Robert Bryce, writing in the WSJ, notes that although conventional energy companies have been charged numerous times for the bird deaths caused by electrocution from power lines, or from contact with crude oil or some other contaminants, the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute the wind companies whose turbines kill an estimated 75,000 to 275,000 birds each year.
One wind farm in particular seems to be a co-venture between Giant Blender Co. and the Grim Reaper:
A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.
Oh well. I’m sure that over time we’ll all come to love the (thud!) whirring hum of the the (fwack!) eco-friendly wind turbines that will (konk!) help protect the natural world for (fftunng!) future generations.
less birds, less CO2
Delicious hypocrisy. I love this site, because the dripping of irony really does a great job of keeping my mental gears oiled.
I dream of a world with one law applying to all. But we all know the world will never be fair.
I was living in San Francisco in the ’70s when those monstrosities were installed. They have been killing large numbers of birds there now for over 30 years. There’s going to be a special kind of hell for all these groupthink green types. It’s in their heads and involves the culmination of all their efforts: Thousands of miles of wind farms and solar panels.
Some insect like Malaria is deadly
if some energy or some kind of electrical shock can or any spray can used in Africa to kill those deadly flies in Africa and Cuba and central America or country with jungle like India without killing bird can caused so many human life get saved each year they need to find equipment to destroy deadly animals or fly create disease for human
But birds and animal are link together one die may caused so many other dead too
Malaria is main source or killing children in Africa
what animal need to stay and what to go
Seriously, New, are you on glue?
It’s all covered under the “end justifies the means” mentality of the eco-bastards.
Not just birds … bats too.
Aug. 25, 2008 — Researchers have found the cause behind mysterious bat deaths near wind turbines, in which many bat carcasses appeared uninjured.
The explanation to this puzzle is that the bats’ lungs effectively blow up from the rapid pressure drop that occurs as air flows over the turbine blades.
“The idea had kind of been floating around, because people had noticed these bats with no injuries,” said Erin Baerwald of the University of Calgary and lead author of a study about the finding in the journal Current Biology.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/08/25/wind-turbine-bats.html
new, totally off topic, but if anyone cared, we’d just eradicate malaria in Africa like we did here. Except that would put a wrench in the works of the global socialist agenda of keeping some down and some up to foment class warfare. As long as there is suffering in Africa, they have a perfect example of the white man keeping the black man down. Malaria is too simple of a problem to solve, so they won’t solve it.
We had some young guys come to our door last week to try to sell us on “Just Energy”, a clean energy plan which supposedly is cheaper.
“We use wind power instead of coal!” they cried, ecstatic.
I started asking about the bird issue, and how the birds are protected. They didn’t know. I asked whether the farms that these wind farms were located adjacent to were compensated for the noise and light pollution (the effect of those wind things is like a strobe light shining into your living room. It’s horrible).
I’ve driven by several wind farms while traveling lately, and I always pull off the road and roll down my window just to see what the noise is like. Living next to that would be just awful.
All forms of power have their downsides, but environmentalists choose to ignore the ones for wind power, and so do the governments. It’s ridiculous.
New….newsflash…..if you want to drone on about malaria, go whine to the leftoids….they are one’s who banned DDT, not the type of folks that you find here.
Note. Wolfe Island, home to Canada’s 2nd largest wind farm….it is now a selling feature in the local real estate listings if a house for sale on said island is NOT within sight and earshot of the wind farm.
Half a billion and counting, who knows how many dead birds and the transportation component of our electrical bill skyrocketing, yet no baseline generating capacity has been eliminated.
Thanks, chimpy mcidiot, for helping to ensure that my children struggle with an insane tax load to pay for your envirojerkoff fantasy land.
eljay, get off your ass,you do it.You raise the funds and get the govts of Africa together and YOU be the person to get your name on a hospital like Dr.Walter Reed.It is no more beholden on the people of North America to eliminate malaria in Africa than it is for Africans to eliminate a disease in North America.If they wish to,they can start with aids.Eliminate it in Africa and North America.
They’re just birds. It’s not like cute, cuddly seals are being sucked into turbines. When will you guys ever learn?!
This busted rib has prevented me the pleasure of riding down to Port Burwell to watch those giant fans reduce dump-chickens to a small puff of white feathers……
The locals say it’s frequent/constant….they figure it’s cause dump-chickens are stupid….
One fella was looking forward to the time when they are scrapped—he’s a scapper (metals recycler).
spike 1, I didn’t say we (NA) should do it, I’m just pointing out that for all the btchin and moaning about malaria in Africa, it’s not that difficult of a problem to solve. We did it. As you pointed out, there are structural issues to overcome, which to me appear designed to make most of Africa the hell hole it is, for whatever purpose that serves.
“It’s not like cute, cuddly seals are being sucked into wind turbines…”
Or hang-gliding environmentalists.
Bats, who eat a staggering number of mosquitoes, are even less cute. From Kevin’s (2:25) link, ten times as many bats as birds are killed at one particular wind farm in southern Alberta. The researcher notes that people have been referring to bats “running into” the blades, but, apart from the fact that bats are – obviously – keenly aware of moving objects, a lot of the dead bats had no apparent injuries; necropsies found haemorrhagic bleeding in the lungs of the dead bats caused by the extreme drop in air-pressure near the blades – their lungs were essentially vacuumed.
They found that one technique showed promise in mitigating such carnage: “shut the turbines down during slow wind speeds during the fall migration at night.”
That would certainly lower the bat-kill to bird-kill ratio. I’m guessing they’d find that shutting the turbines down during the day, too, would practically eliminate the bird-kill rate altogether. But then, of course, millions of people around the world would be forced to flee as a result of rising sea-levels.
Why doesn’t Syncrude just ring their tailings pond with windmills? Problem solved.
So, how’d these get through the Environmental Impact Assessment study… oh, yeah, they’re eco-friendly because they don’t need (much) Big Oil…
And… so where’s the Sierra Club and Green”peace”? How come no eco-morons chained to the blades or hanging banners from tower to tower? Hypocrites.
Osumashi Kinyobe;
The eco freaks are on about birds too. It isn’t just dead seals that get them worked up. An enviro-lefty acquaintance told me all about efforts to save the birds that fly into skyscrapers. When I asked her whether she’d re-thought her support for bird blenders, she muttered something incoherent and hasn’t talked to me since.
When the cap and trade thingie is in place ,windmills and solar will be thrown under the bus and big scale nuclear power will be rolled out.
I’d pay to have these things converted into squirrel blenders.
There are on the order of a few hundred billion living birds on the planet. On the order of a few billion birds die from flying into buildings and vehicles every year. So a few hundred thousand minced in windmills is essentially irrelevant, other than noting that they provide an excellent source of dietary protein for carrion scavengers. Unfortunately, far too many innumerate people are not flying into windmills.
10000 works out to two every daylight hour. Someone should start a clock.
Wind turbines are the 21st century equivalent of last century’s world leading Newfoundland hydroponic cucumber scam.
The wonderful thing about the Altamont eagle-o-matics (bird-blenders, oriole-Osterizers) is that they provide a continously-refreshed buffet our friends the coyotes, who hang out underneath. Manna from heaven.
Yo eljay: Carlin had some further thoughts on class war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ3xxwQvVnE&feature=player_embedded
Quite right, Vitruvius, but I should point out that neither I, Robert Bryce, nor any commenter in this thread made the case, nor even vaguely alluded to making a case, that the world’s bird population is being decimated by wind farms.
The issue, raised by Robert Bryce in the helpfully-provided link, is that while ExxonMobil, for example, payed a $600,000 fine for the death of 85 birds, not one single wind farm, including the one at Altamont where an estimated 10,000 birds are killed each year, have ever been prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The hundreds of charges that have been brought against conventional energy companies for comparably trivial bird kills are always prosecuted in the name of protecting the environment; why the double-standard?
It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but it points to the hypocrisy of going after oil companies, in the name of environmental protection, for much smaller kills.
Never mind the inefficiency of windfarms, and the constant pipe-dream bleating of those who insist that we can replace hydrocarbon energy with wind and solar, etc., if only we put our minds to it.
A short video of an eagle getting whacked would be usefull.
Seriously, New, are you on glue?
Posted by: MaryM at September 28, 2009 2:11 PM”
new is just a spambot I whipped up on a particularly boring weekend. I told you people that already. LOL !!!
I’m no fan of wind-power (as a matter of fact, I am going to a local townhall meeting tonight to address the issue), but bird death by automobile and domestic cat exceed turbines by an order of a thousand times.
We all know it’s not really about environmental protection. The left goes after the oil companies, because the oil companies have lots of money and are big supporters of capitalism. Obviously, if the lefty politicians told the truth about them wanting to tax the oil companies to death, they’d never get elected. So instead they become the champions of a “just cause”, such as protecting the environment/birds/climate and tax them that way.
“Why doesn’t Syncrude just ring their tailings pond with windmills? Problem solved.
Posted by: Kevin Lafayette at September 28, 2009 3:02 PM ” — Thanks for the belly laugh. It would be extremely amusing to listen in on the eco-freaks debating this until their heads exploded.
In a perverse way, I kind of hope that more windmills are built. Maximize their visibility. This eco-gravy-train will crash and windmills will serve as an enduring reminder of the folly of listening to activists, the msm and government. Hopefully, people will also be more skeptical of science that mimics religion.
I completely agree, EBD, I was just adding my quarter-byte’s worth. Personally, I’d like to bring just one charge up against the so-called justice department, the enviro-mentalists, and the other innumerates, and that charge would be about 10¹² coulombs, applied to the temples.
Course, all you have to do to beat the cats is install 1000 turbines.
Doesn’t seem like much.
That’s funny, Vitruvius. I’m guessing that 10 to the twelfth coulombs is a bit more than a mid-January prairie-winter carpet-static finger-shock.
I hear you, LC Bennett. If we go into a mini-ice age, as some are now suggesting, the dormant wind-farm behemoths will stand in rather nicely as glowering memento mori for the historic idiocy of the world-government enviro-nuts.
new…the MOST effective thing to kill off the malaria skeeters is DDT,applied in such small amounts that NO other species is affected.Unfortunately,some green whore(can’t recall her name right now)wrote a book about how dangerous(NOT) DDT is,and thereby had it banned by the eco-cultists,condemming millions to death and debilatating symptoms. But what are a few million less black people to the eco-cultisits?
OT….on Manotiulin Island,in the east tip of Lake Huron,there is on farmer’s field that has two giant fans on it.For about 5 acres around these monstorities,there is not ONE seagull,blackbird,crow,etc. These eco-culists do not only want to rid the world of us homo sapien sapiens,but it appears also all flying life!
I was being sarcastic in my above post, in case someone missed it.
As has been pointed out, environmentalists are rich in folly but poor in sense. For all their talk about wind turbines, they (like solar energy) are not wholly reliable and kill off birds and bats. Just as with banning seal hunts, environmentalists are some of the biggest sources of interference in the ecosystem. Seals eat too many fish and wind turbines wipe out flocks of birds. Let’s not forget how controlled burns might contain forest fires. Perhaps environmentalists should leave nature alone and see what happens.
It’s a trillion amp-seconds, EBD: one amp for a trillion seconds, or a trillion amps for one second, or some equivalent product, divided by the relevent number of pairs of temples, of course, which is itself in the billions. So something on the order of a few hundred amps per idiot, for one second each. And technically it wouldn’t be genocide, because idiots are relatively uniformly distributed.
Now, my dear John, you say “bird death by automobile and domestic cat exceed turbines by an order of a thousand times”. Then you say “all you have to do […] is install 1,000 turbines”. No, you have to install 1,000 times the number of automobiles and cats, multiplied by the ratios of kills-per-unit turbine, automobile, and cat, per unit time (as appropriate). But don’t despair, I have insulators on sale for a reasonable price 😉
Kevin Lafayette at September 28, 2009 3:02 PM
Brilliant idea !!!
EBD: I like the cartoonish asides in your last paragraph. Very adroit.
Years ago, in junior high school, a discussion of MAD magazine turned into a search for sound-words that the writers of that magazine might find useful. Fred Hadley’s “sprong!” still comes to mind, but I am sure that “fwack!” and “fftunng!” would have been widely admired.
Sobbing and weeping over my laptop as I cry:
Why, why, why
do you encourage new??
It takes nothing to unleash another flood to scroll through.
“less birds, less CO2” and less birdsh*t.
while bicycling to work today, I idly wondered if the windcurrents generated by traffic on Deerfoot Trail could be harnessed by windmills.
might improve the gene pool, removing distracted drivers.
The double standard cited here exists everywhere. Once you have the magic green smoke to blow up the non-discerning public’s fundament, your plans can be easily realized. Take for example, the problem of trying to site needed transmission lines. Think about all the hoops developers have to go through in order to obtain approval to build them and how many environmentalists and others stand in the way and delay needed projects for years and decades. Well, it appears that the magic key to open the door to transmission approvals is now in hand:
“Ontario’s power grid is getting a $2.3 billion makeover as part of an ambitious, three-year effort to create 20,000 jobs and bring more green electricity to homes and businesses across the province.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/698928
Ahh yes, electricity with a wavelength of roughly 520 to 570 nanometres. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s like 600 terahertz or so, isn’t it? I mean, that’s a lot of 60-hertz devices to replace, don’t you think?
We’ll know that the playing field is level when Margaret Attwood gets charged for allowing her bird killer cat to roam loose!
“Ontario’s power grid is getting a $2.3 billion makeover as part of an ambitious, three-year effort to create 20,000 jobs and bring more green electricity to homes and businesses across the province.”
http://www.thestar.com/article/698928
Posted by: felis corpulentis at September 28, 2009 6:12 PM
Pssst…A massive power transmission line has been constructed from Mirabel, Quebec across the Laurentians into the Outaouais to supply Quebec HYDRO electricity to (drum roll please!) energy starved Ontario.
Ya think the Ontario Liberals woulda been able to figure out that the province is blessed with fast flowing rivers and developed (particularily in Northern Ontario)tried and true HYDRO electricity instead of relying on Quebec or investing in crock-of-sh*t wind turbines and solar.
gellen: That is exactly my point. I know never feed the trolls but, I come to those posts and quickly scroll by. What a waste of space.
Kevin you made me laugh at that, as well. Do they make mini turbines? I have a large flock of quail pooping everywhere.
McGreenStink is courting Samsung to put 200 80m fans on LakeErie. Part of it is on Indian land and payments will be made..or else