| | | FACT CHECK: DOES FatRUMP OR WINDMILLS KILL MORE BIRDS & BALD EAGLES? ANSWER: FatRUMP KILLS MUCH MORE BY 10 BILLION...
thehill.com
Do windmills kill a lot of birds?
Yes, but windmills are far from being the main culprit in bird deaths.
Windmills kill anywhere from 234,000 to 328,000 birds a year, according to a study by federal scientists. That’s no small number, but it does pale in comparison to the number of birds killed elsewhere.
A USA Today review of the study noted that collisions with cell and radio towers cause an estimated 6.8 million deaths, while cats kill a staggering 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds a year.
So are windmills destroying the bird population, as Trump claims? No; collisions with animals, rather than infrastructure, are by far the big problem there.
More recent studies about bird decline found the U.S. and Canada lost 3 billion birds over the last 50 years, citing pesticide use, habitat loss and climate change as the main features fueling the trend.
As with Trump’s claim for birds in general, the bigger threat for bald eagles lies elsewhere.
“In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses,” Obama-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe wrote in 2016. “Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines.”
Trump likes to showcase the effects of windmills on one of America’s prized protected species, but remember his administration this year issued a sweeping roll back of the Endangered Species Act.
Are windmills foreign-made pollution spewers?
Trump’s comments Saturday were not just limited to birds.
“I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?”
Trump’s not wrong that many wind turbines are produced in China, but the U.S. is also one of the globe's top manufacturers. There is also a growing U.S. industry in installing them, not to mention the increasing demand for clean forms of energy like solar and wind.
Which gets to his next point: Is windmill production spewing fumes and gasses into the atmosphere?
The AWEA found that wind farms around the world generated enough energy to avoid 200 million tons of carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels last year and estimates that most wind power plants repay their own carbon footprints within about six months of operation, offering carbon-free electricity for the rest of their 20-to-30-year lifespan. |
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