windmills are really cool
Not if you're a bird. Doesn't PETA care if many thousands of our feathered friends get chopped into mincemeat by these "green" machines?? Tsk, tsk, how politically incorrect.. :-)
ncpa.org
...Wind blades have killed thousands of birds in the United States and abroad in the last decade, including endangered species, which is a federal offense subject to criminal prosecution.105 While bird kills are not considered a problem by everyone, it is a problem for some environmental groups who lobbied to put the laws on the books, made cost assessments for dead birds and other wildlife pursuant to the Valdez accident, and vilify petroleum extraction activity on the North Slope of Alaska as hazardous to wildlife.106 While such groups as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society have criticized wind power's effects on birds, many eco-energy planners have ignored the problem in their devotion to wind power.
There have been numerous mentions of the "avian mortality" problem in the wind power literature (the Sierra Club labeled wind towers "the Cuisinarts of the air").107 An article in the March 29-April 4, 1995, issue of SF Weekly was particularly telling. The cover story in the San Francisco newspaper was no less than an expose, written not by a free-market critic but by an author sympathetic with the environmentalist agenda.
The article concerns the world's largest wind power farm, the 625-megawatt Altamont Pass project, owned by independent developers with long-term purchase contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric. Some major points of the article follow.108
"It now appears that windmills are annually killing thousands of birds worldwide [including] . . . red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, turkey vultures, assorted owls--and federally protected species like Aquila chrysaetos, the golden eagle. And it turns out that the Bay Area . . . is the windmill bird-death capital of America." (but they are beautiful from a distance, LOL)
The National Audubon Society has called for a moratorium on new wind farms until the bird kill problem is solved, a position that the wind industry opposes.
Some of the bird kills at Altamont Pass are a federal crime under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; killing Bald Eagles is also a crime under the Bald Eagle Protection Act. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is considering prosecution.
Traditional environmental groups will not condemn wind, which they see as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." They hope that the mortality is not too great and that current remediation efforts will succeed.
"So intense has the windmill `avian mortality issue' become in wind and wildlife circles, some fear for their jobs if they speak out; others fear for their research dollars, while the companies fear for their futures."
"How many dead birds equal a dead fish equals an oil spill?" asks the author. One wind energy expert responds: "The trade-offs aren't easy -- there aren't any charts or formulas to guide you."
Environmentalists blocked a proposed wind farm in eastern Washington state because of the avian mortality problem... |
