmental groups and the attendant armies of concerned scientists,
naturalists, and conservationists around the world are working to
minimize the impacts of wind farms
” ….because it’s a really great story.”
Photo of Male Swainson’s hawk in front of the turbine that eventually killed it
The photo above and the following excerpts are from an article by concerned scientists, naturalists, and conservationists from
my local zoo:
With such keen eyesight, why do hawks not see these giant
fans in their workaday flight paths? Gretchen explains that “hawks are
predators. After a long migration, their job here is straightforward,
driven by instinct: build nests, find food and defend territory in the
home range.” Making sense of strange, new human-built hazards is a
secondary priority. “As Jim sees it, imagine waking up every day with
hungry kids to feed. A huge, dangerous blender is lodged between your
bedroom and your kitchen. Your eyes scan the ground, locking in on food,
so even with all your flying skills, eventually you’re going to bump
into it.”
Through focal observations, the keepers collect data on specific
birds’ range behaviors, recording flight type, duration of interaction
with or near turbines, and wind and turbine speed. They seek to discern
patterns and trends holistically on two levels. The landscape level
looks at whether populations are displaced by the turbines, abandoning
their breeding grounds for safer but often less suitable habitats. The
interaction level looks at whether the hawks become habituated to the
turbines, flying near or through them. In nesting territories, the mean
rate at which hawks encounter turbine collision zones, a 400-foot
radius around the blades, is once every 76 minutes.
From the Treehugger article:
As a meme, it really strikes the imagination because wind
turbines are this green thing, right, so killing birds is antithetical
to what they’re supposed to be doing.
Really? Killing hawks, owls, bats etc isn’t antithetical to what wind farms are supposed to be doing?
But if the goal is to save birds, we have to look at the
actual facts on the ground and not just at whatever story makes for the
catchiest headline.
Following is the headline to the Treehugger article:
Wind turbines kill around 300,000 birds annually, house cats around 3,000,000,000
And if you just blew coffee (or whatever you were drinking) out your
nose, I don’t blame you. Several commenters mentioned that based on the
headline they also thought the article was about wind turbines killing 3
billion cats annually.
After having said all the above, the author concludes with a
throw-away comment as a hedge against the unlikely event that somebody
would call him out:
“This doesn’t mean that wind power operators
should stop doing what they can to protect birds. Wind farms should be
properly sited and everything should be done to mitigate any risks.”
The Treehugger article was based on one found in the respected peer reviewed science journal …
USA Today. I had to dig around on the internet to find
the actual link to the peer reviewed study
that the USA Today and subsequent Treehugger articles were based on.
The photo below was found on the website that linked back to the study.
The study is about the impact on small songbirds. It isn’t about
eagles, hawks, owls, condors, vultures, herons, waterfowl, whooping
cranes or bats, which cats don’t eat, although some eagles, hawks, and
owls do eat cats. See the photo below of a great horned owl that landed
on a power line with the cat it had caught. Both were subsequently
electrocuted. The irony. Could only have been worse had they been struck
by a wind turbine.
Electrocuted Great Horned Owl with Cat Prey via
Imgur
I read the study, which was very obviously biased but I suspect that
its conclusion is largely correct: wind farms kill a relatively small
percentage of the total song bird population. The authors showed their
bias by repeatedly comparing the numbers of
small birds
killed by turbines to the numbers killed by other things, like cats,
which were not part of the study. There was no need to repeatedly do
that comparison other than to bias the article intent–to trivialize
song bird deaths. It’s a moot argument. Song birds are not the big
problem.
To convince myself that the study conclusion was reasonable I made a
simple spreadsheet that calculated the number of song bird deaths as a
percentage of the power supplied to the grid by wind. The total
percentage of song birds killed struck me as relatively small no matter
what percentage I chose for wind energy all the way to 100 percent (a
study by the National Renewable Energy Lab suggests that a maximum of
about 12 percent of total energy supply can be from wind by 2050).
An extreme example just to make a point about renewable energy would
be the conversion of the entire Amazon rain forest into corn, soy, and
sugarcane fields to make biofuel and tree farms to fuel power plants in
place of coal. That act would be one step forward (displacement of
fossil fuels) and a thousand steps backward (utter destruction of the
very biodiversity we are trying to protect from climate change).
Climate change is expected to wreak havoc on the planet’s already
rapidly disappearing biodiversity (wildlife) because it will further
shrink/degrade what remains of the ecosystems wildlife needs to avoid
extinction. Ergo, an energy scheme that reduces carbon emissions but
also kills wildlife and degrades wildlife habitat is going to worsen the
impact of climate change on the natural world (one step forward, some
number of steps backward).
(1) If you want to read a more useful article about efforts to reduce
the damage done by some wind farms I would suggest this one:
For the Birds and the Bats: Eight Ways Wind Power Companies are Trying to Prevent Deadly Collisions by Roger Drouin writing for Grist.
(2) If you look at the background of the
wind turbine photo
chosen for the Treehugger article you will see degraded habitat; roads
leading to wind turbines bulldozed through a hunting ground for raptors
which soar/soared on wind currents while hunting rodents and ground
nesting birds in the rocks below.
